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JT Progress Report 2020/21
Chairman’s Foreword 2020 was a year we will never forget; it was a year which challenged all of us – businesses, governments, families and individuals – nothing was left untouched by the effects of COVID-19. Perhaps the defining theme for the year was actually how each one of us responded and adapted to those very serious challenges. There is no doubt that it has been a difficult year for JT – but one which I know we have emerged from stronger, and optimistic about delivering future success for our business, for our customers and for the communities we serve. One reason for that confidence is our base in the Channel Islands, where the local governments responded to the emerging pandemic swiftly, decisively, and effectively – keeping our communities safe and minimising economic impact – such as at one point, paying up to 80% of the salaries for the private-sector employees who were unable to work.
For JT, 2020 was about playing a critical role in supporting those communities, delivering the connectivity needed to make the transition from working in the office and learning in schools, to working and being educated at home and in keeping people entertained and in touch when they couldn’t meet up. We are very proud to have been able to provide the infrastructure needed to make life a little easier; Jersey was one of the better prepared countries when almost overnight the community was told to ‘work from home’ and tight restrictions prevented face-to-face socialising and travel. Our fibre network stepped up to the challenge, and we swiftly moved to provide free local calls, removed charges for exceeding data limits and increased bandwidth to make it as simple as possible for everyone to make that transition. Whatever permanent change this pandemic has created in the way we live, learn and work in the future, we will be there to support our people, our customers and our communities.
Phil Male Chairman
Since this was 2020 though, nothing went 100% as planned. Having just successfully enabled that mass cultural shift to home-working…on a Sunday night in the middle of July, our network failed. The reasons for that, and how we reacted to them, have been well-documented; but I am grateful for this opportunity to add my personal thanks to the dedicated team at JT who worked so hard, in very difficult circumstances throughout the night, to get the systems back up and working as quickly as possible, and to offer my apologies to everyone impacted by that unprecedented incident. We have also faced challenges this year in delivering the ‘999’ service to an acceptable level – a service that JT has looked after in Jersey for more than a century. The detailed review we conducted and the independent JCRA investigation have been genuinely helpful in establishing the exact causes of the problems and resolving them, as well as determining how the service should be developed both for JT and the other operators. Again, the hallmark of last year was not that a serious problem arose; but that we proved how we could handle it in difficult circumstances, while our entire workforce was working remotely, and that we could learn from the experience, giving us greater confidence for the future. That idea - using our experience in 2020 to build back more strongly - is reflected in the additional work we have undertaken to further develop the ‘999’ service. As you will see in our CEO, Graeme Millar’s Business Review we are working with the Government to use modern technology to improve the service, making it more targeted by enabling the emergency services to quickly locate someone in need of their assistance. But 2020 has not simply challenged us all with a global pandemic, it has also demonstrated just how political decisions around the world have consequences in our local markets. As a telecoms company our business is connectivity, and that means we operate on a global stage. 2020 was the year the UK left the European Union and we saw tension in East-West trade conditions, especially in the technology sector. For JT, supporting the islands is always our priority, so we took a prudent approach and re-visited our costs, looked at preserving cash, and reconsidered our business profile in light of the emerging trading conditions. This led to the decision to sell our UK-headquartered Worldstone business. Having developed it over the last
