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"Disappointed doesn't cover it" - that's how Deputy David Mahoney felt when it was announced there'll be a delay in the publication of plans to cut public spending.
He had previously worked on those plans as Chair of 'The Reducing the Cost of Public Services Sub-Committee'.
Last week, the sub-committee published a Summary Report with the caveat that it won't be making any recommendations for actually making those savings before the end of this year.
Deputy Mahoney has previously stated publicly that the sub-committee had "all of its findings available" last December.
Now, he's questioning why it will take them a year from that point to have any proposals ready to publish.
"I can’t think of any valid reason why it would take a year to turn what we had in December into something ‘out there’ that would be reducing costs," he told Express.
"The cynical observer might say that no-one now wants to stand front and centre and push these cost cuts through as they are guaranteed to be very unpopular, and we have a lot of members that will not want that with an election now looming large."
Pictured: The Reducing the Cost of Public Services Sub-Committee - formerly chaired by Deputy David Mahoney (l) - has been working on plans for cutting our public spending for a year.
The sub-committee was set up early last year to find savings in public spending after the States failed to agree the introduction of new taxes, including GST, to cover the spiralling cost of funding public services.
Deputy Mahoney, as a member of Policy and Resources at the time, was installed as Chair of the sub-committee with four other members working with him to find ways of reducing the cost of public services.
When P&R lost a vote of no-confidence late last year, Deputy Heidi Soulsby returned to the senior committee and replaced Deputy Mahoney as Chair of the Reducing the Cost sub-committee.
Deputy Lyndon Trott was elected President of P&R in December, and in March this year - in response to a question from Deputy Mahoney about when the sub-committee's findings would be released - he announced that the majority of members of the public actually want to pay more tax rather than see public services cut.
Above: Deputy David Mahoney questioned Deputy Lyndon Trott about the progress of work to cut public spending during the March States debate.
The sub-committee gauged opinions of members of the public, public sector employees, and politicians through surveys - which combined received 1960 suggestions, submitted by 865 individual participants.
When analysed those suggestions actually comprised 2385 ideas as some of the comments contained multiple ideas.
All of those ideas have been split into different categories and broken down further, with the data published in the Summary Report released last week.
Some of the ideas suggested were considered to relate to work streams already in progress by different States departments so they were not analysed further. This included 505 comments relating to 'tax' and 143 around 'paid parking'.
Pictured: The ideas for saving money/cutting public spending were collated through surveys and then categorised as above.
Other suggestions around the airport, education, ageing well, and green energy were also disseminated to the relevant committees to include in their ongoing work in those areas.
New ideas were categorised as above and then explored further.
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