Policy Council Co-ordination

I made the following speech in relation to the Policy Council’s report on co-ordination of work at the September 2014 States meeting.

 

Sir, I read this report and I have to say it left me scratching my head somewhat.

We hear that PC are

a. blaming the fact that there is no GSP for the reason they have a lot of work to do at once and

b. wanting more resources to deal with it.

 

Well, I find this rather puzzling at a number of levels.

  1. Why, would a Plan make any difference? What is stopping PC from prioritising its workload and advising the States the reason behind this? Getting approval as a consequence?
  2. Members will know that C&E has a number of areas of legislation related  to employee rights that require development. There are 7 in fact from the Industrial Disputes, disability and inclusion, maternity and paternity, age discrimination, racial discrimination, statutory rights to redundancy pay and statutpry rights to paid leave. But, we like PC have limited staff to undertake them. We have therefore prioritised this work.
  3. I am also concerned that, should all this work be done at once, who is going to implement them all at once? If PC get more staff, will the Departments?

I would question whether everything does need to be carried out all at once, and where policies and plans overlap various Departments, which invariably they do, can they be, or should they be?

  1. Finally, I would like to ask the Chief Minister how the creation of new posts will impact on FTP savings banked to date in terms of posts saved and vacancies now filled?

 

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