The good people - as far as Safety Regulation is concerned - left the building some time ago, to consultancy, or maybe Baines Simmons or Avisa, This started many years ago, but accelerated with the Quango Queen* and her successors. I have dealt, at different times, with Flt Ops, Aerodromes and Airworthiness since 1980, but more recently primarily with Airworthiness. I have watched all the good people, ie competent regulators who knew their stuff, disappear, leaving a bunch of time-serving incompetents from the very top down to Inspector/Surveyor level. God alone knows how this bunch will manage in the aftermath of Brexit.
*Does anyone remember the QQ giving the intro talk to a Safety Management workshop at the Belgrano back in the mid-noughties, when she lectured 250 senior managers about how frightfully important safety is? She told us all that she knew this from her personal experience of how, she, as the QQ of the Food Standards Agency, had to go along to a chocolate bar manufacturer after a small production error, and jolly well force them to throw away thousands, yes thousands, of contaminated chocolate bars." I think we knew then that the CAA was doomed, and so it has come to pass.