Wednesday 22 January 2025
General Update
Sir,
I am pleased to have the opportunity to update the Assembly on the work of the Scrutiny Management Committee and to answer member's questions.
The majority of this update will concentrate on two areas: the structure of Scrutiny and the Agilisys Review. But first I will summarise the other areas of the Committee's work.
Our programme of live streamed public hearings continued throughout 2024. The SMC mandate requires the committee 'to promote and facilitate the participation in scrutiny of the widest possible range of States' members. On behalf of the SMC I would like to thank Deputies De Saumarez, Dudley-Owen, Kazantzeva-Miller, Soulsby, Oliver, Mathews, Gabriel, Roffey, St. Pier, Meerveld, Murray, Taylor, and Trott for sitting on Scrutiny panels during this term. Thanks must also go to Deputy Aldwell who took part as a witness for the Island Wide Voting review, and of course to all Committee members and officers who were subjected to the hearings. My Committee fully appreciates the considerable work and time commitment that being witnesses at a hearing involves and we thank them for their co-operation and engagement.
I would also like to take the opportunity in this my last update as Scrutiny President to thank the numerous members of our community who have assisted the Committee during this term for their professional insight and assistance, and in particular our elected Non-States members Grace Ruddy and Christa Feltham together with our former member John Whittle.
The Committee is currently finalising two further reviews: The first of these, led by Deputy Fairclough, focuses on the £3bn of financial assets invested by the States. The performance of these funds plays a significant role in the overall wellbeing of the public purse and, as a result, the management of these investments has been regularly reviewed by those charged with financial oversight responsibilities, including the previous Public Accounts Committee.
Given the importance and the impact attached to the management of public funds, the current Scrutiny Management Committee considered that it was essential to revisit this area to review the new governance arrangements that have been put in place.
The SMC is also reviewing Recruitment & Retention. An effective approach to recruitment and retention of staff is crucial in all parts of the public sector, not least in the areas of nursing, teaching and law enforcement, to provide consistent, robust and cost effective public services.
The review examines the processes and procedures currently used to recruit staff, ways of retaining them, as well as other potential innovations that might be considered to improve performance.
The Legislation Review Panel has continued under the chairmanship of Deputy Dyke. Last year saw a significantly increased workload, primarily due to MoneyVal. I would particularly like to thank our two local Advocates Simon Howitt & William Simpson, who sit as members of the LRP, for their very significant contribution.
At the beginning of 2022, the SMC introduced a Freedom of Information appeals process in accordance with a resolution of this assembly made in response to the SMC policy letter on the matter. This new service, which I am pleased to confirm was introduced within existing resources, provides the opportunity for members of the public to challenge government decisions not to release or supply specific information via requests made under the Freedom of Information Code.
This independent appeals process, which is led by suitably skilled and experienced panel members has introduced an additional check and balance on the transparency of government locally. For clarity the SMC Members are not involved in any decision making regarding appeals which are handled by the independent panel and supported by SMC officers.
The Committee will include a report from the members of the Freedom of Information Appeals Panel in their end of term report.
Scrutiny structure
Last October, I prepared a speech in response to a motion submitted by Deputy Gollop to debate the Scrutiny 2023 appendix report. That motion was withdrawn, but a section of that speech pertained to the structure of Scrutiny. It sought to explain how scrutiny is currently configured. It is clear, both generally and from recent proposals that have been placed before this Assembly that this isn't widely understood. In fact the lack of understanding runs so deep that a late draft of the report by the P&R subgroup on the Machinery of Government proposed changes to how Scrutiny should be structured that are already covered by its existing mandate.
No one understands more than Scrutiny members how difficult it is to be across all Committee mandates, so I welcome this opportunity to explain how and why parliamentary scrutiny is arranged in the way it is and why it was changed from the structure that existed prior to 2016.
The process of change essentially began in 2012 with the publication of the Independent Review into the Scrutiny Committees of the States of Guernsey (the Crowe Report). Subsequently, two policy letters were published, one in 2014 and one in 2015 by the States Review Committee. In these policy letters the broad recommendations of the Independent Scrutiny Review were taken forward into propositions, resulting in the arrangement we have today. Indeed, the propositions in the policy letter relating to the reorganisation of the parliamentary scrutiny functions were carried by an overwhelming majority of 40 members in favour with just two against.
One of the key advantages of the current system that has been in place since 2016 is its immense flexibility to draw freely on those both inside and outside of the States to sit on panels and undertake scrutiny work generally. My Committee has used this flexibility, with local experts joining various panels, hearings, and reviews. There is scope to take that still further and, crucially, the system already allows it to happen. All the various parts of the Scrutiny function are overseen by the SMC which has ultimate responsibility to this Assembly. As members will know, the SMC comprises three deputies and two non-States members chosen for their skills and elected by this Assembly. Unlike Non-States members on principal Committees, these two people are endorsed by the members of this Assembly and have voting rights, so have a direct bearing on the decisions of the Committee.
Much of the comment around scrutiny in the Assembly this term has been about the Public Accounts function. In 2020 the new SMC continued with the Financial Scrutiny Panel arrangement that the previous Committee had established for this purpose, using some States and non-States members of the SMC and various members drawn from the community with relevant experience of financial matters.
While this has worked satisfactorily, it has suffered from a lack of public visibility and in retrospect, I now think a better approach, which is perfectly within the gift of the SMC under the current system, would have been for the SMC to have appointed a member of this Assembly with significant relevant experience within the States to lead on financial scrutiny, together with persons drawn from outside of the States, an approach not hugely dissimilar to recent proposals in this Assembly. Additionally, in retrospect - and although this may seem a minor or semantic point, the designation given to this public accounts function by the last Committee of 'financial scrutiny panel' is less than ideal. In hindsight, it would have been much better for my Committee to have renamed it the Public Accounts panel at the outset, in the same way that at the beginning of this term, the SMC, through the States, renamed the Access to Public Information Code as the Freedom of Information Code, thus stating what it does, making it more visible, accessible and obvious.
But the really important point here is that a Public Accounts Function that is led by someone who is not a member of the SMC or not even a member of the States is perfectly possible under the current Scrutiny systemif that is the way the SMC wish to structure it. No requete, machinery of government review or revolution is needed for that to happen. Earlier this term, I considered proposing a return to the pre-2016 system, which led me to going back and spending many hours re-reading the Independent Scrutiny review, the policy letters and the relevant parts of Hansard. It is the indisputable case that the current system is orders of magnitude more flexible than what preceded it, and I am now of the firm view that any changes or reversion to the previous system would be an unnecessary and indeed, retrograde step.
Suggestions have, however, been floated to have no parliamentary involvement in scrutiny whatsoever and I need to push back strongly against that notion. Not only would such a system be cutting ourselves adrift from the established norms of almost every other parliamentary democracy, crucially, it would make the scrutiny function significantly less politically accountable. So, if anyone else in the dying days of this Assembly is considering proposing change, I'd urge them to come and talk to Committee, but before they do to read the 2012, 2015 and 2016 reports to gain a greater understanding of why we are where we are and what is possible. We are hugely guilty as a States of constantly wanting to break and remake things. In doing so we rarely, if ever, seem to go back and examine and learn in forensic detail what led to where we are now and why, or consider that evolution is often more productive, if significantly less newsworthy, than revolution.
Now to the Agilisys review.
This has been an extremely complex review to execute, and firstly I must take the opportunity to thank the volunteer panel members. They have brought invaluable knowledge and significant private sector expertise across a variety of information technology disciplines for their assistance to the Committee in this essential work.
Early last year we shared our preliminary recommendations with the Policy & Resources Committee, as we were acutely aware that they were actioning changes in the wake of the 2022 IT outages and the PWC review into those outages. We believed that it was vital those changes were made in the light of our preliminary findings, and that the delay in full publication would not mean that opportunities for significant improvement were lost.
There are myriad reasons why publication has taken as long as it has, but believe me when I say that no one has wanted to get this review off their desk more than I. Reasons for the delay include the difficulty of getting access to all the necessary people, especially at the same time, access to documentation, legal hurdles and problems, and a very complex fact checking process.
In order to release any report sooner it would have been possible to have simply published a summary report together with the recommendations. However, as the Committee will attest, I have been adamant throughout the process that the entire report must be put in the public domain and I am pleased to say that will take place on Monday.
Reviews are often conducted because things have gone wrong. And it is human nature to want to have someone or something to blame for failures. The review does not shy away from stating where we consider failures occurred. But from the outset the SMC was clear that the overriding objective of our review was to discover what had not worked and why. It was also important to use the information gained to set out a future path via the recommendations that can provide an optimal IT structure moving forward. It is essential that this structure, provides value for money and works for both those in the States and most importantly for the community we serve and we believe our review will contribute to that objective.
Sir, I thank members for their attention and will be happy to answer any questions.