WHEN the States meets today to discuss the Budget and Health and Social Services’s plea to be absolved of making all the cuts demanded of it by Treasury and Resources, there will be more at stake than the £1m. at the centre of the dispute.

Indeed, it would be tempting to say that the credibility of HSSD is at risk. Having identified the new services it says are vitally needed and having obtained the funding, it is now saying that they won’t go ahead because it chooses not to save a comparatively trivial sum elsewhere.

It is, as the Guernsey Disability Alliance has highlighted, making a political football of real people’s already established needs and then denying them because the Health minister and his colleagues are in a strop with Treasury.

That looks very shabby coming from a supposedly caring department.

However, the real issue is actually rather wider. The global economy is contracting and Guernsey’s will be affected as well. The fulfilment industry receives a fatal blow next April and pensions provision, a significant part of the financial services sector, is similarly under threat.

In the circumstances, Treasury’s request for already identified savings to be delivered faster across the board is neither unreasonable nor unexpected and HSSD – with the largest States budget – cannot expect to be treated as a special case.

If its political members believe they are immune from financial reality and what has been happening since 2008 then they should not be in office. And they are certainly not contributing to a corporate, responsible approach to resolving Guernsey public finance problems.

Where they do have a case, however, is over their track record to date and, possibly, the timing of T&R’s demand for more savings.

That was late in the day and seemed designed to create difficulties and extra work for all departments that had already prepared their budgets.

Pointing out its savings to date and how much better it has performed than many other departments would be taking the moral high ground.

Denying people in need of identified services is misguided – and leaves those HSSD should be helping feeling like political playthings or, worse, worthless.