There is an economic regulation group in CAA, separate to the better known safety regulation group. I believe it's currently branded "consumer protection".
It is mandated to protect fare paying passengers, which is fair enough. That needs doing.
It isn't resourced or mandated to take any role in protecting student pilots (or to be fair student aircraft engineers, student dispatchers or anybody else in the community). I think that there's an unwritten philosophy that as prospective, embryo, or actual aviation professionals we're supposed to be able to look after ourselves.
The only thing that is going to change that view by the CAA is government action. That is potentially possible, if enough people write to their MPs and start making stuff happen. If you go back a few decades, this is exactly the sort of thing that got microlights regulated in early 1980s, which originally CAA just chose to ignore.
Now before we all start doing that, here's a question - would this really be a good idea. Is CAA likely to be the most effective regulator? And what will this cost - compared to other options?
And what are those other options?
- Nothing? Which in effect means leave communities like PPrune to gather and publish information about schools. This works after a fashion, but clearly not well enough, as evidenced by the number of people who have just lost out bigtime in Cabair II.
- Self regulation by the community. So, for example AOPA or BALPA setting up a voluntary scheme where schools provide evidence of their competence, minimum facilities, and financial viability, and provide facilities such as escrow or maximum holdings of student cash and a few other things from a list that could be cooked up quite quickly by a set of aviation grown-ups.
Personally I would not favour this coming from the CAA. It'll take years to get them to do anything, they'll not be particularly efficient, will only be accountable to parliament - not the flying community, and they'll be hellishly expensive - as they are in everything else they do.
If the aviation community get together and enable an organisation such as BALPA or UK-AOPA (better still, both together) to set up a "voluntary" scheme (that we can then all shout very loudly should be regarded as essential before undertaking any flying training) this would almost certainly be quicker to establish, cheaper to administer (and any scheme, sooner or later, will end up being paid for by the flying community), and more effective than anything CAA would, or could, do. It would also be directly accountable to the members of the administering organisations.
G