Government Departments are in the process of preparing their business plans for the next three years. This year, they are taking into account the recommendations that have been made by the six strategic objectives groups, something, which has never happened before in SHG.

Over the past two weeks, Financial Secretary Bob Dolan has been meeting with Heads of Department along with the Government Economist Adrian Green. During these meetings, Adrian has been explaining the groups’ recommendations to Heads of Department, and these will be reflected in departmental business plans and budgets for 2004 to 2007. In addition, Departments are including strategies that they themselves have deemed necessary in order to ensure that the strategic objectives are met.

In some cases, Departments have had to put more or less money into particular areas, but in other cases they have had to make changes, which will not affect their budgets.

The thirteen Government departments have to prepare business plans every year showing what they intend to achieve, how they intend to achieve it, and what resources they require in order to achieve it. For example, the Education Department wants to ensure that students have teachers, and one of the ways of doing this is to engage teachers from overseas when local teachers cannot be recruited. The Education Department also wants to get people trained in the vocational field so vocational instructors have been hired to teach these courses at Prince Andrew School. Since the Strategic Objectives groups have considered vocational training to be of great importance, this will be developed further in the future.

Business plans should be completed by the end of September this year and these together with supporting budgets will be used when negotiating the next three-year aid package with the Department For International Development.

DFID supports the strategic planning concept and SHG will need to show DFID how the proposed three-year budget will be used to achieve the national strategic objectives.