OUR set to take on air route licensing

COMMERCE and Employment wants to hand its responsibility for air route licensing to the Office of Utility Regulation and a 'hands off' approach to be adopted to encourage competition.

Feedback from the airlines is mixed, with some fearing for their future in the marketplace they suspect the move might create.

'To avoid any actual or perceived conflict of interest with the States ownership of Aurigny, responsibility for licensing should be transferred to the director-general of Utility Regulation, who is an independent statutory official and who is also best placed to investigate and take action on any matters related to anticompetitive behaviour,' said minister Carla McNulty Bauer.

'They have the staff available, so rather than us set up a separate statutory body why not fit that into the OUR mandate?'

She said that Aurigny had always been treated as a separate private business by the States and that the promotional part of C&E and the regulatory part had worked separately in order to reduce bias, but that some people still perceived it.

The OUR's report said it would not be in the island's best interest to introduce a totally liberalised approach, which is what Flybe had wished for.