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Dave Jones

I heard John Curran this morning on the BBC saying that the critics of the OUR have got it all wrong and its all about protecting the consumer, can any of you tell me when that has happened and in any event he has missed the point, he also said that history shows that politicians are not the best people to run state owned utilities. Well it is to Guernsey history that Mr Curran should look because I and many others would argue strongly that it worked extremely well for decades before the OUR arrived on the scene. If we had not gone down the road of commercialisation, we not have needed the regulation or the regulator. It is the cost of regulation that has become an added burden to the consumer, 6 million pounds in fees so far has been paid by the utilities since the creation of the Office of Utility of Regulation. Who does Mr Curran think shoulders the burden of those costs? Well I can tell you, it is us the consumer, that he purports to protect, as the utilities have little choice other than to pass them on. So not much consumer protection going on there then?
The whole concept of commercialisation and regulation has been a complete failure and we had the opportunity this week to put our hands up as a government and admit it. It has produced very little other than an overblown Regulatory office and higher charges to the Guernsey people. I still see more adverts in the national press from time to time for even more staff. It has put at least one of our States owned utilities the Post Office at real financial risk and no amount of sticking plasters will improve matters, it might tidy up some of the regulatory issues but it will do nothing to stop the huge bill to the consumer from becoming even bigger in the future.
Regulation if we are to have it at all, should be low cost and high value to the consumer, not what we have at present which is high cost and low value. Early on in this latest report, it asks the question as to whether commercialisation of our utilities and the style of regulation we have adopted could ever work in a small community like ours where the State is the major shareholder of the companies involved.
They put it like this. “Is this type of animal destined for extinction in this type of environment?” I said in my speech that I think the answer to that question was always going to be “yes” and if the animal looks like the present OUR set up, then we should not wait for its natural extinction to occur, it should be taken out the back and put out of its misery now. How did we ever get to this point? And I take some responsibility, as I was in the States when the whole concept was put forward as an alternative to what we had at the time. We were told that commercialisation would lead to better services and lower charges because of efficiencies,
What on earth were we thinking of at the time? We created this mess purely because we are told in the original billet that it was the model they had “elsewhere,” that favourite cliché of the meddlers who never value what Guernsey already has, or how better we are at doing things than many other places. We yet again took advice from those who have no knowledge of the island and it’s tried and tested ways of running’s its affairs and because we have been gullible enough to listen to all this rubbish advice we have destroyed much of what was once good in this community. The problem is we (the States) can never admit we got it wrong and start to put it right and in this case we will just blunder on until we have wrecked these publicly owned utilities or made the cost of theses essential services unaffordable for many. I ask all of you, what has any of it really achieved? Well the process has in the main resulted in a very successful job creation plan for those in the regulation business, resulting in a small army of people trying to fix something that was never really broken in the first place. The thing I find absolutely incredulous, is that they only had to look across the water to see that the whole process has never worked properly in the UK. It just created a bunch of very wealthy utility bosses who frequently award themselves obscene bonuses for poor management, second-rate performance and with the public being fleeced by ever increasing prices. As for Guernsey, we went from having locally managed political utility boards, elected representatives who served the people and who gave their time on these boards for free.

To having commercialised boards with paid board members, much enhanced salaries for the utility management. Then the creation of the OUR, inconsistent pricing, and a real loss of confidence in the whole process by the public.

And as I keep repeating, it is the general public who are bearing the brunt of all the added burden of the fees and charges from these unnecessary changes and the chronic over regulation.

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4

rocquaine

Well I agree that we do not need the OUR and that utilities should be owned by the States.

It is unfair to suggest that it is the politicians fault that the schools are ‘in a mess’ – the matter runs much, much deeper than that.

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6

JJ Lehto

@ Rocquaine, so who is it fault for the terrible results at the high schools? Don’t forget that the politicians tried to hide the true state of affairs from the public.

I have no argument with Mr Jones. Whilst I don’t agree with all of his policies and postings, I think it is refreshing that he engages with the public, and he is definitely one of the best of a very bad bunch.

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