ferris
It's an interesting phenomena, this 'cost-shifting' from ANSPs to airlines. Because that's what it is- reducing costs for the ANSP (such as staff trimming) without heed for the subsequent increase in costs to the airlines as they experience inefficient flight levels/routes, delays etc.
The same phenomenon that has led to AFPEx - a system that got rid of a small number of skilled, qualified but relatively inexpensive aviation experts at Heathrow, but is now run by a similar number of computer systems staff on a help-desk at Swanwick - offloading the required expertise to the hundreds of airfields throughout the country. Bottom line is that NATS saves (arguably) a few pennies, while costing its customers at the airfields ££££s at the same time as service provision/safety reducing.
I apologise for the slight thread drift, but it is all part of the same narrow, penny pinching ignorance that comes out of NATS these days.
Perhaps we would alll receive better safety and service provision if we were not all chasing dividends pyments for short-term bonus schemes for (inevitably) temporary management. Maybe air traffic management could be separated from the market-place and looked after by the state? Oh, that will be why the rest of the world still does it this way and why (dispite the initial interest) they have not all gone down the flawed path of "privatisation".