Just to illustrate the point re: tax relief I've come up with a simple scenario comparison:
Scenario 1: Borrow £30000 at 6.75% (HSBC rate) and repay from full FO salary over 7 years.
Scenario 2: Borrow £60000 at 6.75% and repay from reduced cadet FO salary and £1000 tax free payment over 7 years.
Result:
Scenario 1: Total repayment = £37280, total take home after tax = £209,200.
Total take home after repayments = £171,920.
Scenario 2: Total repayment = £74560, total take home after tax = £232,600.
Total take home after repayments = £158,040.
Implication: Scenario 2 is more expensive than Scenario 1 by approx. £13,880.
Notes:
1) TCX salary scales from
http://www.thomascookjobs.com used for comparison between 'cadet' and 'non-cadet' scales.
2) Constant interest rate used. Increased interest rate will make scenario 2 more expensive still.
Obviously Scenario 1 is intended to illustrate a modular route and Scenario 2 intended to illustrate the CTC/OAT schemes. At one time the CTC scheme 'partners' contributed an extra £5000 for the training year towards living expenses, which would also obviously reduce the effective extra cost of this route. I'm not sure whether this is still the case. So, to me the question is whether the conditional job offer is worth sacrificing an extra ~£14000 over the first 7 years of your career.
Other things I haven't taken into account:
1) Pension. Obviously on a reduced salary the company get to make less of a contribution to your defined contribution pension. In my case this would amount to approx £1000 a year less in my pension pot.
2) Promotion. You will notice from the TCX website that there is a single cadet salary scale, with no difference between FO and SFO. That means that when you unfreeze your ATPL you get no extra money, but continue to move, year on year, up the cadet scale. An equivalent 'non-cadet' would move to year 1 SFO effectively bypassing 1 year or so (depending on how long it takes to get the ATPL) of the FO salary scale.
I'm sure there's more, but beyond the scope of this intentionally simple comparison.