01 Taxation

Members of the 2025 P&R Committee

Chief Minister: Lindsay De Sausmarez 10721
Vice President: Gavin St Pier 8577
External Affairs Minister: Steve Falla 9017
Members: Charles Parkinson 9294, Yvonne Burford 9427

View Previous Committee Handover Document here

it is not simple and there is no single, silver bullet.

Let’s be honest, nobody wants to pay more tax – and if indeed there is no other choice, then somebody else should pay. Right? Consequently, any discussion about Taxation is going to be neither welcome nor likely to result in universal agreement. Of course, there is the third consideration: incorporating savings through technological productivity in the provision of current services and/or introducing new charges where presently there are none.

The foregoing are (in broad terms), the options before the next Assembly and decisions will need to be taken very quickly since Government Finances are running at a deficit – which increasingly erodes our historic savings. Furthermore, for many years, successive Assemblies have either not invested (or not sufficiently invested) in our infrastructure – and now, coupled with the extensive increase in costs for both labour and materials, following Covid and of course, the energy ramifications of the Ukraine war – it is much more expensive than before to undertake that necessary infrastructure investment.

The common answer by Islanders when confronted by this situation (and Guernsey is by no means unique), is ‘cut our cloth’. There is merit in this approach – if in fact we can make such cuts without inflicting considerable hardship on vulnerable individuals or sections of the community. On top of which, to make any serious savings, we necessarily have to target the biggest areas of Government spending – and ideally, in those areas where costs are rising the fastest: health and pensions, both a direct result of an ageing demographic (again not at all unique to Guernsey). But who is going to agree to that?

There is a further consideration – people’s expectations. We are quick to draw comparisons with other jurisdictions when we seek to justify why we too should have those services and facilities.But what seems to have been lost in recent years is our size. We are a very subscale jurisdiction and that matters – quite a lot, because we do not have the necessary economies of scale to make many things comparable with other, larger jurisdictions. Neither in terms of costs, or in breadth of services.

So, it is against these very real considerations that we have to address the controversial subject of taxation. The associated, individual TAXATION POSTS below, cover off these options in more detail, but are based on an intimate knowledge of our Island finances, informed by working closely with Treasury colleagues and a number of professional service organisations for the past two years. I would strongly urge that you spend time reading and listening to them, before simply jumping to conclusions about the way forward on taxation – it is not simple and there is no single, silver bullet.

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Taxation