Jersey’s government has once again been told off for neglecting the multi-billion-pound property portfolio it owns on behalf of islanders – with a new watchdog report calling out years of underfunding, poor planning and missed opportunities.
Express takes a look at the numbers in the Comptroller and Auditor General’s latest review…
The key stats at a glance:
The States of Jersey property estate comprises 867 sites, including 597 infrastructure assets such as car parks and fields as well as 270 “operational” buildings and land.
Educational and healthcare facilities take up the largest chunks of the public estate (as shown in the graph below).
Land and buildings documented in the States of Jersey Group Accounts totalled £4.4 billion at the end of last year, excluding buildings under construction.
The figure includes social housing managed by Andium Homes, valued at over £1 billion.
A full condition survey was completed in 2023, with as many as one in four properties (26% of the estate) categorised as “fair or poor”.
A third (34%) of the estate was categorised as “good or excellent”, while 40% was “good and fair”.
“Fragmented” estate management
The report also called out failure to invest in maintenance.
It said that investment “in recent years has been at levels below recommended benchmarks”.
C&AG Lynn Pamment also found that “much is still to be done” to deliver a long-term public estate strategy that was produced in 2021, and that a “corporate Landlord model” outlined at the time Jersey Property Holdings was established in 2005 had not been “universally embraced across all departments”.
She described the government’s approach to estate management as “fragmented” and also noted that rental income from properties managed by Jersey Property Holdings was “inconsistent”.
Explaining that there was “no policy framework” to support decisions on rental charges, she revealed that there is a current lack of leases for tenants in the Central Market, pending a ministerial decision.
“The failure to develop and fully implement a strategic approach to property management is a concern which is likely to have had an impact across the States in both financial and non-financial terms which are impossible to assess,” Ms Pamment said.
“A vision and strategy are now in place but much remains to be done to deliver the cultural and other changes required to enable the States to demonstrate that their approach is strategic and aligned across the States of Jersey Group.”
While she noted that “steps have been taken to quantify the maintenance backlog”, Ms Pamment added that: “Investment will need to be at an appropriate level to maintain the estate and reduce the backlog.
“In time, this may be expected to reduce reactive maintenance expenditure and improve value for money.”
Her comments come not long after Infrastructure Minister Andy Jehan defended plans for a full closure of Fort Regent in order to enable a major redevelopment of the ageing site to go ahead.
The Minister highlighted the structure’s “fragile” electrical system and contended that a shuttering of the facility “could be mandated on any day due to critical infrastructure failure”.
The full C&AG report can be found here.