Yes Roffa you can be wrong. NATS ATCOs are a minority group and you are not self regulating. I know you are individually some great guys in achieving things that keep the people under your surveillance safe, but that's not enough. The worrying thing is that as a company you are excrutiatingly exposed on a formalised regular basis to external commercial pressures via the same organisation which is supposed to be your safety regulator. I do not understand how ERG ('E' is for Economic) and SRG can protect the public interest whilst this blatant conflict is allowed to continue. You are not in a war zone, so you should not be so stretched on a regular basis.
The PPP arrangement was supposed to obviate the need for a decade of taxpayer investment at the rate of £100M+ per year. Instead I read that after much bigger numbers were supposed to have been injected, that half your company was effectively 'sold' for a piffling £50M to the Airline Group (a consortium of airlines including Virgin, BA and Easyjet) and your main performance targets (subject to mulyi-million pound penalties) are measured in seconds (not even minutes) of delay. Need I remind you that your company almost went bust in 2002 and since then you have been restructured, retargeted, prices recapped, loans refinanced, and goodness knows what else.
Any reader of the public documents and transcripts might be forgiven for concluding that as a company you might be overstretched, undermanned and underfunded for the capital and people investments required to make you state of the art.
Or am I wrong?