AH well. Another day – another Strategic Plan. There was a time when the States used to make do with the occasional report about the direction in which the Island was heading.

On a few occasions they even came out with a policy document or two, but generally this was too much trouble for most States departments. Now we’re inundated with reports and plans.

That’s not a problem, if you believe that you can’t get too much of a good thing. But I fear that there’s a danger of getting planning confused with action.

The current Strategic Plan, which is now out for public consultation, aims to bring together all the various strands of public policy, the many challenges facing the Island and the solutions for tackling those problems.
It does a good job in that respect, but I wonder how many people are going to bother to read it or comment upon it.

The difficulty is that it covers too much ground and it is too broad in scope. It tries to do too many things, and where important issues are identified, they are often hidden in meaningless platitudes. For example:
The overall aim is ‘working together to meet the needs of the community’. Well now there’s a surprise.

This laudable aim will be achieved by ‘allowing everyone the opportunity to reach their full potential, by meeting our health, housing and education challenges, preparing for the ageing society, preserving the countryside and protecting our environment, and creating a responsive government that provides good and efficient services and sound infrastructure’. Does anyone disagree with that? No, I thought not, so it’s as good as done.

Similar woolly aspirations have been contained in other Strategic Plans, so I think we can accept that they are a ‘given’.

Unfortunately it doesn’t get us much closer to how we are going to achieve this nirvana. There is indeed much more detail in the plan, but it is not presented in a way which makes the choices obvious so it’s not likely to elicit much public debate.

It’s almost as though the writers of the report were trying to put together a technical manual on the problems facing the Island, as opposed to an invitation for a lively debate. Perhaps they don’t want a lively debate.

Of course, things are even more confused this year because we’ve got the small matter of a recession to tackle. So that has got to be woven into the report. Further confusion is caused by adding to the plan an important commentary on the impact of an ageing population. Of course it’s impossible to entirely separate these issues, and they are all important and need consideration. But by throwing them all into the same pot, all you get is confusion and lack of focus.

This approach simply does not engage the public in a meaningful way. Everyone will be able to take what they want out of it and what comments there are from the public are likely to be extremely diverse and pretty meaningless. They will be meaningless because there is no way of knowing whether the comment is because the respondent has picked something out as the most important aspect of the whole plan, or whether it just suits his particular interest or agenda. At worse, it could give a totally distorted view of ‘public opinion’ about some important issues where the vast majority of people will remain silent.

On the other hand, it’s probably just as well if there is not a good response from the public. A lot of different views on numerous highly contentious issues and how they all interact with each other, could be more than the planners can handle in a short time frame.

Which presents another problem. What’s the rush? I know the law says the new Council of Ministers has to prepare a Strategic Plan by the beginning of April. But why? How can you expect a new Council to put together a comprehensive report on the priorities for the whole community in not much more than three months while at the same time trying to run the Island?

It’s true that many of the issues identified as priorities will be very familiar to many members of the council. But there are other members who are new to the job and know nothing about the issues they are now expected to lead on. Not only that but they have to decide on their priorities for the short, medium and long term all in a few months. Let’s just hope that the public consultation process doesn’t result in a member of the public coming up with such a good idea that the priorities have to be thrown out of the window and the strategic plan misses the April deadline.

It seems to me that the strategic planning process has become confused. The Council of Ministers and the States can put together whatever planning system that suits them. But they can’t also expect to involve the public at the same time.

To do that you need to clearly identify the issues, set out the policy options and give the public time to discuss them and make their comments.

Obvious implications for other policy areas should also be spelt out, but the debate should be as targeted as possible on one broad issue. It might even be better to do this before States members get involved.

The way we are trying to do it now could just be a waste of time. All the major issues identified in the proposed plan will eventually have to be debated at length in any case, so what’s the point in trying to quickly cobble together an overall plan.

Also a rushed Strategic Plan where there has not been effective public consultation, will not be very robust. Jersey States Members already have a particular penchant for changing their minds. They don’t need a further excuse.
Peter Body is editor of Business Brief magazine