Since the Guernsey Training Agency and the Finance Training Agency were  merged in 1996 to focus on upskilling the island’s workforce, the  organisation has gone from strength to strength.
That process accelerated from 2006 when it was rebadged as the GTA University Centre and became an acknowledged centre of excellence that has since been copied – less successfully – by Jersey and the Isle of Man.
The number of students using the GTA has risen spectacularly to more than 6,500 and it has an impressive track record of helping islanders to get the professional qualifications they and their employers need for Guernsey to compete in a skills-based economy.
It achieves this on a shoestring with help from the taxpayer that has not kept pace with inflation and it absorbed huge rent increases when the States made it leave publicly-owned premises and instead go on the commercial market.
Despite clear restrictions on its resources, the centre is now poised to offer undergraduate courses locally in which the university effectively comes here rather than students going to the UK.
By any standards – they are fully documented in its various publications – the GTA is a model of what can be achieved in partnership with industry, which helps decide what courses are offered.
Yet Commerce and Employment wants to spend an estimated £50,000 on a review of a proven island asset that costs it little more than £400,000 a year. Apart from the waste of time and effort, unless this exercise leads to better funding for the centre, C&E has far better targets for consultancy, not least because it spent nearly half a million on consultants and contracted out work last year alone. And for what?
C&E’s own sacred cow, tourism, receives millions but that spend is carefully hidden in the States accounts and taxpayers would also love to know what benefit they receive from the £741,000-worth of ‘financial concessions’ on transport links.
There are other big areas of expenditure ripe for analysis under C&E’s control yet it wants to pick over something that’s clearly succeeding and spending little.
Given the minister’s disastrous foray into economising on the old age pension, she is at risk of looking like someone who knows the cost of everything – but the value of nothing.