States under fire for lack of up-to-date stats

Deputies have warned they risk "making decisions in a vacuum" without up-to-date statistics from the States of Guernsey.

Last year, because of issues at Guernsey's beleaguered revenue service regarding IT, up-to-date statistics on Guernsey's population and GDP were not published.

Deputy Haley Camp labelled the absence of stats "disappointing" and said it made it difficult for politicians to make informed decisions on future policy.

The most recent population data for Guernsey relates to 2023 at the moment.

Last year, the electronic census for 2024, the 2024 GDP bulletin, the household income report for 2023 and the annual indicators of poverty all reported 2024.

In a release at the start of December last year, the States blamed "widely communicated changes to the IT infrastructure within the Revenue Service" for the delays.

The States said it had "attracted considerable scrutiny, as the delivery of benefits and outcomes has so far fallen short of the original vision and expectations".

"A wide-ranging review of the programme was announced by the States' chief executive," it added.

Camp said: "I think it's really disappointing because a lot of what we do does rely on that data.

"Now, I know to an extent Guernsey doesn't seem to change and shift that much, so perhaps we can rely on old data to give us a picture, but I suppose the difficulty is if you miss something."

In July last year, the States admitted it may have "overstated" the island's population by about 3% in previous statistics.

"When I'm looking at some of the projects that I'm working on within Scrutiny, being told that data cuts off after a certain point, it then just leaves a vacuum, and what is one supposed to do with that?" commented Camp.

"How do you deliver scrutiny if the information just isn't there? So, yes, I think the message has to be that that data has to come up to snuff pretty quickly to help us move forward."

Scrutiny Management Committee President Andy Sloan said that, while he understood the issues with IT which had caused the delays, the situation was still a problem: "That's not a tenable situation. It's basically failure of government.

"To be fair, knowing how they're generated, given our IT problems, I understand why they're missing.

"But, over the last decade at different times, we've had issues with GDP being wrong and population being wrong... without anyone realising.

"As big an issue is one a lack of interpretation and understanding - frankly, to aid support our economic strategy, we really only need a few reliable core economic variables, not a colossal ream of stats of spurious value - and that seems to be as much the case today as it's ever been."

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