Walking around the St Helier waterfront on a fine evening recently, I was struck by how well the development seems to be fitting together at last.

Yes, it’s nowhere near as exciting or adventurous as some of us would have liked, and it seems to have taken an enormous amount of time. But, hey, this is Jersey.

Now the Constable of St Helier would like to bring it all to a complete halt – at least for a while.

His proposition to delay development at Esplanade Square and the La Folie area raises some important issues, but he shouldn’t be allowed to bring everything to a standstill.

He says he only wants to give the States an opportunity to consider what developments should take place in these important areas, because the plans have changed significantly. It’s a new States, he says, so the new boys should have the chance to review this important subject.

The problem is, of course, that there are an awful lot of important issues that have been agreed by the old States which he presumably thinks should be looked at again because we’ve got a few new members in the House – the budget is one. So are we to go back to Square One whenever the composition of the States changes? That’s a recipe for paralysis, not good government.
Of course, the truth of the matter is that the Constable of St Helier doesn’t like some of the things being done to his waterfront.

He makes the comparison between St Malo ‘Intra Muros’ which combines ‘prime residential areas with retail quarters and hospitality in an architecturally pleasing, built-to-last way’, and the St Helier waterfront ‘with the hotchpotch of ubiquitous modern structures’.

He’s right of course, but then St Malo didn’t have 90,000 Jersey architects to please and there was a pretty town there before which was restored after the bombing of World War II. St Helier has got little worth restoring; we had to start with a blank sheet of paper. What we have produced may not be to everyone’s liking – certainly I wanted something much more exciting – but it’s not as dire as some of our architectural snobs would have us believe.

But I think the Constable is rather missing the point in his proposition. He puts the blame fairly and squarely on the States of Jersey Development Company, formerly the much-loved WEB, for ploughing ahead with inappropriate and not-needed developments on ‘their’ waterfront.

But it’s their job to develop States-owned land and get the most out of it. That is what they have been appointed to do. If they think the Esplanade Quarter should become a new financial centre for the Island, even if there are private developments going on elsewhere, then you have got to accept that at least they have done their homework. It would be foolish in the extreme for SoJDC to press ahead with providing something that was going to be a commercial disaster. Whatever you may think of the board of SoJDC, you must accept that they are not fools.

Naturally I don’t expect any politician to have any faith at all in any department or quango of the States. Just about any development you can name has been delayed and changed out of all recognition because of the interference of politicians who seem to think that their job is to second-guess the experts. If you had to identify one factor that has caused the enormous delays and changes to the waterfront developments you would have to pick political interference.

That is actually why SoJDC was created – to try and get this important function out of the hands of meddling politicians. Unfortunately there’s no hiding place.
The Constable of St Helier complicates the issue even more, by suggesting that there are various public buildings, such as a new hospital and police headquarters, that might eventually be built on land currently earmarked for useless developments. He appears to be suggesting that work on the waterfront should be frozen while the States decide what their property requirements are. That shouldn’t take more than ten or 20 years.

However the Constable may have a point about using waterfront land for States purposes, in which case he is fully entitled to convince the States that a new hospital, for example, should be built on the waterfront. It would then be up to the States to agree it with SoJDC, and then, of course, there’s the small matter of the planning process to go through.

But some States members seem to have forgotten already the hours of debate that went into agreeing a new Island Plan, which is there to safeguard the interests of the whole island. We shouldn’t need further political interference in a process that is already time consuming and is designed to protect the public interest.

The States, of course, can decide to do anything they want. The new House might even agree with the Constable and ignore the experts and call for an immediate halt to the Esplanade Square development, so that a hospital can be built there instead just before Hell freezes over.

Hopefully even the new States members will realize that SoJDC has been given a job to do and that they can be held to account if they get it wrong. As they are not infallible, that’s certainly possible, but that shouldn’t be an excuse for more political interference which just promotes inaction and an aversion to taking any risk at all. SoJDC might get it wrong, but that’s probably not as likely as an individual States member working on his own could get it wrong.

Peter Body is the editor of Business Brief magazine