IN the case of funds spent by government, Islanders could be forgiven for forming the impression that, as soon as tax revenue is paid into the exchequer, it becomes the personal property of the Council of Ministers.

This is not because ministers are guilty of misappropriation. It is because they are too often inclined to be very cagey indeed about where the cash is going.

A case in point concerns money spent on consultants’ reports and travel for politicians and civil servants over the past three years. The Jersey Evening Post recently made a request under the States Code of Practice on Public Access to Official Information for details of this spending. The application was refused on the grounds that it would cost too much to extract the required information and that it would also take until September to do so.

Had an individual rather than a newspaper sought the same information, the answer would without doubt have been the same. It is also probable that the individual, like the paper, would have been told that the search could be conducted if he or she were willing to foot the bill for the work.

This episode has demonstrated that the voluntary freedom of information code – which was formulated with the intention of making government activity more transparent to the public – is a poor substitute for the fully fledged law that has been promised but has consistently failed to materialise, and which ministers are now trying to drop from the agenda.

There are simply too many ways for politicians – in this instance Chief Minister Frank Walker – to stand in the way of openness by using exemptions or cost considerations to excuse non-compliance.

There is, meanwhile, a further dimension to the failure of the public sector to account publicly for spending on travel and consultants. It is evidence that the era of truly joined-up government is still a distant prospect.

Standard data held electronically by any well-run business would allow the immediate extraction of totals on a cost such as travel, but this is, it seems, not true of States accounts – for the simple reason that in spite of the greater governmental co-ordination that can now be claimed, fragmented figures and record-keeping at a departmental level are still very much the order of the day.