ON SATURDAY, we drew attention to the lack of rigour applied to testing whether some of the £300m.-plus capital projects requiring the States to borrow £175m. to help fund were actually needed or had to go ahead now.

An example is Treasury and Resources’ own request for approaching £4m. for an IT wide area network. The reason it is needed is because the existing WAN was installed so badly, ‘in a fragmented fashion’ as the report puts it.

Now, because the taxpayer will cough up, T&R wants a business class network – islanders will read that as ‘gold plated’ – because, well, that’s what everyone else has. There is not a word in its supporting summary to say in what respects the existing system is deficient or, more crucially, in what way it is holding back the work or the efficiency of the States.

If the officers and politicians involved were using their own money or that of their shareholders in a real world situation, would this really be going ahead now and in its current format?

The other dispiriting aspect of the T&R borrowing document is that there is no evidence of any alternative thinking on funding projects.

Health and Social Services wants homes for adults with learning disabilities? Let’s borrow £5.3m. plus an unquantified amount for inflation. Instead, why isn’t the States approaching the private sector to provide the facility?

Care and nursing homes are already provided privately and there is evidence that they do so far more cheaply than the equivalents operated by the States.

One of the key objectives of the Tribal Helm spending review was to ensure that the States is only engaged in delivering essential services that cannot or should not be provided by the private sector.

Some of the proposed capital projects clearly fall into the private sector category – yet they have not been knocked back as a result.

Pursuing that approach would be one way of reducing the amount the States is looking to borrow now and in the future.

But the ‘prioritisation’ report simply perpetuates the tired old thinking so criticised by Tribal Helm.