Whilst I concur with everything that has been said concerning controller training, and recruitment. In the Middle East an experienced controller is given a maximum of 40 days to validate. This obviously means you can get the required numbers of staff operationally very quickly.
I don’t believe NATS can afford to go down the route of controller redundancies again. We must thank the “experts” whose predictions were so wrong a few years ago. I do think this is an opportunity for NATS to “streamline” the workforce though, and utilise ATCO skills and knowledge for non operational work as-well as controlling. Do we need a full time “ops” office, investigation office etc etc.