Deputy Kirsten Morel’s call this week for an “economic taskforce” of States Members, and for tearing down the wall between government and scrutiny, was framed around a familiar complaint: the “massive portfolios” handed to individual Ministers. Re-elected in St John, St Lawrence and Trinity, the outgoing Economic Development Minister wants more Members pulled into the work of governing, arguing the current structure forces an unnecessary divide between those who decide and those who hold them to account.

He is right that the load is heavy. But it is worth being precise about what Ministers are actually short of — because the answer points to a solution Morel did not mention.

Ministers are not short of money or staff

A Jersey Minister does not work alone at a desk. Behind the Council of Ministers sits the entire civil service: nine government departments, each led by a Chief Officer, with combined budgets of roughly £950 million once social-security grants and benefits are stripped out. The department supporting the Council itself — the Cabinet Office — is funded at £18 million in the 2026 Budget. Total government spending this year runs to £1.28 billion.

A Minister does not receive a personal budget to hire their own team. Instead they set policy direction for a department of officials who handle the briefing, the drafting, the consultation and, frequently, the speeches. When politicians elsewhere have argued Jersey’s senior Members deserve more pay, the standard rebuttal has been exactly this: unlike a lone backbencher, a Minister has the machinery of a department behind them.

So if Ministers are well-supplied with officials and money, what exactly is overloaded?

The bottleneck is the Minister, not the support

The answer is the one thing that cannot be delegated: the Minister’s own judgement and accountability. A civil servant can summarise a 200-page consultation, but cannot decide what to do about it, cannot answer for it in the Assembly, and cannot take the political heat when it goes wrong. Every portfolio, however large its department, narrows at the top to a single elected person who must direct the whole brief, face scrutiny, and own the outcome.

That is why Morel’s instinct is to spread the political load — more Members in government, Members doing scrutiny and ministerial work at once — rather than ask for more staff. He has correctly diagnosed that the scarce resource is elected decision-makers with authority, not budget.

A third option: change the support, not its size

There is a route Morel left out, and in Jersey’s fiscal climate it deserves a hearing: not more people, but smarter systems.

Much of what consumes a Minister’s time is not deciding — it is the apparatus around deciding. Reading and reconciling competing advice, tracking where a dozen workstreams stand, preparing for hearings, drafting answers to written questions, digesting consultations. That is information-handling, and information-handling is precisely what automation does well. Tools that compress the time between “here is a complex situation” and “I am ready to decide” would let a Minister carry a large portfolio with less strain — without adding a single post to a payroll the same Budget is trying to shrink. The 2026 Budget explicitly commits to curbing public-sector headcount and cutting reliance on consultants; technology that reduces the need for bodies fits that aim in a way that “hire more support” does not.

The decision stays human. The runway to it gets shorter.

The honest caveats

This is not a claim that software can govern. Two cautions matter.

First, if the heaviest part of a Minister’s load is political — contested values, stakeholder management, Assembly arithmetic, public accountability — then automation helps only at the margins, because none of that is an information problem. Morel’s own preferred fix, more elected colleagues, suggests he believes the political share is the larger one.

Second, accountability cuts against automation as much as for it. If a Minister decides on the strength of a machine-generated brief that quietly skewed the evidence, “the system summarised it that way” is no defence before a scrutiny panel. Automated support in government tends to require more assurance, not less — and Jersey’s own digital and IT programmes have been a repeated target for scrutiny, a reminder that efficiency through technology is far easier to promise than to deliver in a small administration.

The question for the new Assembly

Morel poses two answers to ministerial overload: spread the political load, or carry on as we are. There is a third he has not put on the table — reshape the nature of the support so that each decision carries less administrative tail, freeing Ministers for the part only they can do.

Which prompts a fair question for the incoming Chief Minister and his Council: is the cure for overstretched Ministers more people, or smarter systems — and has anyone in government actually modelled the second? The likely answer, that no one has examined it in any structured way, may be the most telling part of the whole debate.