I have to second PAXboy here... people are inevitably cost centres whichever way you swing it. Having a lot of CS people on the ground (i.e. milling around in the terminal) is a big cost centre, especially if they are not really engaged in any activity. Having people on tap sounds nice, but it's kind of tough telling people that they would be on stand-by, and cannot be used for anything else lest they be called in (c/crew and f/crew are different here).
So CS people are kept to a minimum to keep the costs down. And in the challenging airline environment, that is a good thing (keeping the costs down). Whether that is good for the customers is another thing altogether, but the expectation is likely to be that the British consumer knows how to queue - patiently, while the foreign consumer will seek out the CS people to ask what the delay is.
It's a no-win situation. On the one hand we don't want BA to raise their prices to keep the shareholders happy and pay for more CS people, on the other hand we demand service, SERVICE DAMMIT, which only comes from having a lot of people on the ground, which costs money, which means prices go up, which... you get the drift.
S.