P&R Plan "ended up being meaningless"

Monday 14 December 2020

The Policy & Resource Plan will be subsumed into the 'Revive and Thrive' Action Plan, as the Deputy Chief Minister said the long-term strategy had not fulfilled its purpose, eating up massive amounts of staff time and becoming "meaningless" along the way.

The much-vaunted plan, agreed by the States in 2016, plotted a course to make Guernsey one of the "happiest and healthiest places" in the world within 20 years.

It also promised greater accountability, better cross-committee working and was supposed to work in tandem with the Public Service Reform and the Medium Term Financial Plan. 

Some of its 23 proposals for the 2016-2020 term of government were achieved, with social welfare reform, disability strategy and lifelong learning among those progressed.

However, a States blighted by indecision and infighting made little to no progress in many key areas including education policy, air and sea links, long-term infrastructure investment, housing policy and the justice framework. 

Pictured: The P&R Plan was agreed in 2016 but the former States failed to make the anticipated progress on its far-reaching aims. 

Policy & Resources Vice-President Heidi Soulsby, who was the President of Health & Social Care last term, said the plan had clearly not achieved what it had set out to do. She says her committee's post-pandemic action plan will be more concise, more decisive and will combine long-term needs with short-term action.

"We are not looking to have a Policy & Resource Plan and a Revive and Thrive Plan – there are too many plans out there already," she told Express. 

"With the P&R Plan, you could shoehorn anything you wanted into it. It became so huge and it was all about strategy. All the strategies had resolutions attached to them and that is when government gets clogged up."

There are hundreds of extant States resolutions - a legacy of how many laws and policies have been sat on a shelf for years due to low prioritisation and finite resources.

"The P&R Plan drifted into something that ended up being meaningless and that took up huge amounts of staff time," said Deputy Soulsby. "No matter how much resources you put into it, it never would have been enough and it would have needed more. In the world we are now in, that has to be avoided. 

"We cannot do everything and we have to prioritise what needs to be done, rather than what everybody wants. 

Pictured: Deputy Soulsby said the P&R Plan was too high-level and too strategy-based to fulfil its aims. 

"There are hundreds of extant resolutions, laws that have been designated as ‘low priority’ for years, and we have to focus on what really matters. We have to be much more focussed than we have been.

"So we are bringing these together into one action plan. It won’t be perfect, as it is being drawn up in a short amount of time, but if we don’t do something now then we will have lost the moment. We want to focus on action."

In order to achieve that, Deputy Soulsby says the committee has sought to fulfil both sides of its mandate - the policy and the funding - at the earliest opportunity. She says that P&R has to help to break down silos and foster better cross-committee working. 

"We have already started going out and communicating with each of the committees. What I want to see us do is work collaboratively with them, rather than having P&R working as a scrutiny function.

"We need to give that support to committees at the start and throughout the policy-making process. I would expect to see a lot more joint policy letters this term between P&R and other committees."