Originally Posted by
eglnyt
I'm not sure that's a valid way forward. There are rules about acquiring shareholdings in public companies. If you introduce legislation that steamrollers through those rules, even for a limited scope, you are setting a dangerous precedent. For a country totally reliant on other people's investment any hint that it might go all "Socialist" would be very problematic.
It actually probably doesn't need to do that. It holds more shares than anybody else and the 5% in the Employee Sharetrust is effectively out of play so it already has the power to control the company by asking its appointed directors to intervene but again that would send shockwaves through the markets. Still we currently have a Government that takes decisions based on "focus groups" regardless of the effect on the economy so who knows.
The problem is, the government, as the 'largest' shareholder, doesn't understand what the real issues are, and everything is getting smothered is a positive
PR campaign about how well NATS is doing at everything.
Anyone who properly knows the organisation knows that this isn't true (at least at a management level, not to take away from the great work the ATCOs and engineers are doing generally). The PPP - which strangely seems to be morphing into a PLC - doesn't help in gaining transparency and accountability. The main aim seems to be to keep the status quo, and the monopoly going as long as possible, or at least 'until I retire'...
The sector is about to undergo massive change with a 10x increase in aircraft (mostly uncrewed) in the next decade, and the wide scale digitisation of services. This sits poorly with a (largely) analogue organisation.
(At the risk of another 250 messages!) no one should still be running 1960s technology, especially not in a mission critical environment, and especially if you haven't provisioned for any fall backs (ignore the 'expense, complexity' etc deflections). And despite all of the posturing about 'airspace modernisation' it's the organisation that hasn't done it for sixty years that is claiming it's the only organisation that can do it now. Really, there are other approved providers of these services out there? We could go on, but there's plainly a significant management malaise in NATS - there has been for a long time - and just 'spinning the story' won't resolve the core issues.
Maybe privatisation would...?