WHEN it comes to managing a budget, no one underestimates the scale of the problem facing the Health and Social Services Department. By definition, it deals with islanders most needing help.

Meeting the ever-rising expectations of patients, clients and their relatives would be hard enough without staff recruitment and retention problems, the rising cost of medical inflation and the demand to keep up with ever-changing technology.

Yet whatever the emotional and clinical pressures on HSSD to meet what might be called delivery demands, it has actually been tasked by the States to do a particular job – and it is not the job it is currently doing.

We have highlighted the department’s budget woes in recent days not to target Health but because it is a vivid example of how the States is not getting to grips with the new reality of restraint.

Asked to live within its means, the department’s very measured response through its minister is to say, no, we have every intention of overspending  to the tune of nearly £200 per taxpayer, or £8m.

This is a watershed moment.

If every department chooses simply to spend what it likes, financial anarchy reigns and any pretence of Guernsey being well governed disappears.

First Health, then Education, then… Spend what you like because there are no restrictions and the taxpayer will pick up the bill.

What this shows is that the political and professional members of Health are not in control of the department – it is managing them.

No other organisation – except, perhaps, the BBC, which similarly does not have to earn the money it spends – could ignore budget discipline and expect to escape sanction. Why does Health and why does it consider it acceptable to deprive other sectors of what it intends willfully to overspend?

Health and Social Services has thrown down a challenge to government by intending to be in breach of its mandate to be accountable to the States for the management and safeguarding of public funds and other resources entrusted to it.

What happens next will define whether Guernsey has a government, or simply a collection of stand-alone departments doing what they want when they feel like it.