From David Rotherham.
IF ever a picture painted a thousand words, it was the photo and overlaid chart illustrating your article on the proposed Jersey Development Company (JEP, 3 September).

The Waterfront Enterprise Board has been one of the worst blunders in Jersey’s entire history, judged on the quality of their past achievements and current plans. And yet, our ministers now want to roll the failure out across all public property.

Fortunately, they have published that chart, showing how it is intended to ‘work’. The ugly landscape forming the background to the chart is an apposite reminder of how low the bar is for commercial development in Jersey.

However, the real meat is in the arrows joining, or failing to join the boxes in the chart. If one troubles to track through the links, the Jersey Development Company will be quite insulated from the control of the States as a parliamentary body, and even from the Planning and Environment Minister, ex-officio.

Instead, it will report to a mere sub-group of the Council of Ministers, with the only other input being from a quango, Jersey Property Holdings, and a Civil Service department, Planning and Environment.

This elimination of democratic process from the constraints under which the JDC would operate, would undoubtedly improve its own internal efficiency. The problem is that it would be severely counter-productive to managing public assets in the public interest.
I call on all States Members, or at least those who do not fancy themselves as members of the steering group, to vote down this sinister plan.

The deep problems in the global economy make it unlikely that much of the nominal asset value could be realised by stripping them in the short term, anyway, so there is plenty of time to produce a more soundly conceived plan for administering our public portfolio.