FACED with an expensive report highlighting the need for decisive action to restore some credibility to an island government that complies with none of the principles of good governance, the Policy Council decided… to do nothing.
Instead, the most challenging task it set itself was to fabricate a release that attempted to dress up shelving the Wales Audit Office assessment as something positive.
It failed in that, too.
While the ultra-critical document demands central government comment and response, absolutely none was forthcoming. The best ministers collectively could manage was that the WAO’s review would be used as a template against which to measure the pace of change.
Weasel words indeed. The report will not be debated and the council hopes that it will be forgotten by next year.
Contrast that with the comments from the chief and Treasury ministers, who both welcomed and accepted the WAO’s findings.
What the difference marks is a chilling fact: a majority of members on the Policy Council are quite happy to be part of a broken, inefficient, wasteful system that is the despair of a string of eminent reviewers.
More than that, they actually like what they have, no matter the unnecessary cost it represents to the taxpayer, because they have no collective sense of moving Guernsey on.
Instead, the council, by its majority ‘best do nothing’ attitude, is endorsing a system that leaves them in executive control of their department and with no accountability or responsibility for achieving progress on behalf of islanders.
If voters believed that the WAO document was the one report – in a long series – that not even the States could ignore, they have been badly let down.
And it is not even as if ministers took a hard look at the document and decided that righting the wrongs it had identified was just too difficult.
They took a brief look, decided they didn’t like what they saw and the subsequent media release recorded the report’s unlamented demise into what they hope will remain an unmarked grave.
A sad day indeed for those who care about Guernsey.