Mike Hadley. (0559990)
HOUSING licence policies are wasting more than £10m., a Health and Social Services board member has claimed.
Deputy Mike Hadley will at the weekend meet like-minded deputies to discuss what moves can be made to change the Housing Department’s stance and have more 15-year licences issued.
He has published a newsletter outlining his position and other issues. It is being mailed to all residents in the South-east district, which he represents.
‘I don’t want to see a massive increase in population, but the current policy of issuing five-year licences as opposed to 15 is awful,’ said Deputy Hadley.
‘It is costing the Health Department millions. Other departments have problems recruiting and retaining staff and there’s no evidence that it [the licensing policy] works.’
Deputy Hadley said that Health was having to make decisions about whether to spend money on new drugs to save people’s lives when millions were being frittered away because of housing licence policies.
‘I’m having a chat this weekend with other deputies who agree with my point of view to see if we can take the matter forward.
‘I will be asking questions about getting confirmation of the costs in the States. I’ve guessed at £10m. I think it’s a fairly intelligent guess.’
A requete could be one approach to changing the system.
‘The problem with the States is a lot of people, because they have been in the island generations, want to stop newcomers coming in,’ he said.
‘There are so many things wrong with that policy. Considering we have a population of around 60,000, we need new blood coming in.
‘If we totally ring-fenced the population of this island, the genetic pool would become really quite grim and there would be no interchange of ideas.’
He said that Health was spending a huge sum of money on agency nurses and consultants because of its recruitment problem.
Deputy Hadley cited the example of a psychiatric nurse who had to leave because his licence expired, meaning his wife, who was also a nurse, went with him.
‘It requires a change of attitude in the Housing Department, even if we don’t change the licensing system.’
For a long time psychiatric nurses were issued with only a short-term licence, he said, even though it was an area that needed long-term care.
Even when 15-year licences were offered, it was an unattractive package, said Deputy Hadley, coming with a condition that the holder had to buy a house worth at least £500,000.
The Housing Department announced a review of the licence system last August.
Posting the newsletter will cost £700.
Deputies get an annual expense allowance of £2,000.
Article posted on 29th August, 2008 - 2.30pm
8 Article Comments
I do not agree that the States “want to stop newcomers coming in” quite the opposite.
UK born applicants always seem to have the advantage over Guernsey born applicants even if their experience is equal or greater and gained in the UK.
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Finally a voice of sense is speaking out.
From what I can assume, every time a housing licence comes to an end for staff within the health service, the health service would have to find funds to pay for the passage of the staff member and their removal costs on to where they will be moving. Am I correct in assumeing this?
Is this as a direct result of the licence scheme?
The health service therefore suffers because it would not only have to pay out this money, but a highly skill staff member is forced to leave.
On top of this, doesn’t the health service have to replace the ’said’ staff member?
Doesn’t that then require them to pay for for interested parties to visit the hospital and then for interviews. Once accepted, wouldn’t the health service then have to pay theirs and their familys’ travel and removal costs.
These funds could be used for better purposes and the health service would be able to keep experienced staff.
What about education and policing - is this happening there or are there one set of rules for some public service areas and another set for others??
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My 3 year old son desperately needs speech therapy and i have been told that he may have to wait up to a year because at present there are no speech therapists on the island. This delay effects his ability to learn and thus will impact on him for the rest of his life.
It is difficult to recruit and even harder to retain the speech therapists due to the overly restrictive housing license policies. It is absurd that essential services like these arent automatically issued 15 year licenses. Shouldnt we be doing everything in our power to attract these types of people when the island depends on them so much?
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New blood when they are throwing Guernsey people out of there homes look after your own first
and the Generations to come
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I work in HSSD, and I have first hand experience of this problem. Experienced people, good at their jobs, have to leave when their license ends, and then their post remains unfilled for months. We pay a fortune for a locum(if we can get one at all), and then recruit another license holder on the same terms, pay their removal expenses and rent allowance, and enter exactly the same cycle as before.
Remember the article in the Press on Monday about mental health waiting lists? License conditions are the main cause.
Having short term licenses to avoid the imaginary problem of our island being “swamped” with such “undesirables” as nurses, teachers, social workers, physios, and psychologists is costing the taxpayer a fortune. I don’t know if deputy Hadley is right on the exact figure, but I agree with him - it should be out in the open for us all to see and discuss.
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At last the penny is dropping about the weakness of 5-year housing licences. The problem affects all sectors of the economy but Health and Education seem more affected than most.
We know that we have to import teachers and nurses so let’s maximise the effect of this by keeping the good ones rather than kicking them out after 5 years. Remember that a 15 year housing licence is not a 15 year employment contract. If the individual is not worth keeping then the length of their housing licence does not mean that they have to be retained. Under the current system we will struggle to recruit or retain the good ones as they have long-term careers to think about and know that they cannot settle here. How on earth does Guernsey benefit from that ?
If a teacher or nurse leaves the island then they currently get replaced by another. But its the same number of teachers and nurses living in the same number of houses and using the same amount of public resources so wgat’s the difference ? So what if they eventually acquire full local status ? The island’s demographics are such that we need more people of working age to finance the cost of looking after an aging population.
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I’ve had a similar experience to Wil. My son was on the waiting list for speech therapy since before turning 3. He finally got seen for just a few weeks recently, but starts school next week and still can’t communicate legibly. I’m absolutely appalled at the level of service able to be provided and was often given the reason that lack of staff was the issue. We even looked at sending him off island (where he was born) to get the help he needs.
More than that though the logistics don’t seem to make sense to me either. With Jersey and many other jurisdictions that compete for such staff already changing their policies on such matters to make it easier to stay, how to Guernsey hope to continue to attract the specialist services it needs?
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I am really pleased that Deputy Hadley is taking this issue seriously. The population argument is flawed. 15 year licences do not increase the population because all we are doing is changing the workers every 2 years (not many 5 year licence holders stay for the 5 years. What the public sector should be doing is offering 5 year licences in the first instance and then, if staff are found to be doing an excellent job then they should be offered 15 year licences. We will never have enough locally educated staff to fill all the vacancies. All we are doing is throwing money at recruitment and ignoring the retention element - as once the rent allowance runs out after 2 years then the 5 year licence holders start looking to leave the island, and who can blame them.
Local staff also need some incentive to stay working in the public sector. They are arguably discriminated against because they are not entitled to the same help with rent and housing benefits as non-local staff, and in the current financial climate their pay does not compare with that offered by the private sector.
Common sense surely means that the whole licensing issue needs to be debated.
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