After a fair amount of confusion emanating from the Cabinet Office, the people of Bermuda now know that Premier and Tourism Minister Dr. Ewart Brown has retained a development expert to advise the Government on phasing in hotel development so that it does not cause undue strain on the infrastructure.

That's a wise step, given the ongoing controversy over Southlands and the host of other hotel developments in the pipeline.

But it also suggests a major change for Dr. Brown, who earlier this year was bemoaning the lack of hotel rooms on the Island and predicting that Bermuda would have reached its "optimum" goal of 10,000 hotel beds by 2010.

Bermuda currently has something like 6,000 beds on offer, and the 10,000 "bed limit" has not been seen since the late 1980s.

It is worth noting that even in 1992, when Bermuda was just starting to recover from the worst recession since the Second World War and a number of hotels had closed, there were 5,187 people employed in the hotels. According to Government's own statistics, the highest employment levels in recent years came in 2005 when 3,240 were employed.

So it is reasonable to assume that if Bermuda did reach that magical number of 10,000 beds by, say, 2010, it would need an additional 2,000 or so workers, who by definition would have to come from abroad.

It is this problem, and the strain that this would cause to the Island's already creaking infrastructure, that has propelled many of the protests over Southlands and other properties.

Dr. Brown seems - and we use the word advisedly - to have belatedly taken this on board.

That's because it was just a few months ago that he was saying: "We are confident that by 2010 we will see exceptional new infrastructure that will make a substantial contribution to enhancing and modernising our tourism product. In just a little over two years from now we will have reached our optimum goal of 10,000 hotel beds.

"We expect that when new properties like Newstead, Harmony, Ariel Sands and the Ritz Carlton are completed, we will have raised our hotel competitiveness to new heights."

Now, in October, there seems to at least be a recognition that if hotel development takes place too quickly, it could cause serious overheating.

So the decision to try and phase whatever development takes place makes sense.

Few dispute that Bermuda needs additional hotel rooms, or that an entirely new development would raise the bar all round.

But Bermuda's room shortage this year has largely been caused by the closures of the Harmony Club and the Wyndham, both of which are due to re-open, although the Wyndham will be closed until 2009.

But as Dr. Brown himself pointed out, rooms will also be coming on at Newstead and Ariel Sands, along with the Reefs and Tuckers Point. In addition, both Fairmont hotels will be getting substantial renovations, which may not see additional rooms, but will see substantial upgrades.

With that in mind, there's a good argument to be made that rushing development of the Jumeirah resort, wherever it ends up, the city Ritz Carlton and the Grand Atlantic resort on the site of the old Golden Hind may be too much too soon. And one must bear in mind that there is still the Club Med development as well.

It can be argued that there is no guarantee that any of the brand new developments will actually go ahead, not least because it is not clear if any of them have their finances in place. It would be foolhardy for Bermuda to place all of its eggs in one basket, assuming that this project or that project will inevitably go ahead. But there is a risk that if all projects come off, Bermuda would be faced with a surfeit of rooms and an unendurable strain on the Island's finite resources.

That needs to be guarded against. Bermuda certainly needs a viable tourism industry and it needs to keep expanding and improving its "plant". But it also needs to be take care that it does so in a careful and planned manner, and this is one of the few areas of the economy where Government can regulate growth with some ease. It should do so.