Originally Posted by
eglnyt
About 150 posts ago I made a comment that it's difficult to assess the effectiveness of the NATS Investment but it's kept a lot of people employed. Most of those weren't in NATS but generating profit for a handful of large companies.
It's actually difficult to know how much is "wasted", there are 4 main ANSP groupings buying replacement systems at the moment and the systems being developed appear to be costing about the same with the same very protracted timescales. You would expect NATS to need to spend more than the other ANSPs in its grouping as it missed out at least 2 upgrade cycles since the 1990s and the change is much bigger but the application software will cost about the same.. A few ANSPs including NATS need the bells and whistles in the latest iteration to handle the levels of traffic and complexity. If you can cope with the previous generation of controller tools etc then you will pay much less, even as much as 95% less.
If all the suppliers say that the price is £100M then that's the price. If the suppliers know how much you have to spend, a flaw of the existing "transparency", it is hardly a coincidence if the price is set accordingly.
NATS has tried a few times to escape the clutches of those suppliers but at the onset of the pandemic was more reliant on them that at any time before. That situation will return if it hasn't already.
That’s another brilliant spin, but entirely wrong; 90% of the project in question didn’t need to be done and NATS was advised accordingly, but it went ahead anyway because of one employee’s KIP and bonus.
Four suppliers with a quarter of the market each is a technical monopoly (iaw the CMA, but not on NATS 100% scale, so they’re unlikely to point it out for fear of allegations of hypocrisy). But it doesn’t matter if several of them say the price tag’s £XXm (that’s easy to set up offline), the correct question is what’s the better way of architecting the solution - but as you say, the sector will refuse to have that conversation for fear of having to do something they haven’t done numerous times already.