Whilst P&R is often referred to as the ‘Senior Committee’, this can be somewhat misleading. Yes, they do have a broad mandate which includes the serious matter of managing finances via Treasury. But, as has been mentioned elsewhere, States Policy is a matter for the Assembly as a body, but the individual mandates of the current Committee system have delegated Policy development responsibility too. Admittedly, when it comes to financing Policy initiatives, P&R have to sign off. But if they don’t and any Committee feels strongly enough, then they can take the matter to the Assembly as a body and get P&R overruled and directed to provide the resources.
But there is a major flaw in what is otherwise a system of oversight and Governance – prioritisation of resources can become a bun fight since there is no central function for deciding the Government’s Strategy – it springs from Committees a piece at a time. The Government Work Plan is the central document detailing forthcoming (and outstanding) intentions, but it represents the lowest common denominator that the mixed agendas of the entire Assembly will agree upon. There is then, no ‘Gameplan’ for Guernsey’s intended development – just a series of agreed Committee ambitions. It is to all intents and purposes an attempt to satisfy various operational needs or aspirations – as identified by individual groups of about 5 Deputies at a time.
Time was, when things were sufficiently stable and money was pouring in to the coffers with sufficient surplus, that this decentralised committee responsibility approach was perfectly adequate to manage Government. But that was largely blown asunder with the Financial crash of 2007/2008 when Guernsey had to adopt the Zero-10 approach – to retain the Financial Sector at the time. Why? Well because that historic surplus largely disappeared overnight and managing our Government finances became critical. And we have been struggling and tinkering pretty much ever since – much to the dissatisfaction of most Islanders, much of the time.
What do we need to do to improve?
Let’s start at the top. Let’s presume for the moment that actually achieving a vision for Guernsey’s future will have to come after we have established the best system for harnessing responsibilities with resources – people and financial, in a prioritised way. One way to do that is to recognise that the objective is to make a distinct separation between policy development and delivery of operations. Both need management, right? Ok. So let’s imagine that we do only have 30 full time Deputies to begin with (see here for proposals). We can then separate our Twenty IWV Deputies into these two groups – and as far as possible, allocate to the groups based on the experience of each Deputy but stipulate that having some experience as a Deputy will be a prerequisite for the Policy Group – you really need to understand how Government works before you can contribute successfully to improving it. That allows 10 less-experienced Deputies (normally new ones but also recognising that a returning Deputy may be better suited to the operational role than policy), to ‘cut their teeth’ in the other area – let’s call them the Operational Group.
Now, we need to recognise that if we are going to have criteria such as being an experienced Deputy as the necessary qualification for being in the Policy Group, then, given we have a 4 year term (currently) and that Deputies come and go (retire or fail to get re-elected), then we need to ensure we have enough ‘succession’ coming through, gaining experience. So, let’s imagine then that in the Operations Group of 10, we only have 7 departments (or Committees), We also have access to another 10, parish Deputies (assuming we have been successful in having the concept of ‘Parish’ Deputies brought in). Now, you could have Committee teams of 3 Deputies and to that we can anticipate doing pretty much what we do today – have another up to 2 ‘lay’ people (also part time but hopefully, with specific experience). Now we have something a bit like what we already have today, but with a different composition – Committees with 5 members in them – (albeit may theoretically be one short on one committee). The obvious question now is – what should those 7 Committees be responsible for? Well, that will be the subject of another post, but for now, I want to turn attention to the Policy Group and to give some sort of context and continuity, let’s keep calling it Policy & Resources. As we will see, that is actually quite appropriate.
Policy and Resources
The link between the aforementioned and re-focussed 7 Committees would be a representative ‘head’ (perhaps a Minister) with responsibility for the Policy development for that Committee. A kind of senior executive position. This direct link with the Operational delivery function is fundamental. You cannot create Policies in a vacuum or policies that do not have a delivery function at all. I will explore this in a separate post but for the moment, we can see that our new ‘P&R’ has 7 roles that it does not directly contain at present. We can call them ‘ministers’ ‘presidents’ or ‘grand wizards’ – the name doesn’t matter for our purposes yet. What is important is to see that we have our Operational Group ‘represented’ within P&R using this approach.
As to the other 3 roles, what should they be? Well, we do already have a Chief Minister; we also ascribe the title (externally at least) of Exterior Minister to the Deputy with the role of head of External Relations. It is also normal practice to have a Deputy who has responsibility for Finance and let’s keep with this approach and say we need a Treasury Minister. We now have a P&R with 10 members. What their individual and collective function needs to be will be the subject of another post.
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