ONE of the peripheral – but significant – issues to come out of the Health and Social Services £1m. childcare incident is the respective role and responsibility of the minister and chief officer of a department.

The HSSD management team takes great care to keep politicians out of day-to-day matters and, in a statement last week, confirmed that the childcare incident was ‘operational’. The chief officer conceded that he had not briefed his minister fully on the point when he was taking questions last week.

The inference, however, is clear. Irrespective of whether subsidising a handful of staff at enormous cost was good or bad use of public funds, the decision and its subsequent management was none of the political board’s business.

Yet since a minister ultimately has political responsibility for his or her department – and serious under-performance could result in losing a vote of no confidence – do they not need some say in what goes on, even at an operational level?

The closest States members have to a job description is their code of conduct, which sets out their primary duty as acting ‘well and faithfully’ in the public interest. Ensuring value for money for taxpayers’ funds and eliminating waste would appear to be very much within the public interest but closely questioning officials on every line of expenditure and the rationale for it might be regarded as straying into operational areas.

Another reason for raising the role of political board members is the release by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission of the draft code of corporate governance for company directors.

The purpose behind it is simple: organisations should be headed by a robust and effective board of directors which is responsible for governance and oversight of the operation.

While there are limits to how far government can be likened to the corporate world, ensuring that something receiving public funds is well run ought to be a priority for every States member.

How they and their officials achieve that in practice is a different matter – and is the very reason that the Wales Audit Office found that Guernsey ticked not a single box of good governance.