By Orlando Crowcroft
IF you’re ever struggling to come up with gift ideas for an investigations editor in your life, I am going to do you a solid and give you three top-tier options: leaked documents, a nice salacious tip or a huge cache of data, easily convertible into a nice tidy Excel spreadsheet.
So hats off to the freedom-of-information unit, an email from which dropped into my inbox last week with the freshly released “Cost of travel over £500” data for 2023. I didn’t ask them for it, either; I’d just mentioned in an exchange earlier this year that I’d like to see it when it was out and someone obviously jotted down a reminder to flag it, and then did.
That’s thoughtful, isn’t it? That’s the equivalent of remembering that pair of earrings your wife liked in a little shop on a weekend away in Brighton one summer and then popping down there to pick them up and then handing them over on Christmas morn. She’d forgotten about them – I’d forgotten about the data – and yet someone was thinking of me at this special time of year.
It is a great document, the cost of travel over £500, because it’s always full of stories: some are a bit silly, like a “jet set round-up” of the highest-spending departments or a nice little piece about which ministers travelled business class. Occasionally, there is something you might not know about: what was X minister doing in Riyadh in March 2023? What about Honolulu? Why did Y department spend £12,000 putting an employee up in a Manchester hotel for a month? And doesn’t £750 seem a little steep for a single night in a St Peter Port hotel? I hope breakfast was included.
The reason I am being vague about the details above is that even I am not going to start haranguing ministerial press officers over the festive period, but I will be doing so in the New Year.
In the meantime, the document is public, and you can see it yourself on the States website if you want to go have a goosey about how your elected representatives are spending your money.
There are two things about the list that take an axe to my Christmas cheer. The first is that there has been some pretty cavalier data entry in the 2023 list. Only a fraction of the flights, for example, specify whether they were business or economy, and nearly all of the responses to the important “reason for travel” field are cursory at best. “Ministerial business” is a regular response, as is “Other”. I, for one, would like to see a little more information about where our politicians and civil servants are heading on our dime and why. The other area of disappointment for me is that it takes so long to publish the list. We now have data for 2023, and many of the trips took place over two years ago. Could we not urge the government to be a little more timely with its accounting for 2025?
Perhaps that could be my Christmas gift from the Government of Jersey this year – if, by some miracle, I survive in this role for another 12 months.
Dame Hodge
A number of readers have raised the appointment of Margaret Hodge as Labour’s anti-corruption champion and what it might mean for Jersey, flush as the Island is after the relatively easy time it got over Moneyval back in the summer.
She has been given a £36m war chest to hunt down dirty money, crack down on the illicit gold trade, and find out where dictators are stashing their assets and evading tax. It sounds like a lot of fun, and Dame Hodge has a lifetime of experience in the field, recently chairing the all-party parliamentary group on anti-money laundering. Jersey has always been on Dame Hodge’s radar, not least because of the absence of an open public register of beneficial ownership.
In July 2024, she argued forcefully that it was time for the Channel Islands to open its register, an argument that was batted away – as always – by Chief Minister Lyndon Farnham with the comment that Jersey’s register “is one of the oldest and most established registers in the world” and had been “independently evaluated in relation to its transparency”. It was the same meaningless shtick that was given to the same questions about beneficial ownership by this newspaper (and others) during the post-Moneyval press conference in the summer by External Relations Minister Ian Gorst.
But saying it again and again and again does not make it true. Anyone who spends any time trying to find out information using Jersey’s companies register (and I do) knows that it is clearly designed with secrecy in mind: that is one reason why wealthy people like Jersey so much.
Its defenders argue that there is nothing illegal about that (which is true) and that Jersey is not alone in offering wealthy individuals and companies privacy (which is also true) – but is it ethical? Dame Hodge says no, and I am inclined to agree with her. But the overarching frustration for me when it comes to beneficial ownership is, again, the gaslighting. When it is criticised as untransparent, the government responds that it is transparent. And yet, I say again, anyone who has tried to use it *knows* that it isn’t. If secrecy is our thing – if that is our hill to die on – then be honest about it.
La Haule
One wonders whether this will be the year that Infrastructure Minister Andy Jehan finally gets his railings at La Haule.
The latest, as you may have read last week, is that after three-and-a-half failed planning applications (a fourth was withdrawn earlier this month), Mr Jehan has had enough of the planning process and decided that he’s going to push ahead with the project anyway, believing that it is covered under an “essential works” exemption in Jersey’s planning law.
We have raised the point – and raise it again – as to why it took the minister three planning applications and associated costs (not to mention a considerable waste of time) to realise this, but there we go. Mr Jehan says that the La Haule slip issue is about safety. There have already been two accidents there – and there will be more – unless railings are erected.
Critics make the valid point, however, that if we’re tottering around St Aubin looking for unsafe places for unsuspecting walkers to fall either into the sea or into the road, we’re spoiled for choice. Then there are the Island’s cliff paths and walkways, and the country lanes that some of us use on a daily basis. Where does it stop? Where, indeed.
One thing is clear: this issue of railings at La Haule is an issue for our polarised times. Two camps, set in their ways, refusing to give ground. Where will it all end?
Happy hour
The news that the government is finally ready to take a look at Jersey’s five decades-old licensing law has led to some excitement within the hospitality trade. Unsurprising really given that barely a week goes by without another closure of an Island club or pub.
One of those changes would be lifting the ban on two-for-one drink offers and other happy-hour-related deals, banned in Jersey since the 1970s in an effort to prevent problem drinking.
It has been a long time since I have been out later than 11pm – even longer since I have darkened the doors of a nightclub – but as I remember it, the ban on two-for-one offers or happy hour did very little to stem problem drinking by either me or my friends back in the mid-noughties.
Presumably, venues would still be required to refuse customers who were already drunk, and would ultimately have some sort of liability should someone get into trouble after seriously tying one on at happy hour. All that the changes would do is allow venues to be creative with their marketing, and make it less expensive to have a good time, which I think we can all get behind.
Another possible change could be to opening hours, which currently require pubs to shut at 11pm and clubs at 2am. I am old enough to remember when New Labour brought in so-called “24-hour drinking” by relaxing licensing law in 2005. We all looked forward to a new era where you could go for a pint at 4am or spend all night ripping it up in a club.
There are six pubs within a 250-metre stroll of my front door here in north London, more like 12 if you’re willing to walk for 20 minutes. Most close at 11pm, some at 1am on the weekends, none are open all night. Just because pubs can open later, doesn’t mean they will.
Mine’s a Stinky Bay
Few will deny that we are currently living through a golden age of craft beer – in London, at least. This may be a controversial viewpoint, but until recently, I firmly believed – and loudly argued, to anyone that would listen – that it is something that has passed Jersey by.
I am not a fan of Liberation Ale, although it is just about drinkable in a bottle. Notable exceptions to the above are, of course, anything on tap at the Lamplighter, a fine pub that could hold its own against any in north London, and Krafty J’s. It is strange to me that there isn’t more of a craft beer scene in the Island, and I always suspected it might have something to do with the domination of the major breweries, although my efforts to expand on this thesis have gone nowhere as yet.
Anyway, I say “until recently” because just the other day I got out some cash (old school, I know) to meet someone in the Prince of Wales, where they had a beer I hadn’t heard of, Stinky Bay, on draft.
Well, I was genuinely blown away.
This is a genuinely interesting, very drinkable session IPA. Hats off to the guys and I am looking forward to seeing more from them. It always takes outliers to move the needle. Love them or hate them, it was Brewdog that achieved that here in the UK, and while the industry has now overtaken them (how many companies ever really transition to mass market and stay good?), you have to credit them for bringing craft beer into the mainstream.
For now, when I am in the Island, mine is a Stinky Bay.
