UNLESS you happen to be a property developer, a bureaucrat or a member of the Council of Ministers, it is likely that you will have noticed that Jersey is already an overcrowded place.

Relentless economic expansion over the past half-century or so, combined with longer lives, has created a huge increase in the size of the Island’s population, with inevitable consequences for its infrastructure, environment, quality of life and sense of identity.

Now the States are to be asked, in effect, to sanction another major influx of workers in order to produce more tax revenues and so plug the gap created by their own fiscal and economic policies.

The vehicle for this week’s major debate is the wide-ranging States Strategic Plan for 2009 to 2014, covering everything from health and housing to social inclusion and safer streets, but there is no doubt that its crux is the Council of Ministers’ desire to use continued population growth to sustain public finances until the passing of the post-war baby boom generation.

In putting forward this unwelcome option as the only way to balance the books, Chief Minister Terry Le Sueur slipped in the suggestion that Jersey could cope with 100,000 residents, which is something like 8,000 more than the current estimate. It is a suggestion which should not be allowed to harden into policy, either deliberately or by default.

Jersey’s challenges are not purely financial and they will not be solved by merely cranking up the workforce. Simple logic suggests, in fact, that the problems of an ageing population will eventually be compounded by allowing it also to become a significantly larger population, quite apart from the additional stresses imposed in the intervening years.

The line has to be drawn somewhere and this week’s debate is an opportunity for States Members to demonstrate their willingness both to reflect public opinion and to demand a more imaginative range of solutions to the age-old question of how a geographically tiny place like this can continue to prosper without destroying its character.

It may be true to say, as the Council of Ministers have done, that no precise ceiling can be placed on a process so subject to the vagaries of birth, death and business, but there is no reason why the States cannot agree a ‘line in the sand’ figure beyond which the total should not be allowed to go.

Targets, a familiar concept in any private organisation, are simply that and their achievement can rarely be guaranteed. However, if the States this week allow a population of 100,000 to be contemplated, however vaguely, there is little doubt that it will come to pass, with more or less unpleasant results for all of us.