IF anyone was wondering why that lot in the Big House and their hired help have for many years given the impression that they are utterly terrified of a Freedom of Information Law, they can look no further than Jimmy Perchard’s helpful (if astonishing) disclosure to a Scrutiny panel that two senior civil servants have received huge pay-outs simply for resigning from their positions.

Thanks to Senator Perchard, we now known that the head lad in the Prime Minister’s department, Bill Ogley, whose last day it is today, gets a nice half a million quid for clearing his desk, while the former boss of Health and Social Services, Mike Pollard, had to make do with just three hundred grand.
Quite honestly, there are so many questions arising out of this latest shambles that this simple country boy doesn’t really know where to start.

I have worked for probably a handful of employers in my time, although I’ve got mates – particularly those who in the old days we used to call tradesmen – who’ve worked for many more, but none of us has ever experienced a situation in which an employer has accepted our resignation and then given us more than a year’s money as a parting gift.

Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that such a concept is unknown to the vast majority Island residents, although it wouldn’t surprise me that it’s not entirely alien to the greedy finance industry, where the high-flyers are rewarded substantially for failure and the rank and file are told to take a pay cut or freeze or are simply made redundant.

Without putting too fine a point on it, the only circumstances in which I can see someone being given a hefty cheque when they leave a job is when the boss is paying him or her to leave.

I can recall a senior politician – possibly a president then of what was called the Establishment Committee – justifying the existence of what a journalist on this newspaper described as ‘a slush fund’ when he discovered it buried in the Budget document by saying that it was going to be used to pay off civil servants who had ‘gone off the boil’.

(If my memory is correct, some of my civil servant friends suggested at the time that those likely to take advantage of the slush fund had offered scant evidence that they had ever been ‘on the boil’, but I digress.)

For the avoidance of any possible doubt, and strange as it may seem to some readers, on this particular issue I have no criticism at all of either Mr Ogley or Mr Pollard. As far as I am concerned (and I strongly suspect this would be the case with most of us), if I found an employer stupid enough to make me such an offer I’d bite his hand off before he had chance to change his mind.

No, I don’t begrudge them a penny any more than I begrudge Mr Ogley whatever profit he makes from the house he has on the market (I see the price has dropped to just fifty grand over the million mark) and any more than I begrudge Mr Pollard his round-the-world holiday where, the last time I heard of his progress, he was in New Zealand.

My gripe is with the idiots who negotiate these deals or who fail to read (or perhaps understand) the small print on contracts. They’re the ones who are costing us money.

Reverting for a moment to the perceived (by me, at least) terror our elected representatives have of a legally binding freedom of information system, if we had such a thing in place I would certainly pose a couple of questions.

Why, for example, was it necessary to shell out £800,000 to two public employees who, according to my recollection of what was made public when the decisions reached by Mr Ogley and Mr Pollard were announced, simply resigned from their positions? If they didn’t simply resign their positions but were in fact asked to quit, and paid off when they agreed, what were the reasons behind the requests, who made the decisions and who made the requests?

As some whose contribution to the biscuit tin under Philip Ozouf’s bed helps fund this less than desirable state of affairs, I happen to think that not only am I perfectly entitled to ask these questions, but am entitled also to some full and frank responses. I am not holding my breath.

IN last week’s column I was seeking to make a serious point – several, in fact – about the expense of using the national media advertising for a couple of civil jobs and a firm of head hunters to draft the ad and carry out the selection process.

I went on to highlight how big a department the lesser (in terms of salary and everything else) job would command with a veritable battalion of managers, human resources officer and assistants all featuring on the hierarchal departmental chart.

In doing so, I injected a little humour, stating quite clearly that I was simply trying to wind up online morons who think they know all about journalism after having reached Page 3 of a red-top tabloid.

Unfortunately, one of them didn’t see the funny side and went off on one about my ‘drunken, poisonous ramblings in this filthy rag’ and the morons financing my calvados’.

Quite so, dear sir, quite so, but it’s a pity you didn’t get as hot under the collar about the issues I raised in the other 950-words of the column – issues which cost taxpayers far more than the occasion sip of apple juice for medicinal purposes that I consume. Perhaps the Page 3 reference struck a nerve?

AND finally … The little local difficulty over ‘ownership’ of the school milk petition really tells you all you need to know about those involved.
As I said recently about pupils from Grouville School, adults can frequently learn from children.