I appreciate no one has a crystal ball, but is it likely that BA will continue to recruit in the numbers they have done for the last five years? I can think of reasons why recruitment would increase in the way it has done (retirements, leavers, part time, expansion), but have trouble expecting that any of those would lead to a sustained intake of ~200 DEPs per year.
I’ve probably not considered something obvious, and I don’t have access to the numbers for this stuff, but there seems to be quite a lot of potential for new joiners to sit close to the bottom of the list for a long time.