anyone taking the trouble to read the Office of Utility Regulation’s consultation paper on Guernsey Post Ltd’s proposed tariff changes will be struck by one thing: the level of justification the utilities watchdog requires.
That covers statements of ‘fact’, policy changes, details of costs faced by the business and the rationale behind any request to increase postal prices.
In the latest round of discussions, the OUR is challenging assumptions made by Guernsey Post leading to its recommendations on size-based pricing and wonders, in effect, whether more competition will provide postal users, the customers, with better value.
It is an exceptionally forensic approach. To be on the receiving end is time-consuming, frustrating and, given around 75% of GPL’s costs are imposed by the Royal Mail, possibly questionable.
Yet as a result of the OUR’s earlier involvement, Guernsey Post has shed substantial costs, modernised its working practices and is operating a leaner business. What the OUR is now asking is whether that process can be shown to have come to an end. Its report makes it clear that it does not think it has.
While the regulated utilities might not relish the OUR’s attention, its involvement certainly prevents complacency.
The question, then, is why taxpayers’ interests are not equally subject to the gaze of an attentive watchdog. They substantially outnumber customers of the individual utilities but have no say in where their taxes go or how much they are.
Yes, there are the Public Accounts and Scrutiny Committees, but they are toothless by comparison.
True, the OUR has substantially more resources and an entire legal framework backing it up. Yet PAC and Scrutiny have around 45,000 interested taxpayers to satisfy and an annual expenditure this year of £311m. to vet. But there is scarcely an islander (except within the States system itself) who believes they are receiving value for money.
When Guernsey’s ‘new’ machinery of government was being pieced together, the powerbrokers of the day saw to it that the scrutiny process put in place was a shadow of what was actually needed.
Why? Because the system would crumble under questioning like that from the OUR.