Crowcroft seeks “right-hand"

Tuesday 19 June 2018

If you’ve a tight handle on purse strings, can keep paperwork in order, and have few ideas up your sleeve on how to make Jersey’s ‘capital’ a thriving cosmopolitan zone, then you could be the just the right fit as the Constable’s “right-hand.”

Constable Simon Crowcroft is looking for an islander to help fight cut costs, fight administrative battles and drive new initiatives forward in the role of Chief Executive of St. Helier, while he takes the political stage.

The parish previously had a Chief Executive, but the role was slashed alongside around 15 other posts when Constable Crowcroft was first voted in as part of “drastic”, but money-saving cuts to management.

Since then, the Constable says he has “effectively been doing the job myself for 15 years – that is, I’ve been the executive leader of the parish at the same time as the political head.” 

While he said that might be easier in country parishes, the task becomes a little more difficult to achieve when it comes to a town with a turnover in excess of £15million annually and a workforce of more than 250 people.

Pictured: The St. Helier Town Hall. (Google Maps)

Since taking the lead, Constable Crowcroft said he enjoyed the praise of parish ratepayers for his own initiatives to cut costs and keep rates stable, which they have now been for four years, but now he wants to see someone push that even further.

Speaking on the day the role was first advertised last week, he told Express: “When we had rates assemblies, I would always announce I had performed the function of an unpaid Chief Executive, and when we got to £1million in savings, there was applause at the rates assembly that I’d saved a million pounds. But I think the question that was never asked was, ‘How much more can St. Helier get if it has an appropriately qualified civil servant doing the administration rather than as I do dividing my time between politics and administration?’ So I’m optimistic that the parish is going to continue to prosper and that this new role is going to make it more efficient and provide better services.”

Those better services, he said, will hopefully include providing garden waste collection in future, better training and development opportunities for staff, making the parish more ‘digital’, bringing back glass collection and maybe even bringing parish rates down.

So who is he looking for? “I think someone with administrative ability – that could be anybody who has worked for a reasonably large workforce. Innovation and ability to manage change is important, and someone customer-focused.”

Once recruited, he’ll have time to push forward with political challenges he has set himself for this coming term. 

“Although I won the long battle to get the States to pay rates last year, there are still some quite significant political battles that have to be fought – in particular, getting the States to compensate St. Helier for the fact that we’re the capital of the island and we spend more than £1million a year providing services which in the other parishes are paid for by taxation. Things like parks and gardens, public toilets, litter collection and so on – these are all services that ought to be paid for by the taxpayer, rather than the ratepayer.” 

While he’s conscious the Chief Executive role has echoings of the States’ recent senior management restructure, the Constable says that there’s one thing he won’t be copying: “I’m committed to not taking on communications staff – I don’t think we need to follow the States into recruitment of spin doctors.” 

“The time has come to get a right-hand person to take St. Helier forward.”