Guernsey's government: an island run by committees of its parliament

Why Guernsey chose committees over a cabinet

The German occupation forced Guernsey into the one experiment with cabinet government in its recorded history. From 1940 almost every decision of the States was delegated to a Controlling Committee, which the Royal Court's own history of the assembly describes as in effect a cabinet of ministers, each member running a department. The public sector grew enormously under it. Projets de loi were drawn up by the States at the Royal Court's request, ratified by the Law Officers and promulgated by the Bailiff acting as civil lieutenant governor. The island's wartime history covers how that arrangement worked with the German command.

The States ended it on 4 July 1945. The reasoning is on the record: the members accepted that a cabinet had advantages in wartime but held that "government by numerous committees each directly responsible to the States was much preferred in peacetime", and that "administrative work should be spread over many States members instead of concentrating in the hands of a few". An Advisory Council was created alongside the committees to coordinate them.

The committees were older than the war. The Royal Court traces permanent committees to the late 1700s, when the States took on public works and the upkeep of the highways and needed revenue to pay for them. Britannica dates the assembly's emergence as a legislature administering the island through executive committees to the nineteenth century. In 1945 the island went back to them by choice, with the cabinet alternative fresh in its experience.

The model has been reformed since without being replaced. Before 2016 the coordinating body was the Policy Council, chaired by a Chief Minister; from 2016 it became the Policy and Resources Committee. Jersey, the neighbouring bailiwick, ran a similar committee system until 2005 and then replaced it with ministerial government. Guernsey kept its committees.

How committees run Guernsey without ministers

The States of Guernsey is structured, in its own description, into one Senior Committee, seven Principal Committees and a set of boards, authorities and commissions, every one of them chaired by a States member.

The Policy and Resources Committee handles constitutional and external affairs, develops strategic and corporate policy, coordinates the business of the States and examines the proposals that other committees and outside bodies put before the assembly. Its president is elected by the States members for a term running to the next general election. Local media call the holder the Chief Minister, and the office is the de facto head of government, but the title describes a committee chair who answers to the assembly. There is no ministry beneath the post.

Each committee is directly responsible to the States. Its policy letters come to the floor under other business, and the whole assembly votes on them. The committees also run what the States own: water, wastewater, the two main harbours and the airport are owned and controlled by the States, and the island's airline, Aurigny, is wholly owned by them.

Business on the floor follows the Rules of Procedure, the island's equivalent of standing orders. Rule 9 fixes the order of a meeting: statements and questions, then legislation, then other business including policy letters and motions, then the schedule for future business. The Order Paper is usually published on the Monday before a meeting. Rule 17 governs debate. Remarks must be relevant to the motion, a member generally speaks once on it unless the presiding officer allows more, speaking time is limited, and any direct or special interest must be declared before speaking or voting.

What the States of Deliberation is made of

The assembly carries two names for two functions. Sitting as a legislature it is the States of Deliberation, a name the parliament's own site dates to the 1770s. Sitting as an electoral college it is the States of Election, and in that form it elects the jurats of the Royal Court.

The voting membership is 38 People's Deputies, elected every four years, and two representatives of Alderney. Two more members sit without a vote: His Majesty's Procureur and His Majesty's Comptroller, the Law Officers of the Crown, appointed by the monarch and comparable in role to an attorney general and a solicitor general. The Bailiff, or the Deputy Bailiff, presides.

The name records what the assembly was. The Royal Court's history finds evidence of an island assembly in 1481 and, less firmly, around 1429, and the name Les Etats first recorded in 1538. Three estates made it up: the Royal Court, the clergy and the constables of the ten parishes. An Order in Council of 1605 revived it on the petition of the inhabitants, referring to "the ancient use and authority of assembling the three States of the Island". Meetings were rare for another two centuries; the Billets d'État for the eleven years from 1825 to 1836 fill fewer pages than a single month's Billet in the present century. Elected deputies entered at the end of the nineteenth century, and the Reform (Guernsey) Law 1948 removed the jurats and the parish rectors, a sequence Guernsey: history follows in detail. The last trace of the estates, the ten Douzaine representatives of the parishes, left the assembly in the reform of 2004.

How a Guernsey law reaches the Privy Council

A bill in Guernsey is a projet de loi, and once passed it becomes a loi, or law. Passing the States is the first half of the route. A law has no legal effect until it is approved by His Majesty in Council, which happens at regular meetings of the Privy Council in London. The approved law returns as an Order in Council and is formally registered at the Royal Court before it applies.

Most of what the States enacts never travels that far. Ordinances (ordonnances) and orders (ordres) are delegated legislation made under existing laws, and they need no royal assent. Commencement orders, which bring a law into force, are usually ordinances. From 29 February 2024 certain domestic primary legislation in the three jurisdictions of the Bailiwick needs only the assent of the Lieutenant Governor.

The constitution behind this is unwritten. Its starting point is usually given as the Treaty of Paris of 1259, under which the Norman mainland passed to the French king while the islands stayed with the English Crown. They were never absorbed into England by any Act of Union and are described as "peculiars of the Crown". Successive monarchs confirmed their liberties, often citing the so-called Constitutions of King John, a document said to have been granted after 1204 whose existence is legendary.

Where the island's powers end is loosely drawn. The Crown, meaning in practice the United Kingdom government, keeps an ill-defined reserved power to intervene in the domestic affairs of any Crown Dependency "in the interests of good government". The United Kingdom Parliament legislates for Guernsey in the reserved matters of defence and foreign affairs. Guernsey governments have generally avoided testing where the line sits by avoiding open conflict with British ones.

What the Bailiff does in court and chamber

The Bailiff holds two offices in one person. As chief justice the Bailiff presides over the Royal Court, where lay jurats decide cases and fix sentences. As president of the States the Bailiff presides over the legislature. The Bailiff is also the civil head of the Bailiwick and represents the Crown in civil matters. Both the Bailiff and the Deputy Bailiff are Crown appointments, and the Bailiff generally serves until the retirement age of 65.

The office began as a delegation. According to Britannica, the warden of the islands could not hold the king's courts regularly on all four main islands, so the judicial work on Guernsey fell to a bailiff, and the States of Deliberation grew in part from the bailiffs' practice of referring difficult points of law to local notables. Around 1290 the governor Otto de Grandson delegated civil powers to separate bailiffs for Guernsey and Jersey.

The sources disagree on how many jurats sit. Britannica and the Wikipedia account of the island's politics give twelve; the Wikipedia article on Guernsey gives sixteen, elected by the States of Election from among islanders, with no legal training required. Jurats are first mentioned in 1179, and a list of them survives from 1299.

The Crown's personal representative is the Lieutenant Governor, an appointed and unelected office created in 1835 when the governorship was abolished. The holder lives on the island, at Government House in St Peter Port, and is described as representing "the Crown in right of the république of the Bailiwick of Guernsey".

The relationship between court and chamber is on the States' agenda. A government work plan proposed in January 2026 included work on the Commonwealth Latimer House Principles, which concern the relationship between the three branches of government, among them designating Court 3 of the Royal Court as the parliamentary estate.

How Guernsey elects its whole parliament at once

Guernsey voted on its electoral system in a referendum in 2018 and chose to elect all 38 deputies in one island-wide constituency, replacing the districts drawn loosely on the parishes, of which there had been seven since 2004. The Reform Law was amended in 2019 and the first island-wide general election took place in October 2020. It returned 38 deputies on a turnout of 80%, as recorded by the States' parliament site.

The method is plurality-at-large. Every voter may cast up to 38 votes, one per seat, and the 38 candidates with the most votes are elected. The voting age is 16. Voters must register on the electoral roll before each general election, a requirement blamed for low turnout at recent polls.

The general election of 18 June 2025, counted the next day, gives the fullest published picture of how the system is used. The States recorded 27,293 eligible voters, 19,686 ballots and 432,212 votes cast. Voters used an average of 22 of their votes, 58% of what each ballot allowed, and turnout stood at 72%.

The complaint that recurs is the number of candidates. A Scrutiny Management Committee report on the 2020 election, published in 2023, found that voters valued being able to vote for any candidate regardless of parish, and that many found it almost impossible to assess 118 candidates. It named a "significant loss of parish identity and local representation" among the effects and made eight recommendations, among them changing the number of votes each voter holds. At the 2018 referendum one option, option E, would have elected a third of the 38 deputies island-wide every two years. In January 2026 the president of the States Assembly and Constitution Committee told BBC Guernsey the system could change before the general election due in 2029.

Why Guernsey deputies mostly stand alone

Parties arrived late. The Alliance Party Guernsey, registered in February 2020, was the first party formed on the island. The Guernsey Party and Forward Guernsey followed. A further registered group, the Guernsey Partnership of Independents, describes itself as something other than a party in the conventional sense: its members set their own manifestos, which may differ from the group's, and it applies no whip.

The results sheet for 2025 carries a column for party affiliation, and it is almost empty. Of the 82 candidates, five stood for Forward Guernsey and three of them were elected. The other 77 carried no party label on the published result.

The committee system can run on that. A cabinet needs a majority that holds together across votes, and a party is the usual way to supply one. A Guernsey committee needs its members to agree on a policy letter, and the assembly then votes on it item by item. The parliament's own description of the deputy's role says members act on their own judgement and experience, are expected to listen to the people they serve, and are not bound to follow the majority view on every question.

How Alderney and Sark govern themselves apart

The States of Guernsey is the parliament and government of the whole Bailiwick, but the Bailiwick is three jurisdictions, each with its own elected government. Laws passed in Guernsey apply to Alderney and Sark as Bailiwick-wide legislation only with the consent of their governments. Herm is administered directly from Guernsey, so every enactment of the States applies there.

Alderney gave up part of its independence on 1 January 1949, when it adopted a new constitution that confirmed it as part of the Bailiwick and moved it closer to Guernsey. It transferred its taxing rights to Guernsey the same year, and under the 1948 Agreement it delegates certain matters to the States of Guernsey. The States of Alderney has ten elected members and an elected president. Alderney's two representatives in Guernsey are chosen from those ten after an island-wide plebiscite on Alderney, sit as full members and speak for Alderney on the delegated matters.

Sark sends nobody. Its own parliament is the Chief Pleas, and it kept a feudal form of government into the twenty-first century. Until 2008 the Chief Pleas comprised 40 unelected tenants, heirs of the families that colonised the island under a patent of Elizabeth I in 1565, and 12 elected deputies. In April 2008 the laws were changed to introduce universal suffrage, and in December 2008 Sark held the first election to a new 28-member Chief Pleas, according to Britannica. The Wikipedia account of the Bailiwick gives the Chief Pleas 18 elected members. Justice on Sark is administered by the court of the seneschal, with appeals to the Royal Court in Guernsey.

The ten parishes of Guernsey form a fourth layer. Each is run by a Douzaine of twelve or more elected douzeniers, the senior of whom is the Doyen, and two elected constables carry out its decisions for terms of one to three years. The two Wikipedia accounts disagree on a douzenier's term, one giving four years and the other six. The Douzaines levy an occupiers' rate on property to fund parish administration.

Who speaks for Guernsey abroad

The Bailiwick is separate from the United Kingdom and not independent of it. The British government is responsible for its defence and for its formal international, intergovernmental and consular representation, and for some areas of policy such as nationality law, while the Bailiwick still has a separate international identity. Guernsey, Alderney and Sark each raise their own taxation.

Islanders have never had representation in the House of Commons, and they had none in the European Parliament. Those without a qualifying vote in the United Kingdom as overseas voters were excluded from the 2016 referendum on European Union membership. Guernsey was never a member of the European Union. Under Protocol 3 of the United Kingdom's 1972 Treaty of Accession it was treated as part of the European Community for the free trade in goods, and that arrangement ended with Brexit. From 2021 free travel to the continent ceased and visitors from the island needed international driving licences. In 2010 the Bailiwick, pooling resources with Jersey, opened an office in Brussels to advise the Channel Islands' governments on European matters.

The island holds its own seats in several bodies. It has been a member of the British-Irish Council since 1999, represented by the president of the Policy and Resources Committee. It competes in the Commonwealth Games in its own right, though it is not a Commonwealth member in its own right. The Royal Mail relinquished the island's postal service in 1969, and the Universal Postal Union then recognised Guernsey. Full independence has been discussed repeatedly, with proposals ranging from dominion status to a federal state joining the two bailiwicks, in which Guernsey and Jersey would keep their own domestic affairs and be treated abroad as one state.