Negotiations with an airline, believed to be British Airways, have reached an advanced stage, six months after the Guernsey Press revealed that initial talks were under way.
Several senior politicians are keen to see the route re-established, but it remains unclear whether the subsidy required by the operator will be agreed or prove too expensive to sign off.
Economic Development member Haley Camp told the latest Guernsey Press Politics Podcast that the outcome should be known soon.
‘I think it will be a pretty quick thing. There are different camps of opinion, but I think the time is coming,’ she said.
Hear more from Deputy Haley Camp on the latest Guernsey Press Politics Podcast
Economic Development president Deputy Sasha Kazantseva-Miller said in the States last week that her committee wanted to increase the number of airlines serving the island and was drawing up revised policies on air links and the air licensing regime.
But it seems that work will not be completed before a final decision is reached on whether to spend public money reviving the Guernsey-Heathrow route, which was last operated in 2019.
Deputy Camp was concerned with the order in which decisions were about to be made.
‘I am not entirely convinced that the order which is being followed is necessarily logical and that I find very challenging,’ she said.
‘My big worry about something like opening up to Heathrow is that we cannibalise Gatwick, and what was the whole Aurigny thing for? I would rather those questions were answered, or at least scenarios were planned.
‘For whatever reason, these decisions are going to be taken out of the logical sequence which would make the most sense.’
Any agreement to subsidise a new Heathrow link could be made at committee level, as long as it was done within the States’ existing air policies, but other deputies could still force the decision into the Assembly if they wished.
The Assembly’s involvement would be guaranteed only under Deputy Camp’s preferred scenario of agreeing air policies ahead of committing public money to new operators.
‘I would prefer the States to look at the policy as a whole,’ she said.
‘We have a States-owned airline which had a bumpy year and doesn’t seem great at communication. I don’t think the only answer is “Aurigny is mucking up, therefore we should change our entire policy about-face”.
‘I would prefer the States to look at what we actually want from airlines and connectivity, what we’ve got, what we could do better, and how do we then fill that gap?’
The last service to Heathrow, which was operated for about a year immediately before the Covid pandemic, received a public subsidy of more than £800,000.
Deputy Charles Parkinson, then Economic Development president and now a member of Policy & Resources, estimated at the time that the route brought about £3.3m. into the local economy. It also hit Aurigny’s finances by tempting passengers away from the airlines’s London routes.
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