Pilot recruitment in this country is conceptually fixed to prevent experienced and mature pilots from applying for jobs.
Not true. I have known several pilots aged 35+ with only piston-engined time and sometimes with many thousands of hours to get airline jobs. (One was 1,500 hrs, aged 54! AND he got a command before he retired.) The 'instant fix' flying-school-straight-into-a-jet-job isn't always the best answer. Plenty of pilots have worked their way up as flying instructors and with turbo-prop airlines. Many have got themselves jobs in airline offices, as cabin crew and as handling agent dispatchers in order to get known and noticed. And well done to all of them for their efforts. Others have done it, just give it a try and don't just sit at home complaining about 'the system'.
Agreed, there always have been some airlines that have some rather daft concepts about selecting pilots. One is that flying school graduates are the only way to go (most likely that is the way that the chief pilot got his licence?), another is to look down on certain types of experience (I can understand the 'factorised hours' concept, because long-haul hours don't build up experience at the same rate as regional turbo-prop, etc., but I have heard of one rather snooty airline looking down at someone's DC6 experience!) and I have seen some rather daft questions on application forms that can be totally irrelevant (one rather Big Airline at one stage wanted to know how many hours you took to go solo... I've known a pilot to go solo at about 80 hours, but that was on his 17th birthday and
that day he soloed on four different types including a tail-dragger and a twin, so 'hours to first solo' is a rubbish question!).
When the supply is bigger than the demand then that first job will always be difficult to get, but I don't think that airline work is much different from other industries as far as that goes. When business picks up it will change...
As for being
... a BA Franchise, and ... a group company in IAG
I don't think that makes them any different from any other employer, other than that they have the 'tyranny of the seniority list'
to prevent experienced and mature pilots
from advancing at a rate relevant to their experience.