NEWS that Public Services is considering the benefits of commercialising parts of its operations could not – depending on your point of view – have come at a better or worse time.

What might, a few years ago, have seemed a rather dry academic argument about the role of Guernsey Airport and the harbours is now soaked through with historic meaning.

With Guernsey Post locked in legal battle with the OUR, Guernsey Electricity furious with the director-general’s team and deputies queuing up to sign a requete calling for the regulator to be reined in, the idea that several more States operations should go semi-private is seasoning to a nicely boiling pot.

But it is not just the timing as the placing of the PSD minister’s comments that is intriguing.

Guernsey Water – one of the bodies that might be commercialised – has, by any standards, had a good year.

Its customers love it, it does extremely well against UK standards, it makes a profit and is investing strongly in its future. What’s not to like?

Yet the minister chooses a foreword to Guernsey Water’s annual report for an announcement that a green paper on commercialisation will be taken to the States this year.

He then tells islanders that the OUR and National Audit Office believe that the utility could work well as a commercialised business ‘in the right circumstances’.

It is like the head teacher adding a few words to a pupil’s glowing end-of-term report and writing that he or she might do better if they changed schools.

Of course, there are obvious benefits to moving parts of the States into ‘the real world’.

Business leaders and this newspaper have long complained of a civil service and political inertia that stifles change and adds significantly to the cost base.

But that only works, of course, if the model is right. The ugly war between regulator and commercialised utilities is both costly and time-consuming.

Few could be certain that Guernsey Water would improve if brought into that environment.