Guernsey Airport looks into commercialization

Mr Le Ray said he thought any move to commercialization would not include a loss of jobs

Guernsey Airport is tendering for consultants to explore the options for its commercialization.

The States-owned airport was one of the island's assets found ready to be considered for commercialization by a review undertaken last year.

If it goes ahead the airport would not be sold, but set up as a company with the States as the sole stakeholder - like Guernsey Electricity.

Colin le Ray, airport director, said there would be a number of challenges.

Mr Le Ray said: "The purpose of this current exercise is to try to find and identify what the pros and cons are at a detailed level.

"There is always room for increased efficiency and for finding better ways of working and I think this is perhaps the driver for commercialization.

"We are quite efficient in my view, we've done benchmarking tests in the past to look at the sort of costs of running the airport, compared with the number of staff running the airport and we always do quite well in the amount of resources we manage with."

Mr Le Ray said he would be "surprised if there were any identified opportunities for reducing staff".

"We certainly have our views, as airport management, on what commercialization might look like and how it might work as far as Guernsey is concerned.

"We believe there is some benefit in having an external review taking into account some of the lessons UK airports have learnt," he said.