over the next few months and years, Guernsey will embark on an unprecedented programme of public expenditure totalling around £300m. which, at its peak in 2011 and 2012, will be pumping nearly £90,000 a day into the local economy.
In addition, government itself is about to announce phase two of the fundamental spending reviews piloted by Tribal Helm, the States Strategic Plan will be released in October, and the Policy Council is overseeing a programme it says will transform public sector culture and practice.
By any definition, that’s a lot going on and an enormous amount of work and change to manage.
Quite clearly, the finite resources of the States of Guernsey and its staff will be stretched to accommodate this and it is one reason why the council has decided to park the ultra-critical Wales Audit Office report on corporate governance.
The difficulty with that, however, is that the WAO analysis indicates that the States is already remarkably poor at what it does at the moment.
It is not clear where it is going, who is in charge, is bad at taking decisions, cannot scrutinise and hold people to account, and has little concept of providing value for money.
Pouring an additional £300m.-worth of capital projects and a change programme on top of that is, surely, asking for trouble.
The Policy Council says that going ahead with the expenditure reviews, the strategic plan and modernising the civil service will address many of the shortcomings identified by the WAO.
Really? If they get anywhere near, that will be by accident rather than design. And what of the shortcomings not addressed? Will those merely be left or possibly picked off by some other convenient, unrelated piece of work?
Only a government – or the BBC – confronted by such overwhelming evidence that it was not handling other people’s money properly could get away with ignoring that advice.
Anyone else would be drawing up an emergency set of proposals to tackle the deficiencies in a systemic manner – and putting in place a timetable to review progress.
For the Policy Council, however, putting the interests of islanders and taxpayers first isn’t even on the agenda.