This Wednesday 27th April 2022 there will be a Parish Assembly to decide on progressing the project to modernise the administration of the Parish of Saint Helier and rationalise the Parish's powers to act as a one-stop-shop for many of the municipal actions that many Parishioners think we already have. It is a chance to make the inexplicable structure of governance clearer, more responsive and more transparent.
It's an issue I've campaigned on for years both at local government level and as a candidate for the States of Jersey. Local government ideally should be rather boring, and most people won't notice when things run smoothly, and Saint Helier in recent years has been run so boringly and smoothly that the level of rates has been maintained with no increase for a number of years. Since a lot of the work of local politicians is bread-and-butter implementation of municipal trivia, what is proposed is more efficient enactment of what people vote for.
I've been asked for more detail about the proposal, but there's an 86 page report on the background, the evaluation of the Shadow Conseil project which showed how a new elected body could operate (and that the Parish is capable of running such a body).
People who want change, should vote for change.
People who like the way things are run now, should vote for the existing ramshackle system to be placed on a statutory basis.
This has support from all the other Parishes, some of which would potentially be interested themselves in opting-in to the sort of devolved arrangement Saint Helier would like to have. But this is not about telling other Parishes should do: it's about what Saint Helier needs. And besides, Saint Helier's Roads Committee has acted for decades as a de facto conseil, and for the last 20 years with meetings open to the public and media (with the Procureurs du Bien Public also at the table, so that Connétable, Procureurs and Roads Committee can act together, if not vote together). A new law for the administration of Saint Helier would formalise this sort of arrangement, and enable a statutory basis for agreed devolution of functions to the new elected body so that bye-laws, within the framework set by central government, can be made promptly at the appropriate level.
