£250k States CEO working without agreed job criteria

Tuesday 28 August 2018

The States’ new CEO responsible for spearheading Jersey’s largest ever reform of the public sector is working without any agreed job criteria, Express has learned.

Charlie Parker was handed full residency rights as he was appointed to the £250,000 role in July 2017. He began ‘transitioning’ in autumn, before officially starting work this January.

Tasked with making the civil service more efficient and work closer together, Mr Parker has so far created of new departments, warned of staff “casualties”, appointed a string of top-tier ‘Director Generals’, announced a new States HQ, and agreed a £2million contract with EY to change the States’ “outdated” management of the public purse. 

Pictured: The former RBC building has been announced as the new States headquarters.

But in all that time, it has emerged that Mr Parker has been working without a set of ‘key performance indicators’ (KPIs) – an agreed set of standards against which his performance can be measured.

Those benchmarks are usually set by the States Assembly, but it appears that the previous administration led by former Chief Minister Senator Ian Gorst never finalised these in the 10 months between Mr Parker’s appointment and the election.

The new States Assembly is also yet to agree what ‘success’ would look like following Mr Parker’s radical ‘One Government’ overhaul of the public sector. However, a States spokesperson told Express that these would soon be defined and approved with the help of an “independent assessor.” They have not yet been selected.

The revelation adds another layer of confusion over Mr Parker’s employment terms after States officials refused to provide his contract following a request by Express under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Law.

Express asked for Mr Parker’s KPIs after this refusal, and received the following response: “The Chief Executive’s KPIs under the new government will be finalised in discussion with the Chief Minister and an independent assessor, who is yet to be appointed. 

“In the meantime, he is working to deliver the plans for public sector reform that he set out earlier this year, which were agreed by the previous government, and on which he has already submitted a six-monthly performance report to Ministers and States Members.” 

However, it was only after further clarification was demanded that a spokesperson admitted that “no KPIs had been agreed for the CEO by the previous government” in over a year since his appointment was first announced.

So far, the only checks on Mr Parker’s progress have been a six-month progress report written by the CEO himself in which he complained of being forced to take on lower level tasks than he had expected due to “longstanding weaknesses” in the way the public sector is run, and the Scrutiny process.

During a Scrutiny hearing before a panel of States Members last month, Mr Parker was challenged on the savings his government plans would makeamid questioning over the number of highly-paid consultants and Director Generals appointed from outside of the island. He declined to provide an exact figure, but stated: “What I can say is that it’s not in the millions, but in the tens of millions.”