Originally Posted by
eglnyt
So this future demand on the public purse is invented by you? The last £1bn didn't come from the public purse so why should the next?
If anything like last time I would expect the Committee to be hell bent on making sound bites most of which have no relevance to the situation rather than actually discussing the issue at hand. Last time they continually demanded the CEO promise something nether he nor anybody else could promise and contrived to get him replaced when he stuck to the only realistic response.
The RPs are a negotiation between multiple parties and I'd expect NATS to forcefully fight its corner. You might consider that arrogant but actually as directors of a PLC the board is probably legally required to do so.
As I said before once the safety case is established the rest is a business matter. It maybe CNI but the decision as to what investment happens is part of the licence negotiations and in each case so far the customers, ie the airlines, have been offered options with more resilience and after, predictably, initially demanding low prices and more resilience have tended towards lower cost. If you don't want those who pay to define your CNI you need to give the Regulator different powers.
If Monday was a result of the failure of an old system then the initial report next week might include some information on the investment to date, why that system is still in use, and current plans and timescales for replacement.
That is the current 'word' in NATS, so you'd have to ask them, not me (it sounds like you're pretty close too). But if there's going to be no call at all on the public purse that's great - we can meet back here and you can say 'I told you so'. I'd like to read the Hansard report of the last Parliamentary Committee, do you have it, because it would be interesting to see what was actually said? (I thought) Richard Deacon, the then CEO, was replaced, are you saying this is why?
Come on, NATS didn't 'forcefully fight it's corner' (you must be an insider); it picked its ball up and refused to play. What other government department, agency of PPP is immune from scrutiny and improving itself??
NATS is not a PLC, the PPP status confers some significant privileges on it - not least of which is a monopoly that is normally banned under Competition Law. CNI is not a 'business matter', it just doesn't work like that - would you be happy if we deployed your children to Iraq or Afghanistan and said, 'oh, sorry, the business decided against buying you protective equipment and ammunition'?? The analogy shows how ridiculous this line of thinking is. The Regulator should absolutely be defining what fail safe procedures it wants to see, I agree with you there (there's little point checking 'amendments to MATS' if the country's critical national infrastructure is susceptible to catastrophic collapse). I expect the initial report to reveal very little again - if you suspend you disbelief/denial for just a few seconds it's clear that NATS isn't coming clean on this one.