Retired islanders24% of the roll · turnout ×1.35
-11.4What you did0.0
Where it leaves them-11.4
On a pension, using health and social care most heavily, and the most reliable voters on the island.
Guernsey · The 2026 Budget
The 2026 Budget runs a deficit of £47.8m before investment returns. Close it. Every figure you start from is a real line in that Budget, down to individual schools, the prison and the dairy. But the island answers back: raise a duty too far and the revenue walks out of the door.
Then the harder half. Every line you cut is somebody’s service and, under island-wide voting, every one of those somebodies votes for you personally — in 2025 the last seat went by 21 votes, and the deputy who missed it was the sitting President of Policy & Resources. Leaving the deficit alone is not the safe way out either: on the rate the pay bill has actually grown, it reaches nearly £70m by the next election on its own, and a different bench starts collecting the seven signatures that lodge a requête.
Source: P&R 2026 Tax Reform Package: 3% raises £55m · derived: per-point yield scaled pro-rata
Source: Budget 2026: individuals £371.5m · derived: per-penny yield scaled pro-rata, ignores allowances
Source: P&R 2026 Tax Reform Package: £6m
Source: P&R 2026 Tax Reform Package: £10m
Source: P&R 2026 Tax Reform Package: £8m
Source: P&R 2026 Tax Reform Package: £7m
Source: P&R 2026 Tax Reform Package: costs £28m
Source: Budget 2026
Source: Budget 2026: +5% raised £437k in real terms for 2026
Source: Budget 2026
Source: Budget 2026
Source: Budget 2026: already rising 13.3% for 2026
Source: Budget 2026
Source: Budget 2026
Payments to outside providers for care the States does not deliver itself: nursing and residential homes, off-island treatment the island cannot provide, and third-sector contracts.
Assessed care packages for adults with physical, sensory or learning disabilities, and older people, whether delivered at home or in residential settings.
Running the Princess Elizabeth Hospital: wards, surgery, A&E, maternity and the clinical staff who deliver them.
Prescription and hospital medicines, including the high-cost drugs bought in from off-island suppliers.
Child protection, looked-after children, fostering and adoption, and the social workers who carry the statutory duty.
District nursing, community mental health, therapies and other care delivered outside the hospital so people are not admitted or can be discharged sooner.
HSC’s own finance, HR, governance and strategy staff, distinct from the corporate services run centrally for every committee.
Diagnostics, labs, imaging and other clinical support services that sit behind every ward and clinic.
Health promotion, screening, immunisation and the smoking cessation and substance use work funded alongside the tobacco and alcohol duty rises.
Facilities, catering, portering and the day-to-day running of HSC buildings and sites.
Medical leadership, consultant management and clinical governance across the hospital.
Maintaining and managing HSC’s buildings, from the hospital estate to community clinics.
The independent officer who chairs Children’s Hearings, the tribunal deciding compulsory measures for children in need of protection.
What your budget sets in motion. Where a duty rise drives trade off the books, the lost revenue is already netted off the figures above, so the gauge shows what the States would actually collect rather than what the rate card implies.
Nothing triggered yet. The Budget as passed sets nothing new in motion.
In 2025 that seat went at 5,458votes, and the sitting President of Policy & Resources missed it by 21.
A requête takes the measure off you before the term is out, and on this standing you finish outside the 38. The Budget you were remembered for is one the Assembly overturned.
The same measures, sequenced differently, are a different political event. Act in your first year and the anger has four years to fade before polling day, and the books have four years to heal. Defer it and you meet the anger at full strength, with a deficit that the pay bill has spent the whole term making worse. Nothing below changes what you have chosen — only when it bites.
The dashed line is what happens if nobody does anything. It is not flat, and that is the entire argument for acting: on the rate the core-government pay bill actually grew at over the last decade — 5.09% a year — spending outruns revenue, so the −£47.8m you inherited becomes −£67.4m by the election without a single decision being taken.
Every bloc feels two things at once: what you did to them, which fades, and where the island ends up, which does not. A bloc can be furious about a measure and still better off for it — and a bloc you never touched will still turn on you if the hole is left open, because they are the ones who depend on what it eventually closes.
On a pension, using health and social care most heavily, and the most reliable voters on the island.
Schools, pre-school places, Family Allowance and the cost of everything. Squeezed from both directions.
Outside finance and outside the States: retail, construction, hospitality, trades. Feel duties and GST first.
The States is the island's largest employer at 5,230 FTE in core government alone. A pay-bill cut is their household budget.
The sector the 20p flat rate is marketed on. Mobile, well-informed, and the first to price in a change of regime.
Absorb employer costs and GST compliance personally. Vocal, organised, and they turn out.
Most exposed to a flat tax on spending and to any cut in Income Support. Least likely to be on the roll and voting.
The chamber is not the electorate, and it does not have to wait for an election. Note the fiscal hawks: they are provoked by the hole, not by the medicine, which is why there is no version of this page where doing nothing keeps the room quiet.
GST was the defining question of the 2025 election. This bench was elected to say no to it, and to a rising standard rate.
Will trade almost any tax rise for the hospital, the schools and the benefits bill. A cut to a service line is what moves them.
Angered by the hole, not by the medicine. Leave the deficit open and this is the bench that starts collecting signatures.
Watching employer costs, the 20p rate and whether the island still looks like somewhere to run a company.
Tests every measure by who pays for it as a share of what they have. A flat tax on spending fails that test.
Elected in Alderney, not in the island-wide poll, and immovable on the lifeline air link and the breakwater.
The Rules of Procedure give a minority three ways to act between elections, and each one needs the same signatures: “any seven Members (but not more than seven)”. Not at least seven — exactly seven. Seven of forty is a low bar by design, so a government that has lost a bench has lost the initiative long before it loses a vote.
Seven members put their names to a formal statement that you have handled this badly. It does not remove you, and it is not meant to: it is the shot across the bows, and it goes in the Billet for everyone to read.
Seven members can put their own proposition to the States over your head. If it carries, the Assembly has legislated around you.
The seven must first write to every member of Policy & Resources inviting them to resign, and wait 5 working days. If the motion then carries, the whole Committee — you included — is deemed to have resigned, and the States elects your replacement at that same meeting.
The constitutional machinery is real and quoted. The seats, the majority, the 7-signature threshold, the 5-working-day invitation to resign before a no-confidence motion may be lodged, and the fact that a carried motion removes the whole of Policy & Resources at that same meeting — all of that is Rules 21, 22 and 28. So is the 2025 result the seat calculation is anchored on.
The behavioural model is entirely this tool’s. Nobody has measured how a Guernsey bloc responds to a duty rise, how long the island remembers a cut, or how readily a given bench reaches for a signature. The numbers below are assumptions chosen to be plausible and internally consistent, and they are the part to argue with.
No deputy is named or modelled. The chamber returned 35 independents in 2025 and divides issue by issue, so the factions here are an orientation model sized to the real 38plus Alderney’s 2. A position on a hypothetical budget is not a recorded vote, and this page does not invent one for anybody. For how deputies have actually voted, the scorecard is the place to look.
Alderney is in the chamber, not the electorate. Alderney elects its own two representatives and takes no part in the island-wide poll, so the Alderney levers move the signature count and never the poll rating.
| Assumption | Value | Status | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Margin at the last seat | 21 votes | Published | 5,458 votes took the 38th seat; the sitting President of Policy & Resources polled 5,437 and was not returned. |
| Signatures for a requête, censure or no-confidence motion | Exactly 7 | Published | Rules of Procedure of the States of Deliberation, as at 6 February 2025, Rules 28(1), 22(1) and 21(1): "any seven Members (but not more than seven)". |
| Votes to carry a proposition | 21 of 40 | Published | The States of Deliberation is 38 People’s Deputies plus Alderney’s 2 representatives. |
| Retired share of the electorate | 24% | Anchored | Pension age and over are 23.8% of the voting-age population (States of Guernsey Data & Analysis, Quarterly Population Bulletin, Q4 2023). Used directly as the bloc's share of the roll. |
| Public-sector share of the electorate | 14% | Anchored | 5,230 core-government FTE is published; scaling that to voting households is modelled. |
| Pay-bill growth in the projection | 5.09% a year | Published | The compound rate the core-government pay bill actually ran at, 2015-2025, from the States Accounts pay appendices. |
| Revenue and non-pay spending growth | 3.0% and 2.5% a year | Modelled | This tool’s assumption. No published States forecast is used. The gap between these and the pay-bill rate is what makes inaction expensive here, so they are the numbers to challenge first. |
| The other six bloc shares, and every turnout weight | See the blocs | Modelled | A plausible split of the roll, summing to 100%. The ordering of turnout by age is the ordinary finding elsewhere, not a Guernsey measurement. |
| Bloc sensitivities and faction sizes | See the grid | Modelled | Entirely this tool’s. The chamber returned 35 independents in 2025 and divides issue by issue, so the factions are an orientation model sized to the real 38 plus 2, never a claim about how a named member would vote. |
| Anger decay by pace | 40% / 70% / 100% still live at the poll | Modelled | No measurement of Guernsey political memory exists. The direction is the well-established one: costs imposed early are discounted by polling day, and this tool assumes four years roughly halves them. |
Nothing changed yet. Move any lever and your choices are itemised here.
Guernsey is not the only small island balancing a budget this way. Jersey and the Isle of Man face the same pressures with different tax bases, and neither has an easier answer.
Revenue 767m against spend 748m, a 48m deficit before investment returns
No GST or VAT; 20% flat income tax; no general corporate tax
The only Crown Dependency with no broad-based consumption tax at all, which is the gap the Tax Reform Package is built around.
Budget 2026
Government Plan 2026 puts net revenue expenditure at £1,278m; the Fiscal Policy Panel says planned spending exceeds income and leans on borrowing and reserves
5% GST; up to 20% standard-rate income tax; a personal exemption of £21,250
Jersey has run a GST since 2008 and still shows a Government Plan that spends ahead of revenue, run alongside a larger capital programme including new healthcare facilities.
Government of Jersey, Government Plan 2026-2029; Fiscal Policy Panel
2026/27 revenue spending of about £1.47 billion, with a structural deficit of close to £98m bridged by £126m drawn from reserves
20% VAT and customs union with the UK; income tax at 10% then 21%, personal allowance £17,000
The Isle of Man shares a VAT and customs union with the UK rather than running its own consumption tax, and is drawing down reserves to close its own gap through the later 2020s.
Isle of Man Treasury, Budget 2026/27
Every baseline is exact. Revenue of £767.5m against expenditure of £748.5m gives a revenue surplus of £19.0m; below-the-line costs of £66.8m (trading entity impairments £3.3m, non-capitalised project costs £25.0m, depreciation £32.2m, interest £6.2m) produce the £47.8mdeficit. The spending detail is the Budget’s own service-area analysis, and each committee’s lines sum to its published cash limit. A unit test in this repository asserts those reconciliations, so a mistyped figure fails the build rather than reaching this page.
Aurigny sits outside all of it, which is the point of including it. It is a States-owned company under the Trading Supervisory Board, not a general revenue cash limit, so its losses never appear in the £47.8m. Moving the Aurigny levers changes the separate figure in the bar above, not the main gauge. The three loss-making trading entities do move the main gauge, because their combined deficits are exactly the £3.287m impairment inside it.
The elasticities below are this tool’s assumptions, not States forecasts. Raising a duty does not raise proportionate revenue, so each one carries a price elasticity: quantity falls as the rate rises, and past a threshold a second, steeper elasticity represents trade moving to duty-free allowances, personal imports and illicit supply. The States have not published Guernsey elasticities, and these are ordinary published ranges for each class of goods rather than local measurements. They are the numbers to argue with.
| Lever | Base | Steepens to | Evidence it is real |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tobacco duty | -0.6 | -1.3 past +20% | Budget 2026 states tobacco revenue reflects "increased duty and reduced demand"; revenue rose about £5m when travel stopped in 2020-21, sizing the off-island channel against an £8.4m base |
| Alcohol duties | -0.5 | -0.9 past +30% | The same duty-free and personal-import channel |
| Motor fuel duty | -0.3 | -0.6 past +40% | Fuel is hard to import privately; erosion comes from mileage and electric switching |
| Document duty | -0.7 | -1.2 past +25% | Budget 2026 calls receipts "highly sensitive to shifts in property transaction volumes" and carries a £2m risk on it |
| Vehicle first registration | -0.8 | -1.4 past +60% | Purchase timing is easily deferred |
| Income tax rate | -0.25 | -0.7 above 23p | Budget 2026 carries a £5m risk on a 1% forecast error, showing how mobile the base is; the Standard Charge regime makes high earners especially so |
| Commercial TRP | -0.15 | -0.4 past +50% | Property cannot leave, but occupancy and use can change |
| Domestic TRP | -0.05 | no steepening | Close to unavoidable, which is why it raises reliably |
GST is deliberately given no elasticity: the States’ own £55m at 3% is used at face value, on the assumption their costing already nets off compliance. What is added instead is the published running cost of £2.5m a year, which lands on the spending side the moment you adopt it. The one-off build of £3.6m to £6.1m, within an £8.65m to £12.2m total reform bill, sits outside an annual budget and so is flagged rather than charged.