commenting here yesterday on the waste of time, taxpayers’ money and effort that will be triggered by a consultants’ report into the operation of the GTA University Centre, we questioned what had provoked such a daft exercise.
Commerce and Employment, the instigators, dress it up as ensuring value for money but since their minister is a non executive member of the GTA board, that could be seen as suggesting she is not adequately fulfilling her role there.
It might also be regarded as an adverse comment on the other directors, who also include a former HM Procureur, and on the sponsors, who include two legal firms, two banks, the Channel Islands Stock Exchange and the Insurance Institute of Guernsey.
A close read of the terms of reference, however, indicates what is really going on. The GTA University Centre does exceptionally well on ridiculously little because of the skills, enthusiasm and flair of its tiny 13-strong team and because it is independent of bureaucratic constraints.
That is one reason why it is open 52 weeks a year and why, to save taxpayers’ money, it has broken away from the gold-plated and unaffordable civil service final salary pension scheme.
And that is why the centre has drawn this hostile ‘review’. Politicians and civil servants do not like what they cannot control. Perhaps it would be going too far to say that fleet-of-foot operations that really deliver embarrass them, but it remains a suspicion.
What is true, however, is that C&E and the States as a whole are obsessed with input rather than output.
‘We’re giving them £435,000,’ cries the department, choosing to ignore that this is but a flea-bite of its overall budget and that the only important arbiters – the companies paying to send staff on courses and the individuals passing them – know that they are getting an excellent service.
If C&E was thinking clearly (perhaps £50,000 on a report establishing whether it was would be money well spent), it would be in adopting a GTA-type approach elsewhere.
But that would mean a change of culture – and the States does not do that.