Increasingly, Guernsey’s size is impacting the provision of a number of services, either through shortage of key skills, or more fundamentally – the lack of sufficient economies of scale. Since managing Islanders’ expectations is pretty central to performing as a Deputy, this is an area that candidates need to be aware of.
This is the reality of living on a tiny Island
In our highly-connected and globalised world, we are bombarded with information from near and far. ‘What health services are free in the UK?’ Click on a link. ‘How cheap can I get a flight?’ Click on a link. You will get the picture. Making comparisons with other places (regardless of their particular circumstances) is easy to do – but can be extremely misleading when applied to a tiny Island with a particular composition to its economy. Things do not always scale. Many times, I see all sorts of people making side-by-side comparisons with the UK on statistics. Partly due to our not having the same level of data available, but always on the basis of ‘we will just divide the UK data by 1000 and it will be true for Guernsey also’.
What is also ignored, is that we often cannot hit the minimum tipping point to make a service viable for (quite often) – a subset of our 65,000 population. Our Hospital is a case in point as I have mentioned elsewhere – any Hospital is known to require a population of 250,000 to be viable. We are 26% of that figure. Does that therefore mean that we should only expect to be able to deliver 26% of the services you would find in a typical UK hospital? Of course not – Islanders expect 100%. So immediately, you know that we cannot service everything locally – and we don’t. We rely on the UK for quite a lot of particular sorts of treatments – but that necessitates transferring patients elsewhere and (it makes financial sense to do so) – bringing over specialist practitioners when possible. This is the reality of living on a tiny Island.
Very often you will hear the cry ‘in a modern economy’ we should be doing xyz’. Well, if we could afford all of the plethora of goods and services that can be found in other, much larger jurisdictions, then of course we would do so. But we simply cannot – we don’t collect enough revenue as a Government for a start, but even then, we simply cannot compete due to lack of skilled resource – or alternatively, insufficient volume of customers to warrant implementing a service at a price Islanders could afford individually. But Islanders by and large, do not make this connection between our physical and economical realities to their belief that we should be providing comparable services.
There are countless examples. The cost of flying to and from Guernsey is certainly not as cheap as some other places – not even Jersey. But Jersey is nearly twice our population – they have reached that tipping point whereby air travel can prove viable at a reasonable price. Providing just a regulatory certified airport loses us several million a year, but we have to have it. We have to maintain our Harbours – again to be compliant with a number of regulations, but they need considerable investment and certainly just relying on local users and boat owners will not satisfy the capital we require. The provision of our Utilities – both electricity and water now require hundreds of millions of pounds of investment. Should ‘user-pays’ fund all of that? I can assure that the vast majority of Islanders could not.
Subsidies and Universal entitlement
So we get to the reality of life on a tiny island. Government is expected to provide all of these services at a comparable price to anywhere you care to name. For those that Government can (our must) expect to provide a local service, very often, it is only possible through subsidy. That in itself is often something we just have to accept, so that some sort of comparative service can be made available, often even for free or at minimum cost. But it is important to understand that something free in the UK (or even in Jersey), just may not be viable without a contribution of some sort from the individual benefitting from the service here. That of course presumes that the money is there to do so in the first place.
With a more sophisticated population, the range of expected provision ever-grows too. It is also true that parts of the economy also expand or contract or disappear altogether. Tourism is a good example. Decades ago, Guernsey relied very heavily on Horticulture and Tourism. Today, there is little other than domestic horticulture and our Tourism industry is static at best. Even Finance is no longer growing at the pace it once was, indeed it is questionable whether outside of necessary Compliance, whether it is growing at all. In the 1950’s we had hundreds of small farms – now we struggle to reach double figures.
We rely for about 68% of our tax revenues from people’s salaries and wages. Theoretically, bringing in a lot more workers would benefit our tax base. It would of course also put up the demand (and cost) for Housing dramatically. – it would also create far greater demand for services such as Healthcare and Education. Finding that sweet spot which ensures that we can subsidise essential services sufficiently but importantly determine exactly what individual Islanders can expect the Government of a tiny Island to pay for as a Universal entitlement – and what they will have to pay for themselves is a major challenge for the next Assembly. Islanders and especially candidates. must be ready for some very difficult decisions.