Horace Camp argues MyGov’s collapse wasn’t a one-off mistake: weak leadership, unclear accountability, supplier overreach and a system without real senior consequences left taxpayers facing a £21.6m bill.
MyGov’s collapse has already been reported, but what matters now is how it happened—and what it says about how public projects are controlled.
Horace Camp’s argument is blunt: most islanders will never wade through the MyGov report, and that is exactly why it matters.. Once the language is stripped back, the story looks less like a tidy administrative hiccup and more like a modernisation promise that kept changing shape as difficulties grew.. The programme was eventually stopped after Policy & Resources intervened in August 2023, with the review concluding it could not be recovered by then.
The recorded bill is hard to ignore.. The review puts the total at £21.6m, with £16.2m going to Agilisys.. Even those figures, Camp says, are only the visible spending—and not the true economic cost of time, disruption, and follow-on work inside government.. He argues that nobody can seriously believe a project of this size consumed only what shows up on invoices.. There were officer hours swallowed by repeated meetings, re-drafts, fire-fighting, and damage limitation; and there was opportunity cost elsewhere in government where attention was diverted.
Camp also brings the numbers down to household reality.. Using Guernsey’s own latest population and employment bulletin—32,067 people employed or self-employed in June 2024—he estimates the MyGov cost works out to about £674 per working person.. For a typical home with two earners, he suggests it could mean well over £1,300.. It is not money spent on something tangible like a new hospital wing, a new school, or potholes being fixed; it is money spent on failure.
There is a second question that sits underneath the cost: what kept the machinery moving once it started to wobble.. Camp asks how many extra posts and temporary workarounds were created to keep delivery going, and whether those arrangements still exist today.. His suggestion is straightforward—Guernsey should consider zero-based budgeting rather than “business-as-usual” routines that allow posts and budgets to roll on by habit.
A key theme in Camp’s critique is that MyGov did not collapse in a single dramatic moment.. Instead, he describes a slow failure pattern familiar to the public sector: services re-scoped, workstreams re-badged, governance reset, and delivery scaled back.. Decisions, he says, were sometimes taken outside formal governance arrangements, with the review acknowledging opportunities to stop or slow spending—yet those opportunities were not taken.. In his view, the governance structure ended up operating less like a system of control and more like camouflage.
He points to the way accountability can be diluted when responsibility is spread across layers.. After a 2021 reset, there were reportedly more than 20 boards, groups and teams beneath the programme board.. Camp argues that healthy governance should sharpen accountability, but in a troubled organisation it can smother it—so no single person can clearly be said to own the outcome.. Even so, the review reportedly states the programme board held overall responsibility for MyGov and for the spending within it, which Camp says undermines the argument that ownership was impossible to pin down.
Supplier influence is another sharp edge in Camp’s account.. The review says external suppliers were granted excessive influence over areas that should have remained under States control.. He also highlights a scrutiny finding relating to Agilisys: the States’ retained technical expertise was considered totally inadequate to monitor the contract properly in its early years.. Camp treats that as more than a technical weakness, arguing it effectively meant the people paying the bills were not in a strong enough position to challenge the people collecting them.
The timing of scrutiny is where Camp turns from process critique to a question ordinary readers will likely ask: why scrutiny wasn’t closer to the ground earlier.. The Scrutiny Management Committee’s report into the future digital services contract with Agilisys was published on 27 January 2025, covering July 2022 to January 2025.. Camp frames that as evidence the damage was already largely done by the time proper scrutiny kicked in.. He argues that scrutiny done as post-mortem work cannot function as early warning, and he warns against cosy explanations that keep scrutiny comfortable instead of keeping it effective.
Financially, he also challenges the promise-versus-reality gap.. The original funding request projected annual recurring savings of £7.4m by 2021, but the review says only £1.3m of savings was reported—and that even this had limited evidence showing it was directly attributable to the programme.. Camp presents that mismatch as part of the wider story: chasing efficiencies, then ending up with a fraction of what was advertised, with the evidence supporting that fraction itself appearing shaky.
Yet the most pointed part of Camp’s analysis is the culture around consequences.. He argues the real scandal is not just that millions were lost, or that systems were weak, but that senior failure appears to be survivable.. The review reportedly says there was no clear framework to manage senior leadership conduct or capability, that performance management was not linked to MyGov delivery, and that there was limited evidence of individual accountability being identified or addressed where programmes failed.. In Camp’s reading, the structure allowed those near the top to operate without facing professional risk at the level most ordinary workers, traders, and small employers face.
Camp frames that mismatch as why public anger runs deep.. People miss a tax bill and they do not receive a soothing action plan.. Run a business badly and the market punishes you.. Fail repeatedly at work and you may lose your job.. In the States, he says, losses are socialised, responsibility is spread until it turns to vapour, and careers can float above the wreckage while the public pays in money, morale, services, and trust.
He ends with a warning that goes beyond one programme.. The review reportedly suggests issues seen in MyGov have been repeated across other transformational programmes, meaning the collapse may not have been a one-off accident.. Camp argues it could reflect a serious illness still untreated: too much money, too little scepticism, blurred accountability, and reliance on advisers and contractors, without personal jeopardy for those in command.. Until that changes—until senior failure creates real professional danger, scrutiny is conducted under bright light with records the public can test, and budgets are forced to justify themselves—Guernsey, he says, will keep producing polished explanations for failures that should have been stopped much sooner.. The underlying question remains the same: why those who burned the money do not seem to live under the same law of consequences as the people who earned it.