PERHAPS the most intriguing – but unanswered – question to emerge from the rapidly developing farce over funding training in Guernsey is just what agendas lie behind the attack on the island’s highly-regarded GTA University Centre.

This newspaper, and others, were troubled by the motives of Commerce and Employment in launching a review of the agency and the report that has appeared justifies those fears.

At a stroke, the department’s consultant wants to pull the plug on an organisation that has been described as a jewel in the crown for the excellence of its work and which has helped literally thousands of islanders gain qualifications.

Instead, if C&E gets its way, a group of States departments and a brand new civil service bureaucracy will replace an independent, cost-effective and fleet-of-foot operation meeting industry’s needs with a centralised structure dictating what training should be provided.

If there was any evidence that the GTA University Centre was failing in some way and could not be repaired, then intervention or even replacement with something better would be justified. But that is not the case – and there is no evidence to suggest that it is.

Yes, the centre has a funding problem but that is attributable to the recession, C&E starving it of money and, now, the Guernsey Financial Services Commission’s unilateral decision to withhold funding in excess of £400,000 a year.

The significance of that should not be underestimated. In effect, based on a 2002 Billet d’Etat and the finance sector’s own understanding, that amounts to the GFSC trousering nearly half a million pounds of someone else’s money for its own purposes, thus ignoring a funding convention that goes back to at least 1996.

Why the commission has chosen to act in such a high-handed manner is not clear – but the speed with which the finance industry’s representative body has responded is very telling indeed – and threatens head-on conflict between the regulator and those he regulates.

That is not something the finance sector would do lightly, which is also very revealing.

So what really lies behind the C&E-GFSC pincer movement to crush the island’s premier provider of training?