‘To spend, or not to spend?’ that is the question.
With a new set of tax reforms on the table, many Guernsey taxpayers are questioning whether the States should control its spending rather than raising more money through tax.
But what does the States spend your money on – and how has this changed over the last two decades?
Express decided to dive into 20 years of States accounts to see what we could discover.
Note: Changes in accounting practices over the period make direct comparisons difficult (see ‘Moving goalposts’). We have taken every care to ensure these figures accurately reflect long-term spending trends, though accounting variations across the two decades may exist without altering the core findings.
Health growing vs Education
One of the biggest patterns since the States started publishing its accounts online is the relative amount we spend on Healthcare compared to Education.
Back in 2006, Guernsey spent about 20% of its budget on Education (£51.2m) and just over 28% on Healthcare (£71.1m).
Fast forward two decades and both figures – unsurprisingly – have grown a lot in absolute terms.
However, the percentages tell a very different story.
Healthcare has grown substantially, swallowing nearly 40% of the States’ core budget.
Meanwhile, Education has steadily drifted down to under 15%.
While it is tempting to blame this shift on recent pandemic pressures, the data reveals a longer-term trend.
This divergence has been quietly building for two decades, as an aging population and escalating medical costs have systematically squeezed education’s share of the taxpayer pie year after year.
It’s also worth noting that the States’ accounting rules changed multiple times throughout the last 20 years, including moving much of Social Security spending into the Health budget after 2023. (See ‘Moving Goalposts’, below)
A growing civil service
It isn’t just Healthcare budgets that have risen.
Over the last two decades, one category has grown quietly but substantially: Corporate and Governance.
Back in 2006, the administrative machinery required to run the States of Guernsey cost £22.32m – representing 10.2% of its core budget.
By 2025, that figure had climbed to £111.67m – about five times as much – representing 17.4% of all core taxpayer money.
We now spend more money on it than on Education – by more than £17m.
Similarly, the number of States employees costing at least £100,000 a year is six times higher than it was a decade ago.
Note: Figures show total cost of employment, not salaries. Before 2016, the States tracked a lower £70k threshold, so the modern trend is clearest over the last decade.
At first glance, this data appears to validate the classic taxpayer grievance of a bloated civil service.
However, a deeper dive into the financial notes reveals a more complex reality.
Firstly, the jump in 2023 might look like a sudden explosion in hiring of highly-paid public servants.
However, it was actually mostly down to a large number of frontline workers – including senior nurses, doctors, and teachers – tipping over the £100k threshold all at once due to a wave of backdated pay awards and extra overtime used to cover local staff shortages.
Over the 20-year run, Corporate and Governance has also had to absorb massive, island-wide structural demands.
It covers the immense cost of modernising Guernsey’s aging IT infrastructure, funding critical post-Brexit legal and compliance frameworks, and navigating the multi-million-pound multi-year transition to international corporate accounting standards like IPSAS.
The data demonstrates that the baseline cost of simply keeping a modern, internationally compliant island jurisdiction functioning has transformed over the past two decades.
Whether that money represents administrative waste or the necessary price of 21st Century professionalism remains one of the most important questions for the ongoing tax debate.
Relocation costs
One area we wanted to look at was the amount Guernsey spends on relocation grants and subsidies for key workers moving to the island.
It’s a political hot topic, with many people arguing that the subsidies are both unfair to people from the island and skewing the housing market – something that Housing Minister Deputy Steve Williams has previously admitted is the case.
But how much are we actually spending?
Note: 2025 figures not published yet.
Before 2018, when the States overhauled its approach to people moving to the island, relocation expenses were handled and tracked by each department, so we didn’t have a centralised view of how much was being spent.
Between 2018 and 2022, spending mostly hovered between £1.4m and £1.7m, with an isolated spike to £2.4m in 2019.
However, this has since risen to nearly £5m, which reflects increased recruitment as well as higher rents, because of the island’s housing crisis.
While the increase will be worrying for many – and doesn’t factor in the inflationary effect the subsidy is having on private rents – it’s still less than 1% of the States’ overall budget.
Moving goalposts
Understanding a set of accounts for an entire island can be tricky at the best of times.
That becomes even harder when those accounts keep changing.
Over the 20 years the States has published its accounts online, it has continuously altered either the accounting rules or the physical layout – making comparing one year to the next incredibly difficult.
In fact, no two years were perfectly identical in format, and a direct year-on-year comparison was structurally broken nearly two-thirds of the time (63.2%).
These changes ranged from splitting the accounts out into entirely separate documents, to introducing Zero-10, setting up the States Trading Supervisory Board (STSB) to oversee commercial utilities like Guernsey Water and Guernsey Ports, or completely decoupling the States’ multi-million-pound pension system from core taxpayer spending.
This makes it difficult to track like-for-like data over time – such as the rise in Welfare spending.
When the figures started in 2006, Welfare was wrapped up with States Pensions (costing a combined £61.58m), but this changed in 2018 to become Welfare only (rising £92.84m in 2025) with Pensions being taken off the main ledger – a clear increase but not an “apples with apples” comparison.
This shifting framework also helps explain some things in the data that look unusual.
To a casual observer, it looks like the Environment and Transport budget plummeted off a cliff in 2016, or that Social Security spending suddenly spiked by tens of millions in a single year.
In reality, services weren’t being cut dramatically; the States had simply moved those massive operations off the core taxpayer ledger – transferring Ports and Water works to the STSB, and routing ring-fenced medical grants directly into the Healthcare budget.
Overall spending
So, given that several major sources of spending have been moved off the core accounts, does this mean spending has actually risen more than the graph above would indicate?
In a word, yes.
If we were still using the ‘all-in-one-pot’ accounting model from 2006, Guernsey’s annual public sector expenditure wouldn’t be the £641.64m recorded today – it would be closer to £750m or more.
The States did not radically shrink the scope of government; it moved things like commercial utilities and pension liabilities off its main balance sheet.
Sticking to budget
One interesting thing the accounts show is how often the States spends more than it budgeted for – by quite a lot.
Since 2017 the States has only come in under budget once overall.
During this time, it spent £105m more than it originally planned.
The biggest overspend was in 2023, when the States went over its budget by more than £19m.
Of the top five departmental overspends in the last 20 years, four were on Healthcare and two were from last year – Corporate & Governance (£8.9m) and Healthcare (£8.2m).
- 2013 Healthcare – £13.4m
- 2025 Corporate & Governance – £8.9m
- 2025 Healthcare – £8.2m
- 2015 Healthcare – £7.2m
- 2024 Healthcare – £7.2m
In the last 20 years, there were two years where no departments underspent – but not a single year where no departments overspent.
On average, the States spent £2,246,250 more per year than it had budget for.
The bottom line
So, where does this leave the debate over Guernsey’s tax reforms?
The data demonstrates that over two decades, core government spending has more than doubled, climbing from £254.42m in 2006 to over £641.64m today.
And don’t forget, if we were comparing “apples with apples”, the true figure could be nearly three times as much as in 2006.
Even after stripping away the shifted accounting goalposts, the public purse is expanding at an undeniable pace.
While a significant portion of this cash has been channeled into Healthcare and international compliance, it leaves taxpayers facing a fundamental question.
Is this significant rise an unavoidable reality of modern island life, or is it a clear sign of a government that needs to aggressively rein in its spending before demanding more money from taxpayers?
As the tax debate looms, the choice for Guernsey is clear: Spend less or tax more?
