OVER the last few days, Comment has looked at some of the implications of the 3% minimum pay deal struck with around 2,500 States employees and also at the wider implications of payroll costs on the States’ professed policy of public spending restraint.

One of the other questions posed by the award is whether the taxpayer actually gets value for the money they spend.

Again, this is not some ultra-critical newspaper debating point but an essential issue that has been in the government in-tray since before 2005 when a Professor Clarke was employed to give advice to the then Civil Service Board.

His successor, Dr Graham Robinson, refers to the Clarke Report in his own review three years later of the role of the States as an employer and makes the point that things have actually deteriorated since the function of the board was absorbed into ‘the centre’, roughly the Policy Council, its HR unit and its negotiating body, the Public Sector Remuneration Committee.

Interestingly, Dr Robinson made a number of ‘high priority’ and ‘urgent’ recommendations in his report, which was dated February last year. This important document was shelved because of the general election and was supposed to be discussed by the Policy Council last Monday and again deferred because ministers ran out of time.

So it is possible to conclude that this one issue, which directly affects thousands of public sector employees plus their morale and in excess of £170m.-worth of islanders’ cash, is scarcely on the political agenda.

This is vitally significant when it comes to value for money. As Dr Robinson (who was at pains not to cause offence with his report) delicately points out, ‘it is perfectly feasible that a highly committed, dedicated and enthusiastic staff member could work alongside a colleague whose performance might be consistently mediocre or worse, without the performance of either being the subject of formal recognition by the manager’.

If star and slacker get the same pay, why bother to break into a sweat? It also reinforces the probably wrong view that civil servants are what the report calls ‘capable but comfortable’.

The real issue, however, is that no one appears to have grasped this political nettle.