Ports staff redundancies ruled out

Redundancies were considered to be too expensive, and there were fears it would eventually hamper the island’s recovery effort when the borders re-open.

Guernsey Ports is mandated to operate on a more commercial footing, although staff are employed under States of Guernsey conditions.

The furlough scheme did not cover public sector staff, so that was not an available option.

The details came out in the Assembly following questions by Deputy Steve Falla, which were put to the president of the States’ Trading & Supervisory Board, Deputy Peter Roffey.

Deputy Roffey said that the airport and harbours had to stay open in order to maintain the island’s lifeline services, but in March 2020 immediate action was taken to reduce costs.

‘This included a suspension of recruitment, overtime restrictions, and a suspension of all non-essential projects in the ports capital programme.

‘Guernsey Ports, in consultation with regulators, also secured permission to reduce headcount at the Airport Fire Service.

‘As Guernsey Ports staff are employed by the States of Guernsey, there was no furlough scheme available. We did raise that as a possibility, but there was none available.

‘However, Ports staff were also used to support the Covid critical worker scheme and continue to do so.

‘I have to tell Deputy Falla that options for a redundancy programme were examined very carefully.

‘However, it was concluded that the potential savings didn’t justify the initial redundancy payments and the subsequent cost of recruiting and retraining staff were factored in and the operating hours would need to be increased obviously.

‘More likely, the cost would necessitated a reduction in operating hours at the airport for several years in order to pay for the cost of those redundancies so on balance it was felt that it was best to maintain the current level of expenditure as an airport and harbour in waiting.’

Deputy Lester Queripel sought a clarification, because he got the impression that redundancies could never be made because it would always cost too much.

Deputy Roffey explained that the redeployed staff would hopefully be needed back in their original positions soon.

‘Redundancy would have been absolutely acceptable if there had been a permanent and known downturn in the level of service and therefore we were on an ongoing basis going to need fewer staff.

‘We were faced with a situation that we knew for a period of time we didn’t need the number of employees that we did, but in future what we hope very much is that we will be returning to some form of normality and that we will need to crank up the service again.

‘So the cost of the redundancy payments when factored in, when we were going to have to then re-employ when the service levels needed to be cranked up again, it clearly became uneconomic.’