Local News/SENATOR FARNHAM PICKED HIS MINISTERS ON "EXPERIENCE." BUT THREE WEEKS IN, IS THAT CLAIM HOLDING UP

Lobbi Original|Government & Administration|St. Saviour

SENATOR FARNHAM PICKED HIS MINISTERS ON "EXPERIENCE." BUT THREE WEEKS IN, IS THAT CLAIM HOLDING UP

BusinessTechnology

•5d ago

When Lyndon Farnham named his Council of Ministers at the end of June, he defended his choices — several of them familiar faces returning to portfolios they'd held before — explicitly on the basis of experience. On bringing Alan Maclean back to Treasury, a role Maclean had already held between 2014 and 2018, Farnham told the JEP: "I was mindful of the role that Alan played previously – he has a great deal of experience, and after discussion I felt he was the best person for the job." On moving Elaine Millar back to Social Security, a brief she'd held for eighteen months before the change of government in 2024, he said simply: "Elaine has done a very solid job." Tom Binet kept Health outright — no reshuffle needed, because he'd already been there two and a half years. The pitch was consistent: these aren't new hands. They've done these jobs, or ones like them, before. Islanders should expect competence built on that record. Three weeks into the new government, on the specific policy questions that matter most to people's daily lives, that claim has not held up. Not in vague, arguable ways — in ways you can check against the record, which is what I've done below.

Senator Maclean and GST: the numbers were right, the framing wasn't

On 13 July, Treasury Minister Senator Alan Maclean answered a written question from Deputy Lee Carpenter (Reform Jersey) on the cost of removing GST from food. His answer: £14 million a year, and — his central point — "removing GST from food provides the most benefit to the highest income households because they spend most on food." His own table showed the poorest fifth of households saving £1.8 million (12% of the total), against £4 million (28%) for the richest fifth. Read in isolation, that looks like a case against the policy. But cash saved isn't the same as who's actually helped, and Maclean's own department already holds the data needed to see that. Statistics Jersey's separate Household Income Distribution report shows the poorest 20% of Jersey households receive just 5% of all household income, while the richest 20% receive 49%. Set the GST saving against that: The poorest quintile gets 5% of the island's income, but 12% of the GST saving — more than double their existing share. The richest quintile gets 49% of the island's income, but only 28% of the saving — barely more than half their share. Per household, that works out to roughly £200 a year for an average household in the bottom quintile against roughly £450 for the average household at the top. £200 goes a great deal further against an income under £20,000 than £450 does against six figures. Relative to where households actually sit in Jersey's economy, removing GST from food is a mildly progressive policy — the opposite of how the Treasury Minister framed it. That's not a matter of opinion; it's the same government's own income distribution statistics, applied to the same government's own GST answer, sitting eight years into a Treasury career that was supposed to make this kind of analysis second nature.

Senator Millar and Long-Term Care: got the cap wrong, didn't know the waiting period existed

On 30 June, during her own ministerial appointment hearing, Deputy Samantha Gleave asked Senator Elaine Millar whether the Long-Term Care scheme was "currently fair and properly understood," and raised the fact that Islanders with assets above £419,000 can face waits of up to three years before the scheme pays out. Senator Millar — who ran this exact portfolio in 2022 and 2023, and who named improving LTC communication as one of her priorities at the time — said she was "astonished to hear about a three year delay." She stated her understanding was that people with assets pay "up to £60,000" towards their care. She described the Property Bond, the mechanism that secures a debt against a person's home, as something that "very rarely" happens. When Gleave explained the waiting period was determined by assessed care level, not a financial threshold, Millar replied: "If there was a time limit it was not something I was aware of. It must have been something done in the last couple of years." None of that matches the record. The waiting period has existed since the scheme launched in 2014, set out in the Long-Term Care (Benefits) (Jersey) Order 2014 — up to 148 weeks' self-funding at Level 1 care. The actual cost cap is £80,700 for a single person and £121,050 for a couple, not £60,000. And the Property Bond book, far from rare, grew from £1.1 million in 2022 to £7.3 million by the end of 2025 — a 563% increase, according to the States of Jersey's own 2025 Annual Report — while the fund itself ran a £5.2 million deficit last year, with benefits growing at 12% annually against income growth of 5%. This is the minister who made LTC communication her stated priority the last time she held this job.

Senator Binet and prescriptions: "I don't know," after two and a half years

Health Minister Tom Binet told the JEP he "did not believe" free prescriptions had ever been a "wise" policy, and floated introducing a charge. His reasoning: "I don't know what the cost of processing a prescription is, but I know I can get paracetamol for about 70p in the supermarket... Those sort of bad practices need to stop." Stephen Orme, of Le Quesne Pharmacy, gave the reply that's been circulating since: "The Senator has been the Health Minister for two-and-a-half years – he should know exactly how much it costs to 'process' a prescription." Orme filled in the number Binet didn't have: pharmacies are paid a £3.96 dispensing fee, out of which they cover staff wages, rent and electricity, against the £50.28 the government pays a GP for prescribing the same item. He also corrected the supermarket comparison — retailers are capped at selling 16 paracetamol tablets at a time; pharmacies can dispense up to 96, with professional advice attached. Orme's conclusion was blunt: not knowing this basic figure, in his own words, "should warrant resignation."

Whose job is it to challenge the answer?

None of this is really about three ministers having a bad few weeks. It's about what we expect of them, and what they seem to think is expected of them instead. Running a government department is a genuinely big job, and it's reasonable for a minister to lean on the civil service — the executive branch — to brief them, to steer them, to hand them the numbers. Nobody elected expects a minister to personally recalculate the LTC fund's reserves or model GST receipts from scratch. That's what officials are for. What isn't reasonable is taking what the executive hands you and repeating it without challenge, without thought, and without enough understanding to notice when it's wrong — especially when, as in all three cases above, the gap between the answer given and the answer that's actually on the record was there to be found by anyone willing to look. Deputy Gleave found it. I found it, sat at home with the legislation and the annual reports. The elected member's job in that relationship isn't to be a mouthpiece for the department briefing them. It's to hold that department to account on the public's behalf — to be the check, not the echo. That distinction matters even more when it comes to money. The tone coming from government at the moment treats public spending, and the ability to ask for more of it, as something close to a right — the GST levy is going up, the LTC contribution is going up, and the justification offered is rarely more than "the fund needs it" or "costs have risen." But government doesn't have a right to the public's money simply because a law permits it to collect it. That money is handed over on trust — the expectation being that it will be spent carefully, on the public's behalf, and accounted for honestly when more is needed. A government that can't accurately describe its own schemes to the people asking about them has not yet earned the benefit of the doubt on that trust. Coming back for more without first justifying what's already being spent isn't governing for the public. It's asking the public to fund the gap in its own understanding.

Why this matters

Three ministers, three portfolios, three specific policy questions — cost of care, cost of food, cost of medicine — and in each case, the person holding the brief either got the core fact wrong or didn't have it at all. This isn't a pile-on over a slip of the tongue. Senator Millar's error inverted her own scheme's central protection. Senator Maclean's framing pointed the public in exactly the wrong direction on who a tax change would help. Senator Binet didn't know the number his own department pays out every time a prescription is filled. What makes this worth writing about isn't that ministers make mistakes — everyone does. It's that "experience" was the specific, stated justification for putting these three people back in these three jobs. Senator Farnham didn't say he'd picked a team that would learn on the job. He said Senator Maclean had "a great deal of experience," that Senator Millar had "done a very solid job," that Senator Binet didn't need moving because he already knew Health. The record over three weeks says the experience didn't transfer into the depth of understanding the public was told to expect. That matters because of what comes next. These are the same ministers who will be asking Islanders, over the next four years, to accept a higher LTC levy, to accept GST staying on food, to accept a prescription charge — decisions that reach directly into people's pockets. If the people making those decisions don't currently have a firm grip on the mechanics of their own schemes, Islanders are entitled to ask how those decisions are being made, and on whose advice. Senator Farnham should be judged on the same standard he set for his own appointments. If experience is the qualification, the public should be able to see it demonstrated — not assumed from a CV, but shown in the answers ministers give when asked, in public, about the schemes they run. On the evidence of the last three weeks, that test hasn't been met.

Sources

Discussion (0)

💬

No comments yet. Be the first to discuss this article!