There still seem to be people who think that there's a huge pot of profit money sitting there just waiting to be used to fund the pension scheme. If you get somebody with financial knowledge to explain the annual report to you rather than just picking out headline figures you'd realise what happens to those profits.
Apart from a small amount of profit taken out as dividend all the profit made to date has gone into investment. NERL has planned to spend about £130 Million this year on capital projects and has spent similar amounts each year since the investment programme was restarted. That's paid for the new Prestwick Centre, the new TC ops room and equipment, Swanwick workstation and display upgrades, contingency and development facilities at CTC, iFACTS, new Mode S radars, new communications equipment and lots of other small things. If there was no profit that investment would all have to be funded from borrowing and that just wouldn't be possible. The regulator allows NATS to make that profit to fund the investment because it sees that as good for the industry. If NATS was to try to use that profit to fund staff costs the regulator would quickly act to reduce the income accordingly. As it is with the likely drop in income as a result of the oncoming recession the investment programme is already under pressure and those NATS staff working on projects face an uncertain couple of years.
NERL is not allowed to subsidise the NSL operation so even if there were a big pot of profit none of the profit from NERL could be used to pay NSL pension costs.