Comment: over to you, Chief Minister!

Monday 18 June 2018

Jersey’s new Ministers have four years to deliver on their promises - but with much to achieve, what comes first?

Here, Express columnist, and former States Advisor, Kevin Keen sets an agenda for them.

“With only 4 years to go until the next election, our Council of Ministers clearly has lots of work to do. It would be great to see our new leaders solve some long standing problems early; here are some ideas.

1. Electoral reform - often promised but still not delivered - is essential for more engagement from the public, and a fairer system. As we know it will take a while, so if I was the Chief Minister I would set a deadline of June 2019 for the debate, and some final decisions supported by referendum in Autumn 2019 if necessary.

2. Population & demographic change is clearly a key issue for Jersey. What we need now is proper consultation with the community setting out the challenges and options available. The deadline for completing the consultation should be by the end of this year with a debate and decision on future policy early in 2019.

Pictured: population policy should be an urgent issue for the new Council.

3. The hospital has to go somewhere and it needs to be the right place so lets get that decision made. For what it is worth I would have favoured building a new hospital on Parade Gardens extinguishing the beginning of Gloucester Street that splits the site if necessary. The existing hospital buildings could be demolished and turned into public space when the project was finished. A decision before Christmas (2018!) must be made.

Pictured: Future plans for Jersey‘s £466million hospital.

4. About 20 years ago a colleague of mine said that if you stacked up all the reports about the future of Fort Regent you could reach the moon. That may have been an exaggeration (at the time!) but one thing is for sure we have been talking about what to do with Fort Regent for far too long. Come on Chief Minister let’s crack this problem finally, including identifying a funding stream to actually make that happen. You must have all the reports and consultation you need to be able to make some proposals in the next year.

Pictured: The future of the Fort has been in question for years.

5. A University for Jersey which allowed our students to study here, and young people from elsewhere to live in the Island whilst studying, could offer so many opportunities for Jersey. We probably have the buildings (or at least some potential sites) and an idea of the sort of degrees we might specialise in; what we need is some focus to get a feasibility study & some proposals completed before the end of the current term.

A newly reformed public sector that is, finally, better, simpler and cheaper will help these and other projects get done, but we still need to find the money for projects like Fort Regent and a University.

I would take a good look at our balance sheet and consider selling some assets including all or part of companies like JT, Jersey Electricity, Jersey Post and Jersey Water, maybe even using the Channel Island Stock Exchange so that the public could continue owning a share of these companies if they wanted to.”