Peter Gilson wrote a thoughtful letter in the Guernsey Press on the subject of spending and the economy on Thursday: We can’t afford to ‘spend, spend, spend’ where he’s right to raise valid points about departments overspending, but raising concerns about spending in general is only half right.

It should be ‘Invest, Invest, Invest’ at this point.  He compares States spending to an example from the real world, but the example is a charity.  A charity collects donations and spends on good causes.  That is not what government does.  Nor should we expect government expenditure to return a profit, as a commercial organisation would require.  But make no mistake, government spending should be considered an investment, and wise and careful planning is needed to avoid waste.

We have historically low interest rates, and an economy that could benefit from stimulation after both the financial crisis and now the pandemic.  We won’t get growth without investment from somewhere.  States investment stimulates the economy at a time when it most needs it.  If you think borrowing is expensive or risky, wait until you see what happens if we get negative growth and high unemployment.  Island services such as healthcare and social housing have been set up and funded with almost full employment, but a deep recession would be a different matter.

Rebuilding parts of our infrastructure that have historically been underinvested, like the harbour, and schools, helps to avoid that.  However, building must be carefully planned, to avoid overheating the local construction sector by with too much at once.  But with that in mind, carefully planned projects are exactly what is needed.

This is the half where Peter gets his observations spot on.  The two school model for secondary education was created in a cost conscious environment.  It included cut-price, cheap and nasty schools, intended to minimise costs in education with an ethos of “pack ‘em in and pile ‘em high” but is poor value for the island overall with two other school sites are left unused, and thoughts about what to use them for in the future met with a collective shrug of the shoulders.  That’s not careful, it’s plain wasteful.

Now is the perfect time to revisit the education model and build the schools we want.  My proposal for a three school model that uses all the existing sites meets this challenge head on:

• Rebuild La Mare de Carteret because it’s a shovel ready project with detailed plans already created but never used.  A small sixth-form centre could be easily added.
• Use the Grammar School site and its sixth-form centre as a nonselective local school and avoid waste of our valuable assets
• Invest in St Sampsons with its own sixth-form centre for some subjects and inspire our future generation about what we can achieve
• Continue education at the Les Beaucamps site but as a prestigious home for the new Guernsey Institute of further education that makes sense

My concern is not so much that departments will ‘spend, spend, spend’ but that investment will be poorly thought out and wasteful.  The way to avoid that is to listen to the people and not plough on with unpopular projects.  Mechanisms such as the subtly biased questionnaire from ESC that Peter mentions are the opposite of what is needed.  It’s more of the same “we know best” approach that believes public opinion is an inconvenience to be worked around, not an invaluable resource that warns against taking the wrong path.