Committee priority spending is too high, warns Policy and Resources.

The latest Government Work Plan, published today (13 June), shows projected committee spending is £4M over budget.

Policy and Resources asked committees to focus on priority projects, but even so, cost estimates exceed the money available.

The plan covers the next two years, and the committee's lead for the Government Work Plan, deputy Bob Murray, explains where the £4M figure came from:

"The committees have come back to us, having gone through a process of checking what they believe remains critical and they feel must be funded. It will be for the Assembly to decide whether or not they believe those are valid or not, but the £4M is beyond what is already budgeted in the GWP."

He says in some cases the funding requirements may not be completely accurate:

"To be fair, some of that is only provisional costings, because some of those initiatives have not gone through business cases. But that is the sort of quantum we are talking about."

Given what's planned isn't affordable, deputy Murray says P&R may suggest what can go ahead, and what can't:

"If necessary, Policy & Resources will recommend in September the suspension of some work to progress what it considers essential for the longer-term sustainability of the community.”

Deputy Murray says borrowing the money wouldn't be an easy fix:

"Borrowing would only occur if we were making sufficient surplus every year from revenue to be able to pay that back with some certainty.

It would allow us to plan, perhaps with more comfort, some of these larger infrastructure projects, because we know that there would be money to fund them.

It will cost obviously a bit more, but it gives us some flexibility, because what it might allow us to do is to build up or maintain the reserves that we’ve currently got, in the case something untoward happened in the future that we haven’t yet recognised, like another Covid for example."

Deputy Murray says health is a big draw on the States finances:

"Every year we add millions to Health and Social Care's budget and every year it breaks through it and there’s no reason to think that will change.

One of the key things is the amount of extra agency costs that we are forced to use because we can’t actually house or bring people over on a permanent basis.

Since Covid, I’m afraid health and social care personnel are very much in demand and a lot of them have actually left those professions because of the pressure they got put under.

It’s not a reflection on HSC in any shape or form, it’s just these are the only tools that they’ve got left in the box to try to deal with the increasing demand year-on-year."

In July, deputies will decide which projects to pursue, while in September they'll allocate funding.