WHAT happens next in the unfolding drama surrounding the ending of the airport firefighters’ industrial action and the sacking/resignation of the States pay and conditions negotiating body may well be a defining moment in the evolution of the States of Guernsey as an effective government.

It will certainly help to reinforce public opinion of its fitness for purpose.

Members, and the Public Sector Remuneration Committee in particular, can continue to slug it out with the Policy Council or the Emergency Powers Authority over the use/abuse of executive authority or they can recognise that a decision had to be taken and just move on.

The PSRC is finished and will be replaced by something better. Any hope of reprieve was lost when the Association of Guernsey Civil Servants welcomed the ‘decisive action’ by the Policy Council, spoke of the PSRC contaminating employment issues and looked forward to things moving on to a new and more harmonious and rational level.

PSRC members seeking to have their resignations debated serves no purpose and will merely provide another opportunity for the States to highlight its worst trait: posturing about matters islanders consider to be trivial or irrelevant.

Attention needs to focus on establishing an effective body that links pay with performance and departmental priorities and safeguards taxpayers’ interests by ensuring settlements are at least part-funded by modernisation, headcount reductions and, where appropriate, buying out Spanish practices and agreeing no strike clauses.

The death of the PSRC is an enormous opportunity already recognised by the Policy Council and everyone else involved in public sector industrial relations. How States members react to that will be telling indeed.

Following this week’s scenes in the Assembly, the fear is that members will go into a form of self-preservation mode: if the Policy Council can pick off the PSRC like this, who next?

Deputies are right to hold the council to account for its actions – serious questions remain about what authority it had for sidelining another, properly mandated department – and that scrutiny process is vital.

As pressing, however, is getting in place a States Employment Board with the ability and resources to deal with the backlash from the firefighters’ settlement that the States earlier inaction made inevitable.