CRITICISM by a Vale deputy of the Wales Audit Office’s report into good governance – or, rather, the lack of it – in Guernsey has a curious feel.

For while the member is fully entitled to view the report as a waste of £80,000 and the WAO as a discredited organisation, his arguments against it really do not hold water.

Yes, the organisation and its former director-general are going through some difficult times but does that mean the work its staff did in Guernsey lacks credibility?

The central complaint by the deputy against the WAO is that if the many allegations against it are correct, it suffers from far more systemic problems than they claimed exist in Guernsey.

That’s a curious way of looking at things: something’s worse than the States, so ignore the difficulties here…

And even if the work that the WAO’s officers who had nothing to do with the financial irregularities now disclosed did while here is to be ignored, there are still endemic issues to resolve within Guernsey’s government.

Asked whether achieving desired outcomes is well integrated into decision making, a majority of senior civil servants, 51%, said ‘rarely’ and a further 30% said only sometimes. That is not indicative of the long promised but as yet undelivered joined-up government and the results of the survey are far worse than the benchmark comparison, the average of all local authorities in Wales.

More than that, the report produced was, at the time, the culmination of a series of earlier reports by other, independent, authors making substantially similar criticisms.

The WAO’s report came out in September 2009. Just seven months later the tribunal of inquiry into the airport firefighters dispute was published and, in its one paragraph in heavy type, delivered this damning conclusion:

‘The failure to deal with the underlying problem, which led to the industrial action by the firefighters, stems from the system of government which does not encourage either a corporate approach or collective responsibility. In our view there was a systemic failure to act in a corporate and strategic manner.’

How much more evidence to States members require – and when are they going to do something about it?