AN ANNOUNCEMENT today that the Public Services Department is considering the commercialisation of the ports and Guernsey Water is an encouraging sign that at least some areas of the States are prepared to modify their thinking for changing circumstances.

As we and others have said before, while government has to provide certain services, it need not run them. In fact, just to take the narrow examples of Guernsey Post and Guernsey Electricity, it is clearly better if the States is removed from operational matters. As soon as the dead hand of bureaucracy and the civil service ‘one size fits all’ mentality was removed from those two organisations, they became leaner, more efficient and much happier places to work.

The other benefit was that the professional managers were able to do what they do best – take commercial decisions in the interests of customers, staff and the operation without (in their view) unhelpful political considerations getting in the way.

Treasury and Resources, as shareholder, has a memorandum of understanding with the commercialised entities in terms of how they operate and the expectations T&R, as representative of the taxpayer as owner, has of them.

What is not generally known is the MoU also quantifies what the utilities can expect from the politicians. Islanders will not be surprised that the impetus for that came from the commercialised operations themselves.

The deputies and civil servants, however, were taken aback when the utility bosses said, ‘Yes, we’ll sign this when we know what you are going to do for us’. The concept floored T&R. What finally emerged in the MoU was an undertaking that the States would not waste the utilities’ time and that political decisions would be taken in a speedy manner.

That says much about how government works and how out of touch it is with commercial – some would say real-world – actuality and PSD is to be commended for looking to shake off such thinking.

There is much work ahead in deciding what the best commercialisation model is but one of the first steps should be to have Guernsey Water vacate its South Esplanade offices and release what is a prime site in a semi-financial part of Town.