FINDING the right time to change the final salary pension scheme for States employees is a key challenge for the public sector pension review group, the new Treasury and Resources minister has said.

GUERNSEY urgently needs to reposition itself as a different type of economy, the retiring Treasury and Resources minister Charles Parkinson said yesterday.

DEREGISTERING all but three Guernsey Qrops looks like a ‘spiteful’ attack by the UK taxman, penalising the island alone, the Treasury minister said yesterday.

OUTGOING Treasury minister Charles Parkinson said yesterday that he saw no harm in publishing in the annual accounts the amount of money the States spent on pay settlements.

WHEN the States meets today to discuss the Budget and Health and Social Services’s plea to be absolved of making all the cuts demanded of it by Treasury and Resources, there will be more at stake than the £1m. at the centre of the dispute.

The latest twist in the saga of how to raise £1.8m. – raiding air passengers rather than boatowners – is an indication that government in the round really does not understand the concept of ‘joined up’ far less practise what it preached back in the 2004 reforms that were supposed to make the States run [...]

A PUBLIC defender system would not be a viable solution to the rise in legal aid costs, the Guernsey Bar Council has said.

TWO comments were made this week, apparently independently of each other, and yet they both indicate the level of fresh thinking that managing Guernsey requires in today’s fast-changing world.

PUBLICATION of the Treasury and Resources Department’s latest quarterly bulletin makes encouraging reading for anyone concerned about the condition of the local economy.

DEPUTIES are in denial over the juggernaut of States spending and are more interested in excusing themselves than controlling it, according to the Treasury minister.