St Helena : St Helena Executive Council Report 16 to 29 July 2008
Submitted by Saint Helena Herald (Juanita Brock) 02.08.2008 (Article Archived on 16.08.2008)
H. E. the Governor Mr Andrew Gurr reports on this vital St Helena Government Committee meeting.
St Helena ExCo Report: 16 – 29th July 2008
Today’s Executive Council was shorter than those held over the past few weeks. We began with a look at the Child Welfare Bill. This is a substantial document of 118 pages and we have been helped in the drafting of it by the National Children’s Homes in the UK. The current Child Care Ordinance 1997 has been in force for 10 years and the legislation in it is considered to be outdated and unable to provide adequately for the promotion of the welfare and rights of the Child in accordance with international best practice.
But do we need fresh legislation to enable us to be able to look after our children properly? Surely we are capable of doing that without needing the law to tell us how to do it? Of course that is so. But in enacting this kind of legislation we are facing up to the fact that there are some children in our society who will need this kind of protection, and the better the quality of the law in this area, the better it is for society as a whole.
When in place this Bill will ensure that we establish a Safeguarding Children’s Board as well as setting up a structure to regulate Children’s Homes, private fostering, child-minding and day care. Other implications will be the establishment of a social worker with specific responsibility for Children’s affairs, the training of staff where necessary, provision of expenses for fostering and transport for home visits.
As you can appreciate this is a wide ranging piece of legislation and it was agreed that we will hold a full discussion in Information LegCo in the near future prior to it returning to ExCo and then progressing to public consultation.
We then discussed the fact that the purchaser of the Consulate Hotel should be able to hold the ownership of the hotel through a limited company. Consideration was given to the various differences between individual ownership and corporate ownership and it was decided that in this case there was no relevant change as the same individuals were involved. Thus I agreed to the recommendation that we agree to the transfer.
The two Money Laundering Bills were then considered and a brief report on the public consultation was given. Exco recommended that these bills now pass through to Legislative Council.
The next matter considered was that of the bunker surcharge on the RMS. When the fares had to be raised on the RMS on 6th March last, we agreed that the bunker surcharge should be moved up and down depending on the applicable cost of fuel. Fuel has risen in price over the past 4 months to the extent that we now have to raise the surcharge from 14.46% of the fare to 22.23%. This is actually a rise of 6.8% in the existing rates and will apply immediately.
Under Any Other Business we expressed our disappointment that the forthcoming CPA visit by MPs has had to be postponed. This has happened because the rescheduling of the RMS has led to all kinds of changes both to the visitors and to us, and it had become virtually impossible to continue with the visit next month. We are now discussing suitable alternative times with the CPA.
At the beginning of our meeting, as a background to the Child Welfare Bill, we had discussed the current issue of the misuse of alcohol among young people that seems to be responsible for so much anti-social behaviour at weekends. I mentioned that I had already discussed the matter with the Chief of Police and that we would be looking at a range of options as to how we might deal with the problem. It is a great pity when our freedom, that we treasure highly, has to be controlled in some way because of the behaviour of a minority and we will consider our action very carefully.
The meeting finished at about 11.20 am
AMG
29th July 2008
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