Heathrow chief executive John Holland-Kaye said the regulator "continues to underestimate what it takes to deliver a good passenger service, both in terms of the level of investment and operating costs required and the fair incentive needed for private investors to finance it".
"Uncorrected, these elements of the CAA's proposal will only result in passengers getting a worse experience at Heathrow as investment in service dries up," he said.
For a supposed chief executive of a key business, Mr H-K seems to have a poor GCSE Economics understanding of what is investment and what is operating expenditure.
Investment is about adding to the overall business, like building another runway. It is not about daily operating matters. Now as far as I can see Heathrow is not currently making any significant investment at all. They may well be engaging and training staff, and periodic Repairs and Renewals. But that is not investment. And thus we don't need any investors to finance it. These operating expenses should come wholly out of their (very substantial) revenue.
Of course, if they didn't divert so much of their revenue to dividends for Spanish (and other) shareholders, whose only interest is how much money to scoop out of the UK aviation market, it wouldn't be so much of an issue. Revenue has of course been well down the last two years. Tough bananas, major shareholders, that's one of the things of being a shareholder. Nobody forced you to buy out the old BAA shares in what you knew was a Regulated business, and doing so didn't put any additional funds into the business.