AS comforting as it is to know that our Chief Minister is ‘comfortable’ about the latest population figures, larger question marks have to be raised.

Although last year’s increase in population was relatively low compared to the previous three years, the 3,000 extra people who have bedded down here since 2006 are now taking their toll on the community as a whole.

Not least, the number of people being made redundant ‘on the quiet’ has not lessened over recent months, and with Jersey Post and States departments likely to be shedding jobs in the next few months, there will be increasing demand for employment but very few job vacancies to speak of, at every level.

Those who have moved to the Island relatively recently could conceivably move back to their homelands, but undoubtedly the advantages which attracted them here in the first place have not gone away.

Whereas during the recession of the early 1990s J-category workers simply went home, there is now the imminent prospect that they will soon have full residential qualifications with full purchase power, and a host of new properties to choose from.

In the meantime, children need places at nurseries and schools and Health’s waiting lists become ever longer. Three thousand more workers, plus their families, are bound to be making extra demands on all kinds of services, including rubbish collection and disposal, sewerage, road use (and there’s no need to spell that out), demand for water and electricity, calls on public administration, the police and prison, Social Security, doctors and dentists, opticians, the further education courses and so forth.

Of course, in forthcoming years this will have a knock-on effect all the way down the line, even to space for burials and the use of the crematorium.

What I find disturbing is the shameful way the States chose to conceal the increase in population by delaying a census for a further five years.

It is almost as diversionary as the tactic they have used to replace the previous Island Plan after only five years – precisely because the current one will not cope with the population bulge that the Housing and Economic Development departments have allowed to be created.

And it’s no good our head of statistics telling us that there are four people to the equivalent of every football pitch. That just goes to show how large are the properties occupied by the country folk, compared to those who live cheek by jowl on top of each other in apartment blocks.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, Mr Gibaut, but no one is being fooled this time.