Together Gibraltar are deeply concerned by the Chief Minister’s response to the Principal Auditor’s report and ensuing public backlash. It was only a few short months ago when following a narrow election victory, he promised humility. Regrettably, old habits die hard and he has already tried to spin the most damning criticisms as a 'vindication' of his decision making. This attitude does a disservice to the hard work of the principal auditor who has been unequivocal about the mismanagement, poor value for money and the hurdles he has faced in simply trying to obtain information. It also flies in the face of the public’s demands for greater transparency and of the honest public servants whose workplaces suffer directly from the mismanagement.

When asked about excessive overtime in the environment department, and how some civil servants had managed to double or even triple their salary through undocumented overtime, the Chief Minister claimed that he personally intervened, saying: "when this was brought to my attention I stopped it”. He then goes on to say that the reason it hadn’t been fixed before was because he personally had not been made aware of it.

This leads to a lack of accountability, because the Minister managing the department at the centre of this scandal is simply not present at all. The Minister for the Environment since 2011 has been Prof. John Cortes. We would like to know his comment on this matter, which took place on his watch.

TG leader Nick Calamaro stated “It should go without saying that relying on the personal intervention of one man is not a good way to run a government. There is a lot to take in from the report and Together Gibraltar will have a separate piece focusing on the consequences rampant poor leadership has had on our public services.”

“When we call for transparency we are not looking to ‘grill’ public servants either in public or in parliament. Ministers work for us, and we ask that they demonstrate this by giving the public the decency of an apology, or an explanation when their departments are systematically mismanaged.”

The GSD do us no favours by continuing to make vague accusations about the nature of the problem. It’s not enough to call these mistakes “eyebrow raising financial issues” or to make thinly veiled comments alluding to corruption. As Together Gibraltar have long argued, we need politicians who say what they believe.

This is what we believe: for public services to succeed, there needs to be accountability. Accountability means that when there is consistent failure in a department, the Minister at the top should accept this and step down. The vast majority of our public servants are diligent, hard workers who want to do their job effectively and to help our community. However, we are consistently hearing from them about ongoing abuses which we now know are not being stopped by the ministers supposedly accountable. As a result, they feel powerless, which contributes to long-term disengagement and ultimately a poorer public service.

Finally, the repeated breaches of tender process rules is also of deep concern which we are continuing to investigate. This is not just about “value for money” but about making sure that the services on which our children, our elderly, and our infirm depend on are up to scratch. To ensure that they are not being taken advantage of for someone to make a profit. We are especially concerned about the severe breaches of process around the provision of care for the elderly. The principal auditor himself has stated that the “informal contractual arrangements” covering MedDoc’s provision of elderly care “put at risk the continuation of vital care services to elderly and vulnerable citizens”.

If the government really believes that their own ministers are responsible for the functioning of these departments then we demand that they follow through on the outcomes of these conversations and report back to the public. We want to know how ministers will prevent this ever happening again, and how they will regain the trust of their departments.

ENDS