On Monday, the Telegraph published an interview with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s leading pensions analyst who highlighted the financial impact falling birth rates and rising life expectancy will have on the UK over the next 40 years or so.

He calculated that government would need to find an extra £80bn a year to fund long-term care, the increased burden on the NHS and paying pensions for longer.

The bleak assessment included predicting damage to family relations as children increasingly come to regard their parents as a burden.

As working adults, they face the prospect of higher taxes, longer working lives and less inherited wealth as parents sell their home to pay for care costs.

In our business pages yesterday, a leading investment manager was touching on similar issues – albeit in a different context – when he said that the demographic cost of maintaining the elderly meant that the tax burden on those still in work after 25 years meant they were unlikely to have much incentive to remain in employment.

These factors are critically important to all small communities like Guernsey, which have fewer resources to draw on. The added significance for this island, however, is that its low tax status is vital for maintaining a financial services-based economy and for attracting individuals to work here.

One of the debates that Health and Social Services wants to start with its 20:20 Vision is encouraging islanders to consider how much they wish to spend on services like healthcare and to prioritise that against other areas.

Much of government expenditure is historically based. Committees and now their replacements, the departments, have simply been given money each year on the basis of what they have spent, not on what they have achieved or what, necessarily, the island requires.

It is one reason why Treasury wants to move towards zero-based budgeting, to ensure that every line of expenditure is capable of justification.

Even with that rigour, however, the demand on the public purse will grow. It is difficult to see how that constant call for funds can be met without damaging that which makes the island work as well as it does.