Island Plan for Jersey 2021–2030
How long can we allow them to bumble along, keeping everything exactly as it is? Even the Prince of Wales says we have just eighteen months ‘to keep climate change to survivable levels and to restore nature to the equilibrium we need.’
The first public consultations for the Island Plan 2021–2030 took place last week. The Government of Jersey has produced an expensive 52-page booklet called Strategic issues and options and numerous large-scale graphics reproducing its pages and diagrams.
Unfortunately, the whole publicity thrust started in the middle of the discussion, not at the beginning. The meeting I was at was well attended by local architects, property developers and property owners. The ‘strategic options’ up for discussion suited them well. Where will they be allowed to build the 6,670 new homes that it has been identified the market will absorb? ‘Look, it’s simple supply and demand, and there’s no point in discussing that,’ I was told at my table. We can increase the density of the town, extend it to the north or south, increase the density of existing ‘village’ estates or extend them, we can start new large-scale developments in specific parishes, or we can build all over the countryside. Which is it to be? Please vote now.
If we are going to have a ten-year island plan, it needs to start with a vision of where we as an island want to be in ten years time. This needs to be informed by scientists’ and economists’ best research into where the rest of the world is likely to be by then.
Of course a thought-through island population policy would help, but there are much bigger issues. We have declared a climate emergency. We have a global biodiversity crisis. Do we really think that the global finance industry will continue to need Jersey as an offshore base? Will offshore finance still attract boat-loads of wealthy high-earners, their entourages of cleaners and cooks, and their big 4x4s to drop their children at private schools?
Are Jersey Royals, and all the chemicals they need, going to remain the mainstay of local agriculture? What are we going to do about overfishing and the nitrates in our groundwater?
If people are going to bus, walk and cycle to work, where will their work and their homes need to be? What are our plans for heavily insulating existing buildings, and what changes to building regulations will demand the highest standards of all new builds?
Over all of this, what are our plans for the de-growth of wealthy globalised economies including ours, and what are our plans regarding global climate justice?
You can have a say at http://gov.je/islandplanreview
This article first appeared in the Jersey Evening Post on 25 July 2019
