Having served as a States Member in two terms, from 2014 and from 2018, I want to offer an honest account of what that process actually looks like from the inside. Not a dry recitation of Standing Orders, but a frank description of the human experience of it, because I think the people of Jersey deserve to understand how their government is formed.

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Friday 19 June: Electing the Chief Minister

The first sitting of the new States Assembly is one of the most consequential days in Jersey's political calendar. The 49 newly elected Members will gather in the Chamber and, before they have barely had time to find their seats, they will be asked to choose who will lead the island for the next four years.

For new Members, the experience is genuinely overwhelming. You are surrounded by colleagues who may have years or even decades more experience than you. You are acutely aware that this is not a routine procedural matter, the person elected Chief Minister on that day will set the tone, the priorities and the direction of government for the entire term. The weight of it is felt immediately.

What I remember most vividly from my first time going through this in 2014 is not the speeches or the questions, it is the fear of making the wrong decision. And I do not just mean fear of choosing the wrong candidate for the island. I mean a more personal, more uncomfortable fear: that if I voted the wrong way, it would affect how I was perceived by more established Members for the rest of my term. That somehow a vote cast on day one would follow me around for four years.

I can tell you now, with the benefit of experience, that this fear is entirely unfounded. Once the dust settles, nobody gives a second thought to how anyone voted for Chief Minister. But in the moment, that knowledge is not available to you. And I am sorry to say that in 2014, that anxiety did affect how I voted.

By 2018, I tried to share this with new Members, to reassure them that the pressure they were feeling was not real and that they should vote with their genuine judgement. But I think it still affected some of them. It is the kind of pressure that cannot simply be talked away, because it is not rational. It is an inevitable consequence of being new to a high-stakes institution.

Does the process work?

The formal process itself, each candidate giving a ten minute speech and then facing up to an hour of questions from the Assembly, is a genuinely good mechanism. It is public, it is on the record, and it means that whatever a Chief Minister candidate promises in that Chamber can later be used to hold them to account. The questions can be probing, and the answers revealing.

But the quality of the performance on the day does not always determine the outcome. In 2018, one candidate answered the questions more clearly and more compellingly than the other two. He was not elected Chief Minister. The reason was not his ability or his vision, it was his political ideology. The Members who voted against him did so not because he failed in the Chamber, but because of where he stood politically. That is a perfectly legitimate thing for elected Members to consider. But it illustrates something important: this is not simply a talent contest. It is a political decision, made by politicians.

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The Democratic Gap

This brings me to something that I think deserves much wider public understanding, and which I believe contributes, at least in part — to Jersey's persistently low voter turnout.

When the public votes in Jersey's election, they choose 49 individual Members. Each of those Members carries a mandate from their constituents. But once those 49 Members are assembled in the Chamber, the mandate each of them carries becomes almost entirely irrelevant to the question of who governs and in what direction.

The Chief Minister is not elected by the public. They are elected by the 49 Members. The Ministers are not elected by the public. They are appointed from within the Assembly. The ideological direction of the government that forms is determined by internal Assembly politics, by who can assemble enough support among colleagues, not by the aggregate wishes of Jersey's voters.

This is an inherent feature of a system built almost entirely on independent Members rather than political parties. I want to be clear: I support that system. I believe independent membership has real value, and I would not advocate abandoning it. But we should be honest about its consequences. When a voter who strongly supported a candidate with a particular political outlook discovers that their candidate's views have no bearing on the shape of the government that forms, the question "why bother?" becomes a reasonable one to ask. I do not think that is the only reason for low turnout, and I do not think it is easily solved. But it is real, and it is worth naming.

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The Week Nobody Sees: 19–26 June

Once the Chief Minister designate is elected on Friday, they have until 9.30am on Friday 26 June to submit their list of Ministerial nominations to the Greffier of the States.

Most people assume this is the week in which the Chief Minister carefully considers who is best suited to each Ministerial role and constructs their team accordingly. The reality is rather different. For the most part, the team has already been assembled — not during this week, but during the weeks and months before the election, through a process that takes place in coffee shops, living rooms, phone calls and messages.

It is sometimes called the horse-trading phase of the election, and the name is apt. When a candidate for Chief Minister is seeking the ten signatures of fellow Members required to put themselves forward, those conversations are rarely without conditions. Some Members will offer their signature only if they are offered a particular Ministerial position. The Chief Minister candidate, in turn, may approach Members they wish to include in their government and begin negotiating. By the time the new Assembly sits for the first time, the broad shape of the government has often already been determined.

This happens entirely outside any formal process. There are no rules governing it, no public record of it, and no mechanism for scrutiny. It is simply politics, human beings making deals in informal settings, as they have always done. I was never part of those conversations in either of my terms. My own route into Ministerial responsibility came differently: in both cases I was approached around a year into the term, when a vacancy arose, and asked to take on a role. In 2014 I was asked by the then Chief Minister to serve as Assistant Chief Minister with responsibility for e-Government and Digital. In my second term I was asked to take on Digital Government, before eventually becoming Minister for Children and Education when the previous minister stepped down.

That path, earning trust as a backbencher and being appointed mid-term, felt to me like a more genuinely meritocratic process than the pre-election negotiation. But it is not the only path, and for new Members with ministerial ambitions who were not part of the horse-trading, the publication of the nomination list on 26 June can feel like finding a door already closed.

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Monday 29 June: Appointing Ministers and Scrutiny Chairs

The sitting on 29 June is the moment the horse-trading becomes visible, or rather, the moment when the Assembly has the opportunity to override it.

Each Ministerial nomination comes before the Assembly for a vote. Any Member can propose an alternative candidate. If a challenger steps forward, both the Chief Minister's nominee and the challenger deliver a speech of up to ten minutes and take up to twenty minutes of questions. The Assembly then votes.

This is more than a rubber stamp. I have seen the Assembly reject a Chief Minister's nomination in favour of a challenger. When it happens, it is accepted as a legitimate exercise of the Assembly's collective judgement. There are Members who approach each Ministerial appointment on its merits, and who are willing to support a challenger if they believe that person is better suited to the role. The process has real teeth.

It is worth noting, however, what happened in 2022. On that occasion, a significant number of Assembly Members took the view that the Chief Minister should be allowed to choose their own team, that the Assembly should not interfere. The full slate was approved without challenge. That Chief Minister was later removed from office by a vote of no confidence, brought by one of the very Ministers the Assembly had waved through on that argument. The lesson perhaps writes itself: the Assembly's scrutiny of Ministerial appointments exists for good reason.

The Scrutiny Chair Problem

After the Ministers are appointed, the Assembly proceeds to elect the Chairs of the Scrutiny Panels, the Public Accounts Committee, the Privileges and Procedures Committee and the Planning Committee. These are critical roles. Scrutiny is the Assembly's primary mechanism for holding the government to account, and the Chairs set the agenda and tone for that work.

The election of Scrutiny Chairs, however, takes place on the same day as the Ministerial appointments, and this creates a structural problem that I do not think has ever been properly addressed.

Assistant Ministers are appointed by Ministers, not by the Assembly. They are not part of the formal vote on 29 June. They are announced at the discretion of the Ministers who appoint them. This means that on the day Scrutiny Chairs are being elected, there are Members sitting in that Chamber who believe they may be offered an Assistant Minister position, but who have not yet received confirmation. Faced with the choice between putting themselves forward for a Scrutiny Chair role and holding out for a government position that may or may not materialise, many choose to wait.

The result can be that no one comes forward for a Scrutiny Chair position. I have seen the Assembly go into recess because the Chamber simply could not find a willing candidate for one of these critical roles. It is an absurd situation, and it is entirely a consequence of how the two processes interact.

There are two straightforward ways to fix this. The first is to separate the days, hold the Ministerial appointments on one day and the Scrutiny Chair elections on another, allowing the dust to settle and Members to know where they stand before committing. The second is to require Ministerial candidates to declare who their Assistant Ministers will be at the point they are standing for the Ministerial role, removing the uncertainty entirely. Either solution would be an improvement on the current position.

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What This Process Tells Us

Jersey's process for forming a government is, in many respects, a reasonable one. The Chief Minister election is transparent and produces a public record. The Assembly retains genuine power to shape the government it gets. The Scrutiny process, when it works well, provides meaningful accountability.

But the reality of how it works, the horse-trading before day one, the gap between public mandate and governmental outcome, the informal deals that precede the formal votes, is largely hidden from the people it affects most: the voters of Jersey.

My purpose in writing this is not to condemn the process. It is simply to describe it honestly, from the experience of someone who has been through it. Democracy works better when people understand how it actually functions, not just how it is supposed to function. The public deserves that understanding, and I hope this goes some small way towards providing it.

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Scott Wickenden is a former States Member for St Helier South (2014–2022) where he served as Assistant Chief Minister and Minister for Children and Education.