Victory or defeat – it’s a States call
Wednesday 30th July 2008, 2:30PM BST.
ANYONE wishing to take a harsh view of where the new States stands might conclude that just three months into the life of the House, the cracks are already starting to show.
Admittedly, the weight of ‘evidence’ will materially hinge on the outcome of this week’s waste debate and whether members again vote for further delay while other solutions are explored.
However, the sursis motion, which would defer taking a decision, is expected to gain a lot of support and has the potential to be approved with who knows what potentially disastrous consequences for refuse disposal.
As it is, Mont Cuet tip is already dangerously full and the Guernsey Chamber of Commerce has seen fit to urge members to take a decision, almost any decision, and just to get on with it.
Student loans are returning to the Assembly in the autumn and it is not hard to predict that they will again become grants.
Slightly more esoteric is the debate to be triggered by the House Committee on the membership of Policy Council working groups.
In effect, the committee does not think the council should exclusively decide who sits on the working parties.
The council, on the other hand, takes the view that it knows which departments should be represented and is best placed to nominate the ideal candidates.
In its way, it is as significant an issue as the move by a majority of deputies seeking to prevent the chief minister from signing an agreement with the Lord Chancellor on the island’s international identity without express permission from the States as a whole.
If the waste debate is again stalled and if the House Committee gets its way, it sends out a clear message: the States rules, ok.
Some would hail that as a victory for parliamentary democracy, others as a defeat for joined up government.
If the ultimate decision-making body is the States as a committee of 47 members, then yo-yo government will prevail.
If not, then some other system is needed – and fast.
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Even in this so-called ‘throw-away-society’ and even in America, possibly the most consumptive of the lot, if they dumped everything in land-fill sites it would take up less than 1% of their land mass.
Guernsey probably has marginally less ‘space’ (desert, mountains, land devoted to agri) than the US but you get the message. Land fill does the job.
Spending £18-£25m on an incenarator is a tragic waste of money. If we want to make a positive out of a negative (rubbish) we should reclaim some land and dump the rubbish to fill it in. Then 0% of our land is used for waste management (in fact it’s a gain) and there’s no heavy capital cost at all.
The fact is we do not need an expensive plant at all or ‘the cheapest’ of any of the proposed expensive options. Just dump the proposals and the rubbish. Nothing could be simpler.
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What your journalist and a lot of the Deputies seemed to totally miss in the sursis debate yesterday was that a waste solution that deployed a variety of smaller modular technologies to deal with the various different components of the waste stream, would be (a) much quicker to get up and running as most of the technologies can be bought off the shelf, and (b) would allow Guernsey to remain much more flexible as waste arisings change and new even better technologies come on stream. Had the sursis gone through, far from ‘delaying’ the eventual solution…. it would most likely have resulted in a much quicker resolution to the whole issue.
The Deputies who voted against it, did not do so because they felt that PSD had chosen the right companies to tender, but because they did not want the States to be seen to be ‘dithering’…. a poor basis for a decision of this magnitude and may well result in the final solution taking longer than need be.
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Rosie.
Please explain to us all how the decision yesterday excludes a micro incinerator – to which I presume you refer (the small option), supported by other technologies, possibly thermal or other bio options capable of processing 25000 tons?
Deputy Parkinson said it didnt and he knows what tendering processes are all about.
Is this another case of so-called waste experts speaking out on issues they claim to know best on but in fact only demonstrating that they know very little about the situation?
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