OUR hospital needs replacing. Our roads are in a dire state. There is insufficient social housing, and what there is too often fails to meet basic standards. Our sea walls are crumbling. The Airport needs work. Some of our schools need major repairs.

To this catalogue of failures to maintain vital parts of public infrastructure, we can now add the sewage treatment plant.

In 1961, just two years after the existing sewage works were completed, the Island’s population stood at 59,489. Small wonder that after half a century and a 64% increase in the population, this basic piece of the Island’s fabric is struggling.

Now, a replacement costing up to £60m is proposed, possibly to be funded by a new tax, strengthening the impression that political thinking in Jersey has shifted to a position in which everything, everywhere, must be taxed unless a compelling reason can be found not to do so.

The pressing need for a new treatment plant can also be seen as a symptom of the absence of any kind of planning for the infrastructure needed by a population of almost 100,000 souls perched on a rock measuring nine miles by five.

The population is not, of itself, the problem. The problem lies in the acute lack of homes, the alarming encroachment of development on what was green land, the creaking and groaning of the basic infrastructure.

The big question is, of course, this: How has this been allowed to happen?
It is hard to escape the conclusion that successive political administrations have failed to assign sufficient importance to vital elements of the Island’s basic public sector facilities.

Although it is easy enough to understand why, in the present climate of austerity, money for repairs, renovation and capital projects is hard to find, it is legitimate to ask why essential work was ignored while the good times rolled.

Could it have been that politicians, many of them now in retirement, had their eyes so firmly fixed on the goal of growth at all costs that simple housekeeping tasks simply eluded them?

If that was indeed the case, we are now on the verge of discovering – through the incapacity of infrastructure to cope with the pressures of a population that has burgeoned since so many of its basic elements were created – that growth entails costs as well as benefits.