A utilities' debate due through the back door?

Formal questions about pay and performance of the directors of Guernsey Electricity, Guernsey Post and Aurigny, now sit alongside general long-standing concerns about the financial position of at least two of those entities.

It’s likely that some deputies are unhappy enough to stir things up when the Guernsey Post annual report is formally aired at the end of the month.

That is all that they are likely to achieve, at this point anyway, though Deputy Mark Helyar seems to have a broader ambition in mind – to replace directors’ remuneration with a commitment to public service.

In his formal written questions, he appears to argue that they are overpaid, and questions what they might be doing for their money.

Deputy Helyar knows all about non-executive directorships after all – he lists more than 30 of them on his public declaration of interests.

STSB’s counter is that they come in well under the market rate for a non-executive director role, even a government-owned one, if Jersey’s benchmark is anything to go by. In total, it spent some £220,000 on non-executive fees and expenses last year.

Non-executive directors expose themselves to ‘significant personal and collective responsibility, and their duties are very serious’, it says, and goes on to add that there appears to be a lack of knowledge about what the commercialised boards do, and how they do it.

That much is probably true. But if deputies want to force a debate on performance of their trading boards, a swipe at the individuals, who have gone through proper process and public scrutiny to collect about £1,000 a month, is the wrong way to go about it.