OUR disclosures today about high salaries at Guernsey Post indicate the mountain it has to climb in order to ensure it has a future.

When a rival company comes in here, or in Jersey, it will face similar office, storage, transport and Royal Mail costs. Will it put a man on a bike for £37,000 a year including a final-salary, index- linked pension? Will it start business here with a pension scheme that has a £9.3m. deficit, equivalent to £34,200 per employee?

These are substantial challenges for Guernsey Post and it is to his credit that the acting chief executive says the business is facing up to them. Islanders will wish him well, for there is much affection for one of the island’s best-known brands and we all want to see it continue and flourish.

However, what the regulator has been saying for years has come to pass – GPL wasn’t efficient enough and customers were paying the price. It is no coincidence that it rarely had to advertise for staff or that it has remained so strongly unionised.

In many respects, however, Guernsey Post is a microcosm of the economic reality facing the States of Guernsey and the public sector as a whole.

Government is burdened – or rather, the taxpayer is burdened – with costs, manning, attitudes and practices that are unsustainable but, unlike the utilities, it does not have a regulator to force it to face up to economic facts.

Instead, as the States Strategic Plan out last week indicated, departments are still spending accumulated savings at a time of stringency while allegedly embarking on a financial transformation programme.

The reality is that government is an organisation out of control.

For instance, it is not clear whether Education last year took on the additional 50 full-time equivalents Treasury said it did, the 14 Education says it did or the 25 extra headcount indicated in the States accounts.

Nor is government doing anything about the cost to the taxpayer of the pension scheme, the same scheme that the regulator says is damaging the utilities. Guernsey Electricity’s net pension deficit has doubled in just 12 months to £10.3m., a deterioration of £12,300 every day.

The deficit in the States scheme is equivalent to £7,000 per taxpayer – but that’s being ignored.