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New Members of STSB
- President: Mark Helyar 6980
- Vice President: Andy Niles 5846
- Member: Bruno Kay-Mouat 6051
The Island needs a big picture approach
2024 was a bad year for transport connectivity and most particularly for Aurigny as its plans for managing the transition from the Embraer Jet sale to new ATRs went from bad to worse. It culminated in a disastrous PR event in which a late inbound aircraft had to return to the UK when it was within minutes of arriving – after the Airport refused to stay open long enough to permit it to land. To be fair, Aurigny had certainly tried the patience of Airport staff for a considerable period beforehand – as its arrangements for temporary aircraft whilst awaiting the new ATRs just fell to pieces.
With both these entities entirely owned by the Island and falling under the mandate of STSB, travellers simply could not fathom how the left and right hands seemed unable to work effectively together. Throw in the ongoing problems with Alderney’s runway for which Aurigny have been the only airline to undertake the Public Service Obligation (subsidised by Guernsey), add a bit of a scare over sea links in 2023 and our Island connectivity has never felt more tenuous. The Airport loses substantial amounts of money every year. St Peter Port Harbour needs some £60 million on essential maintenance. Aurigny will inevitably return to a deficit for 2024. The only bright thing on the horizon is that finally, we have a contract with Brittany Ferries for the next 15 years.
What this catalogue of woe exposes is that our subscale size as a market for air travel in particular cannot be sustained without subsidy and despite Aurigny’s attempts to at least break even – it has probably run itself too lean and consequently it has negatively impacted its reliability. There is another issue – that of the mandate and its prosecution by STSB. With both Guernsey Water and Guernsey Electricity also in need of considerable capital investment alongside the Harbour and another of its entities (Guernsey Waste) also requiring subsidy – it is not just the transport elements of the mandate which need to be revisited within the context of a wider plan for STSB.
Turning to internal Transport issues, we are told repeatedly that the much vaunted Integrated Transport Strategy requires further penalisation of car owners (and most particularly single occupant vehicles), in the attempt to force the use of both smaller vehicles and impose expensive electric vehicles on Islanders too. And does anybody see any less congestion on our Island roads as a consequence? What any vehicle drive does see very regularly, are lots of cars piled up, driving at a speed imposed by a single cyclist on a regular basis – all in the name of Active Travel. This doesn’t sound like a Strategy – unless it really is the intention to get rid of cars altogether, something not altogether unimaginable given ‘mobility’ plans for the North of the Island announced by E&I.
What’s to be done?
Well, in the first place, this is yet another example of the challenges the Island (and indeed the Bailiwick) is faced with due to its small size. The second recurring theme is that the way in which Government has organised itself into Committee silos actually exacerbates the lack of joined up thinking. All Islanders rely on transport both within the Island and to and from the Island. almost all our freight, particularly essentials such as food are again a transport-related consideration. A single Committee with overall responsibility could cross subsidise between these various services moving from beyond purely ‘user pays’ by pooling some of the associated revenues.
Undoubtedly, some degree of subsidy will remain – our size pretty much guarantees that. But again, maybe in common with the concept of Universal entitlement as described in the Health arena, it might be possible to get to a point whereby travel costs more broadly could become more affordable. This is further evidence that dealing with issues in isolation as forced upon the Assembly due to the current Machinery of Government simply cannot be relied upon any longer.
Quite a lot of work has been commissioned to look at the options for commercialising most of the STSB operations. However, whilst driving greater efficiencies in the component parts is essential, a presumption that simply compartmentalising each of them will provide more cost-effective results is counter-intuitive when the options for increasing market share and therefore economies of scale are next to zero. The Island needs a big picture approach here to overcome the natural limitations of being a subscale market.
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