States reform is failing - Keen

Wednesday 24 February 2016

One of the Island's leading businessmen, who was contracted to advise the States on cutting costs, has delivered a withering assessment of how much progress has been made.

Former Chamber of Commerce President Kevin Keen described the States as having some good people, but a “…pretty terrible system…they don’t have the urgency, or the limits on expenditure, and there’s a lack of accountability.” Last year he left a consultancy role which was intended to help the States fill the £145 million budget deficit which is due to build up by 2019, unless the right action is taken.

Speaking to the Institute of Directors lunch at the Grand Hotel this week, Mr Keen, who is currently the interim CEO at Durrell, listed the various initiatives which had been put in place to cut government spending in the last decade including both “comprehensive”, and “fundamental” spending reviews, but said that none of them had worked.

He said that the pace of reform was still too slow and “silo-based”, with the onus on civil servants protecting their own departments and budgets.

Instead, he called for a fundamental change in how the States works, which would see many of its current functions taken over by the private sector, such as the abattoir, sports centres, crematorium, car parks and the incinerator:

“The first candidate for break-up and privatisation is Infrastructure, and that’s not about getting rid of the gardeners, it’s much more fundamental than that…Government has to do some functions, but it doesn’t have to do the range of functions that it does now.”

He set out his vision for a public sector with a much smaller "head office", with other areas focussed on the delivering the best value for customers, and much greater cooperation with Guernsey. 

Mr Keen also proposed the creation of “ministerial boards” for some of the bigger departments such as Health and Education, in which business people from the private sector would support and advise the Ministers.