Pay costs were \u00a3246m. in 2020 and would now be in the region of \u00a3320m. if they had increased in line with inflation over the past five years.<\/p>\n
But they are forecast to hit nearly \u00a3350m. this year and \u00a3364m. has been allocated in the draft 2026 Budget submitted by Policy & Resources.<\/p>\n
Mr Smillie said that after nine months leading the public sector he was clear that inflation-busting increases in the pay bill had to stop.<\/p>\n
Listen to the full interview with Boley Smillie on the Guernsey Press Politics Podcast<\/p>\n
\u2018It has to change. We can\u2019t afford for that trend to continue. The island can\u2019t carry on like that,\u2019 he said.<\/p>\n
During the same period, the number of employees working in public administration, excluding education and healthcare which are measured separately, increased by about 300, and it overtook financial services as the island\u2019s largest employment sector.<\/p>\n
However, by far the largest increase in pay costs has been in the health service, and overall pay costs have remained at about 50% of day-to-day spending, as expenditure on non-pay items has also outstripped inflation.<\/p>\n
P&R\u2019s draft 2026 Budget proposes an increase in day-to-day spending of inflation plus 1%, which includes \u00a312m. of additional expenditure requested by committees. <\/p>\n
\u2018The way in which the States budgets does not lend itself to addressing the issue,\u2019 said Mr Smillie.<\/p>\n
\u2018It\u2019s very much about \u201cthis is what you did last year plus inflation and now let\u2019s talk about what else we need to do\u201d. We fundamentally need to take a much stronger look at what we\u2019re doing now and how we can do it better.<\/p>\n
\u2018Otherwise we\u2019re just trying to reduce the gradient at which costs increase when we should be trying to reverse it.\u2019<\/p>\n
P&R\u2019s draft 2026 Budget also includes new savings of \u00a34m., with more efficiency cuts pledged in future years. <\/p>\n
In a wide-ranging interview for the Guernsey Press Politics Podcast, Mr Smillie explained why he was confident that the vast majority of next year\u2019s savings, and millions more in future years, could come from reducing consultancy costs, which grew sharply in the previous States term. <\/p>\n
He \u2018agreed wholeheartedly\u2019 with a claim made recently by P&R president Deputy Lindsay de Sausmarez that States committees sometimes paid consultants to tell them what they already knew. <\/p>\n
Tackling that, and restraining expenditure generally, would require better prioritisation across the States, he said.<\/p>\n
\u2018If we have a culture of just wanting to do more and more and more and more, then it\u2019s going to cost more and more and more and more, and the efficiencies that we can find get dwarfed,\u2019 said Mr Smillie.<\/p>\n
\u2018That\u2019s where the relationship between the Assembly and the public service is so important. We really need to make sure we\u2019re prioritising what\u2019s necessary rather than what we would like to do.<\/p>\n
\u2018If we can create an environment where funding the new things we might want to do, and I mean that largely politically, must at least in part be funded by the efficiencies we\u2019ve gained from doing things better, then that\u2019s quite an incentive actually to deliver reform.\u2019<\/p>\n
P&R has faced some criticism for presenting what it has called \u2018a holding budget\u2019 three months after committees were elected, but Mr Smillie hoped that people would understand that \u2018change does not happen in nice annual increments \u2013 it sometimes takes a little bit longer than that\u2019. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pay costs were \u00a3246m. in 2020 and would now be in the region of \u00a3320m. if they had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213469,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-213468","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213468"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213468\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}