SUNDAY mornings are a fairly quiet time in our household. But not last Sunday. The air was blue because I was listening to the Treasury Minister on the radio.

Now I have a great deal of respect for the minister. He’s one of the brightest, most hard working and forward thinking States members we’ve had for a long time. But on Sunday he was talking twaddle. And pretty dangerous twaddle at that.

In an attempt to wheedle out of any responsibility for the deeply unpopular Business Plan cuts, he blamed managers, not ministers and certainly not the Council of Ministers, for the uproar. It was managers who had put forward cuts that they knew would be the most unpalatable, he said, so that they wouldn’t be accepted, and they could carry on as before.

That’s not only illogical, it’s a slur on the integrity of managers of States departments.

It had crossed my mind that it was the Council of Ministers who had decided to put forward extreme cost-cutting measures in an attempt to soften-up the public for more taxes. But I rejected that because not even States Members can be that devious. But to suggest that department chiefs are playing that game is even more far-fetched.

Now I’m sure that there are good managers and bad managers, but what I can’t accept is that there are a lot of reckless managers. But according to the Treasury Minister some of them (indeed quite a few of them if you look at the extent of the proposals) are prepared to take the risk of saying they could get by without services that they really want to keep. Doesn’t the minister know that the vast majority of public servants are in their job because they want to help the public (there’s a hint in the title)?

There are not many who would be prepared to play Russian roulette with the services that the recent fuss shows are valued by their users.  They were forced to make cuts, and who forced them? Well it was the Treasury Minister and his colleagues on the Council of Ministers.

The more you think about it, the more illogical the stance of the Treasury Minister becomes. According to him the unpalatable cuts were proposed in the certain knowledge that the public wouldn’t accept them. So what happens now? Cuts have still got to be made – the Council of Ministers insists on it. So the ministers have to go back to the managers who have to look for different cuts in the hope they won’t be so unpalatable, if that’s even possible. So whatever happens services will be reduced or lost because the Council of Ministers says we can’t afford them.

That’s a perfectly reasonable stance for the council to take, but they can’t then go back and complain that they didn’t mean THOSE cuts; and that there really must be an alternative.

Of course the Treasury Minister goes on a lot about efficiencies, and confuses that with cuts when it suits his argument. What was proposed in the Business Plan and where some ministers are now feverishly back-tracking, was substantial cuts.

It might only be 0.8% of budgets, but when your budget is already cut to the bone, that’s substantial. So the Council of Ministers weren’t asking for more efficiencies; they were demanding cuts.

In any case there wouldn’t have been any time to put efficiencies in place. The Treasury Minister obviously forgets that the Council of Ministers ordered the additional cuts at very short notice, just so that they could meet their self-imposed deadlines for the Budget. Otherwise there might have been some red ink in the Budget and we can’t have that can we?

If departmental managers did make mistakes, it was due to the unreasonable demands of the Council of Ministers and their budgetary panic. If the council wanted to prune or even get rid of services altogether, they should have allowed time to consult with staff and users.

Naturally for a Treasury Minister, most of his comments on the radio centred around the biggest spending department, Health and Social Services. He had some kind words to say about the level of care, but expressed surprise that in some areas the standard of facilities had fallen behind. Hasn’t anybody told him that budgets have been squeezed for several years?

However he obviously believes that like all other departments, Health can become more efficient. But then I don’t know of anyone who has ever disagreed with that.

But of course health is a tricky area because the bean counters are not just dealing with figures on a balance sheet; they are dealing with patients, their health and their quality of life. So what in the context of health does the Minister mean by service efficiencies? Is it doing more with less money, which I assume is what he means, or is it doing more with more money?

Everyone knows that you can pour never-ending sums of money into health care, and the result could well be improved efficiency. In other words the department is more efficient because it is curing more patients and prolonging their lives. But that would be horrendously expensive and apparently we can’t afford that.

All we can do is provide the best health care we can with the money we can afford, which is what I thought we were trying to do all along. The Treasury Minister, however, rather pointedly said that Jersey’s spending on health care per capita was higher than many other places.

I assume he’s talking about Mali and the Congo, because as far as I can tell, spending in Jersey is not out of line with the rest of the OECD. Indeed it’s much less than France which spends the most and consequently has what many consider to be the world’s best health care system. I guess Jersey with the second highest GNP per capita in the world can’t really aspire to those lofty heights.

But this is a rather crude benchmark because you might expect a small jurisdiction to spend more per capita than a big one. Indeed it might be useful to know what comparable jurisdictions are spending, but it looks like we’ve scrapped the expensive benchmarking exercise we introduced with great fanfare in 2002. But higher spending per capita doesn’t necessarily mean inefficiency. It might just mean that we give it higher priority, and that’s for the Council of Ministers to decide. I just wish they would get on and do it.

Peter Body is editor of Business Brief magazine.