EXPRESS OPINION: the political 'two-step' at Overdale

Monday 01 March 2021

There are some who will react to the recent stories about what’s NOT going to be in the new Overdale hospital, or the fact that the plans include a site of potential archaeological importance, with a satisfied, “I told you so.”

Others will have exactly the opposite reaction. These people are in the “just get it done” lobby, and for them, anything other than a news story describing the new hospital’s actual opening will drive them to distraction.

Increasingly in public discourse we are driven to the extremes of an argument, which is a cartoon-like place of binary opposites: right/wrong, black/white.  

Certainly, the island’s politicians have been herded into this pen, where they are either ‘for’ the Overdale hospital, or ‘against’ it – and the simple act of questioning it is conflated with somehow being culpable for perpetuating the manifest failings of the current building. 

Pictured: some of the diagrams for Overdale published to date. 

Just because that current building is increasingly becoming not-fit-for-purpose, it doesn’t mean that anything to do with its replacement should be agreed without very robust scrutiny – to do otherwise is just an exercise in opinion management. 

Ultimately, the island is hurtling towards a bill of around £800m – we don’t yet know how that will be paid, but it will certainly land on the island’s doormat at a time of tighter budgets, more borrowing and lower confidence.  

The battle over ‘where’ has now finished - it has been replaced by scrutiny of ‘what’: will it be an ‘all-under-one-roof’ General Hospital as we have been repeatedly told?

Or will the services which are clearly missing from the Functional Brief be delivered “in the community” instead?”  

And scrutiny of ‘how’: will the new building sit directly across Westmount Road, as new diagrams seem to suggest? Will the ‘Knowledge Centre’ - ironically - be built on part of a field which has been confirmed to be of "potential archaeological significance."

Pictured: the land which the government said might have to be bought via compulsory purchase, if necessary. 

States Members have so far given their backing to this scheme based on diagrams which wouldn’t have been out of place in a Kindergarten. They have been told that the detail will all be worked out through the planning process. 

Such is the political two-step which has been danced for decades, delivering all of the major developments you see around you: at the ‘principle’ stage, detail isn’t important. And at the detail stage, you need to just say “yes” as you’ve already agreed the principle, and any delay is clearly a sign of inefficient incompetence (this second stage is delivered along with chuntering about how long everything takes to get done, how the Jersey system is dysfunctional, and how there are so many ‘wreckers’ around these days!)

Jersey is a delicate web, and detail matters. Nuance is important. Despite the frequent protestations of global prowess, the island is still essentially a small-community; instinctively, we like that. Local knowledge is a point of reference, a sense of belonging. Often painted negatively as parochial, it can actually be particularly powerful. 

So, yes. Plonking an £800m development on a historic hill overlooking St. Helier, at a time of widespread money worries, building a new highway through a long-standing sports facility and some people’s homes, and not mentioning (so far) the very close proximity of a potentially important archaeological site, is rightly going to cause relentless scrutiny. 

That scrutiny is becoming ever harder to deliver in Jersey – but it is also becoming ever more important.  

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IN-DEPTH: What services will and won't be in the new hospital?