Guernsey first affordable housing target to be set

Guernsey's Housing Department will next month ask the States to set the island's first affordable housing target.

If agreed, they will aim to provide an average of 171 new homes each year from 2016.

The affordable housing will be a mixture of social rented properties and partial ownership homes.

The overall annual target for new housing is 300 new dwellings per year. Politicians will be asked to continue to agree this.

A framework for public service reform

Public service reform is a ten year plan to transform the organisation, management and the delivery of services to customers.


The aim is to build a single public service organisation, one that works in partnership with outside expertise, organising and delivering services centred on those who use them, and using money wisely and carefully. An organisation designed around meeting community needs, rather than expecting the customer to adapt to the public service's internal procedures and structures. One which has adopted technology and a 'one-stop, tell us once' approach to make our services easier to access and use.


The document sets out how to make reform happen, with four overall priorities, each of which are linked:

• Improving customer engagement and satisfaction 
• Delivering and demonstrating value for money 
• Improving staff engagement and satisfaction 
• Enhancing organisational performance measurement and management

"We will reduce the number of sites that we own and work from – at the moment it is more than 100. Doing this will help us remove boundaries between departments and functions through more effective team working and co-location, and to rationalise the property portfolio. We will free up resources by making existing processes more cost effective and efficient. These savings can then be re-invested to meet increasing demand or in new or improved services, ensuring all of our services are sustainable into the future. This is about saving to invest. Many of us do this every day, building a dividend by changing our lifestyles or habits and reducing our personal expenditure in one area so we can spend more in an area we see as or more important or valuable to us. In the same way the public sector will also build a dividend through reform, one that will be reinvested in services – a reform dividend " Paul Whitefield CEO States of Guernsey

To support those priorities, three workstreams have been identified that are critical to their successful delivery and which are set out in greater detail in the document:

• SMART Guernsey - bringing our services on-line and making better use of technology 
• Estates optimisation - ensuring we make the most effective use of our buildings across the island and ensuring the best possible customer access 
• Innovation and continuous improvement - ensuring we are cultivating and exploiting ideas for improvement from both inside and outside the organisation 

You can access a copy of the framework here: http://change.gov.gg/ or you can download a copy from the bottom of this page. Summary leaflets are also available in Latvian, Portuguese and Polish.

Download  a Framework for Public Service Reform full PDF