DEPUTY Bernard Flouquet was absolutely spot-on – twice – during the last States meeting. That may not be a sentence I’ll use that often in my weekly column but credit where credit’s due.

His insightful comments came during debate on a PAC report into Education’s capital programme. His first bullseye was insisting that it’s high time the States had one central, expert body charged with executing all of its capital projects. The second was in pointing out that the States resolved to do just that four years ago, but that resolution, like so many others, is just being ignored by those who should be implementing it.

Let’s take the two issues separately.

Firstly, why should the overseeing of big capital projects be centralised? Many islanders would argue such a move is needed to avoid the continual huge overspends that seem to always be in the news.

In fact that is something of a distortion of the truth. The vast majority of the States’ capital projects come in within budget. For example, both the HSSD site development plan and Education’s programme of school building have stayed firmly under budget.

The same is true for many other projects. Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that financial debacles such as the New Jetty, Airport Terminal and Beau Sejour show that when things go wrong they can go very wrong.

More to the point, the civil servants in States departments should be focused on delivering services and not pretending to be experts in construction. There is no reason why they should be.

Big building projects are only occasional events in the life of a department, so naturally senior civil servants are picked on the basis of their ability to run a health service, or a museum, or a social security system, and not on their knowledge of the construction trade.

Let’s be clear – there is an element of risk in each and every capital project. Even employing the greatest experts in their field won’t eliminate that risk, but will simply mitigate it. Likewise, setting up a central body to oversee large capital projects won’t eliminate the need to bring in expert project managers for very specialised projects – like a new hospital.

What it will do is increase the level of in-house expertise and release the senior staff within departments to focus 100% on running those departments.

Of course the ‘client department’ would still need to be kept in the loop and consulted frequently to ensure the building they get is the building they need. They could still be represented on the project board but the process would be led by those properly trained to do so.

Just as important was Deputy Flouquet’s second point about a clear States resolution being totally ignored. It was under Deputy Trott in 2006 that T&R asked the States for approval to set up a centralised property function which would represent the States, as the clients, in any large capital project.

As part of that process, other departments had to transfer any staff and resources they were using for managing their own capital programmes to T&R. That transfer took place, but T&R never provided the promised service.

Frankly, if any other States department had received extra resources under such a false prospectus they would have been lambasted by T&R and told to hand it back again. Perhaps the PAC should take a close look at how this financial sleight of hand was executed and whether such budgetary chicanery is acceptable in the committee that is mandated with ensuring financial discipline in other departments.

The broader point is the growing trend to just ignore inconvenient States resolutions when departments don’t feel like implementing them. Whether it’s Environment over the traffic strategy, the Policy Council over civil partnerships or T&R over centralised project management, the tactic is the same. You don’t ask the States to rescind or alter the resolution, in case they insist that the original decision stands. Far better to just pretend that the instruction you don’t like was never given to you in the first place.

A psychologist would no doubt point out that all these acts of denial are in keeping with human nature but they are certainly not in keeping with democracy. Just as justice delayed is justice denied, deliberate and prolonged foot-dragging in implementing States decisions really does represent departments blatantly cocking a snook at the Assembly. It’s time Scrutiny took a look at the long list of unimplemented States resolutions.