WHEN this newspaper criticised Treasury and Resources last week for abandoning any pretence of a policy of restraint in government spending, we did so on the basis of the department’s own 2009 Budget report and quoted some of the minister’s own words from the Billet d’Etat.

Since then, a number of readers and deputies have asked whether our view might have been gained from too narrow a reading of the report.

After all, restraint is such a central part of the Government Business Plan that ignoring it so soon into zero-10 would be a major, unannounced, policy shift.

It would be nice if politics was played by such rules. But it is not. Sadly for islanders, T&R is banking on two things to get away with its Budget, which is essentially a ‘let the States spend what it wants and tax islanders accordingly’ plan.

The first is deputies not spotting the sleight of hand. The second is them not caring even if they do.

Zero-10, essentially a shift away from raising money by taxing business profits to taxing islanders’ income, required economic growth and the States to spend less. That growth was always going to be hard to find with the House capping the population and now harder still with the global slowdown.

That makes controlling States expenditure not just important but crucial. But instead of telling islanders and opening a debate on where savings might be made and what the consequences would be, the Budget is guiltily furtive on the point.

What cannot be disguised, however, is the rapidly increasing cost of government, particularly wages. These should have been kept at or below RPI. Not only are they higher, the rate at which the public sector is giving itself above-inflation rises is actually going up.

In real terms, payroll costs fell in 2006-7 when the then Treasury minister was vocally behind restraint. This year, civil service and other staff costs will go up by nearly 8%, or 2.3% in real terms, and next year, while the headline amount is expected to be a little under 7%, in real terms that rises by 2.7%.

And it’s all coming from islanders who are already financially hard-pressed.