Gozo has a problem. All right, it probably has several, if not many, starting with over-development.

But high on the list is jobs: there aren’t enough of them to keep youngsters on the island after they have left school, so they are forced to take the ferry to find work on the other island. We are constantly being told that it is so.

Statistics for Gozo are dodgy, firstly because we no longer know, nor have we any way of counting, how many people actually live here. But a figure of 3,000 regular commuters has been quoted, about half of who work in government departments.

What, we might wonder, do they do when they get there? I ask, because I don’t know the answer, but I would bet that the majority are sitting at desks, inputting data, compiling figures and reports and some, even, responding to online enquiries from taxpayers.

What I would doubt is that few of them are there, in government offices on Malta, because they need to come face to face with Joe Public simply because that’s where the majority of Joes live.

I pause, momentarily, to mention that the other, newer, big business in these islands is the online gaming industry. There’s a clue in the name: it is online. It doesn’t matter where its employees sit: for all the punters know they could be dealing with croupiers or bingo-callers on Filfla or Fiji.

So here’s a question: why doesn’t the government move some of this computer-based work to Gozo?

I remember, for example, that when the pandemic struck, Identity Malta announced that it would no longer conduct any business over the counter, and that all transactions would thereafter be online. And why not? What difference does it make, where your personal records are inputted or sourced? Why couldn’t pensions or income tax or car-licensing be handled in Gozo, rather than in Malta?

Why, indeed, couldn’t keyboard typing be done from home (we learnt, pretty quickly, that a lot of it could be, efficiently, confidentially and securely, from government work to banking).

Why not move some computer work from Malta to Gozo?- Revel Barker

While one can argue that any minister, and his own immediate cabinet team, needs to be as near as possible to the seat of government, the same does not apply to the desk-bound inputters and guardians of data.

Some readers will be vexed by my drawing comparisons with the UK, but over there, faced with areas of high unemployment, they moved some of the big government departments around the country: driver-licensing and vehicle records to Swansea (south Wales); NHS England to Leeds, West Yorkshire; revenue and customs and pensions benefits to Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north-east.

Why not move some – or, indeed – a lot (say 1,500 jobs worth) of computer work from Malta to Gozo?

After all, we are told that IT is one thing in which Gozitan youngsters excel. It appears to be their birthright: we see babies in pushchairs with a dummy in their mouths and an iPad on their laps as they are wheeled into pubs. There’s nothing like getting the right start in life.

And that brings us back to development on Gozo, where there are plots in Xewkija that have stood vacant since before the parents of those babies were born. An industrial estate does not need to be about manufacturing: it can be for warehousing, food-processing, or about computer in-putting. In short, it should be about job creation.

Where there’s a will (my old Granny used to say), there’s a way. And what’s lacking from central government is the will. Perhaps they want to keep all the best, pensionable, white collar jobs on Malta, solely because it’s the “main” island. But all the words about Gozo’s ageing population and the lack of jobs available for youngsters ring hollow if nobody is going to do anything about it.

It might be helpful if the ministry could tell us what is actually in the Gozo Plan – apart, I mean, from whatever’s been in so many of the previous plans: finishing the road from the harbour to the Qala highway, and from there to Nadur… the Marsalforn breakwater, the cruise-liner quay, an extended marina at Mġarr… (although the air link seems to have been forgotten and subsumed by nonsense about a tunnel that nobody actually wants).

Presumably, they would all involve work that Gozitans could do.

There was a bit of a fanfare recently to announce a new Standing Committee on Gozo. We don’t know what it does, apart, probably, from taking its meetings sitting down. But it is well past the time, surely, for it to get off its backsides and do something useful for the island.

Like creating and relocating some jobs.

Revel Barker, ex Fleet Street reporter and long-time resident on Gozo