OVER the last few months, a group of local and UK businessmen have been working on a long-term, integrated waste and sewage solution for the island and have now formed the Longue Hougue Project Development Company.

STATES members have just passed the £80.4m. airport development project and appointed the preferred contractor Lagan Construction.

GUERNSEY AIRPORT has clocked up more than £10m. in new costs since the development project started in 2009, it has emerged.

Speaking over the weekend, Guernsey’s Public Services minister gave a pretty good impersonation of someone detached from reality by saying that how businesses respond to the price rises he intends to trigger by ratcheting up charges at the ports was really not his problem.

AT A time when Guernsey is closing wards because of a shortage of nurses, has failed to find any savings under the much vaunted Financial Transformation Programme and has a stalled anti-poverty programme that forces a 72-year-old woman back to work, it is gratifying that Public Services is resolutely focused on the important issues.

NEWS that a consortium has been formed to promote and, if necessary, finance and build a Guernsey waste park that would deal with all refuse as well the island’s sewage inevitably draws the focus on to the process by which any preferred solution will be reached.

A CALL yesterday for there to be a secret ballot in the States to decide whether members of Public Services should be sacked or not is a disturbing indication of just how little progress there has been in trying to adapt Guernsey’s government for the 21st century.

PUBLIC Services easily survived a vote of no confidence yesterday.

POLITICS being what it is, there will be many undercurrents to this week’s debate on the vote of no confidence in the Public Services Department.

WITH Suez dead and buried – for there can surely be no return – the Public Services Department must wake from its States-induced coma.