AI has been used to compare manifesto promises made by each Deputy with the votes they have cast since we elected them.
Bridgehead Communications has created the ‘Guernsey Deputy Scorecard‘, describing it as “a free public site that sets every manifesto promise from the 2025 election against every recorded vote of this States term, deputy by deputy”.
The firm’s Founder and Managing Director, Guernseyman Will Walter, says two of them have already broken their manifesto promises on GST, with that topic returning to the States at the end of next month.
Mr Walter said he has created the AI-led scorecard system to answer questions that he and other people have.
“The most revealing thing we found is not who broke a promise. It is how few promises were written in a way that could be broken at all,” he explained.
“Twelve deputies campaigned against GST and three of them wrote something a vote can test. Read together, those manifestos were a masterclass in saying just enough to be heard as anti-GST while committing to almost nothing.
“I am not accusing anyone of setting out to deceive. But the effect on a voter reading that booklet at the kitchen table is the same either way: you come away believing you have a promise, and you do not.
“That is not a scandal. It is something worse. It is normal, and until now it was invisible.”
Mr Walter said his AI platform works best when measuring a Deputy’s performance against their words, if the manifesto pledge was written “plainly”.
37 deputies were elected in June 2025, with another elected in the April by-election earlier this year.
They, alongside two members of the States of Alderney, get to decide everything that affects our lives from how old you have to be to get your nose pierced to the amount of money spent on health, education, and policing each year.
Mr Walter said those decisions and every other one made by our government need to be tested, and open to scrutiny.
“Nobody is paying for this and nobody commissioned it,” he said.
“I grew up in Guernsey and this is the kind of thing an island of 64,000 people should already have.”
The Guernsey Deputy Scorecard also includes data on how many meetings each Deputy has attended and what they’ve said during each parliamentary session, as well as whether they have taken a ‘side’ in a debate.
“None of that is really the headline, though,” Mr Walter added.
“Attendance and manifesto wording get the attention, but they are not what I built this to settle. The two things that will actually decide whether this island has a future are whether the economy grows and whether anyone can afford to live in it, and both are where I want scrutiny to land next.
“On growth: real GDP has grown by well under 1% a year on average since 2013, and in 2023 it fell in real terms even as the headline figure rose. Match Jersey’s pace that single year and Guernsey produces roughly £683m more. On housing: deputies made 153 manifesto promises on it between them, and only 60 have ever met a recorded vote that could test them. The other 93 have simply never come up. A promise nobody has been made to vote on is not a broken promise, but it is not a kept one either. It is just unaccounted for, and on the two questions that matter most, most of what was promised still is.”
