StillDark&Hungry

ProM

I know I digress from the threadline but in answer to your question I know the controller in question.

My question back to you is what, or who, would you consider to be a representitive face of an ATCO? We may not all be Mr or Mrs average, the fact was she was chosen and I think did a great job in the article.

ProM

still dark, i was merely making an observation about companies attitudes in general. Your colleagues seemed less happy with her performance than you are but I have no view. As I have made clear, I am an outsider, and therefore could not judge how representative she was.

I guess it comes down to the purpose of the interview. If you are trying to recruit then you give a nice happy interview (as this seems to be). Others posters on here seem to feel that the same would be true if the company is trying to undermine their case

Interviews for other purposes may instead try to convey a different impression

055166k

At a time of tension on the negotiating front, and particularly as the union has conveniently overlooked their mandate from the membership to address the PAY issue in favour of Pensions, this article must have made management roll about laughing.
Jolly Hockey Sticks everyone! Pencil one in for the next promotion board....sorry selection centre or whatever.
Apologies for Thread-creep.

fisbangwollop

I see on todays intranet that the Red baron is planning some more bar stool sessions over the next month............all dates confirmed except for Scottish.........guess he has to load the coordinates into his gps so as he can find us........whatever I hope he has invested in a good flack jacket!!!

055166k

"Bar Stool" suggests a two-way flow. The last lot was a one-sided management presentation......full stop. You can't communicate with a brick....it will always be a brick.
Of course it may be possible to pretend to be one of the "favoured few" and speak to *od directly.....assuming the minders aren't present to block you out.

audij

Anyone know the truth about the rumour that Aston man is on a promise of a K if he pushes this pension rip off through?

jobsfortheboys

Had our biefing this week, went in with a firm NO in mind but came out thinking nearly the opposite.

Cant dispute the figures, something has to give as the current situation is not sustainable.

Option 1 vote Yes and we look ok for the next 15 years although we are almost guaranteed to have to defend our position from here on in, albeit at the expense of those yet to join us.

Option 2 vote no and somehow hope that the Gov or whoever might ride in on a crest of a wave to save us and bail out our expensive pension pot, seems unlikely at best. Worst case scenario is pension frozen and moved to new scheme by whoever and NSL in jeopardy.

Its Hobsons choice for me. Option 1 looks the best of a bad bunch.

ImnotanERIC

you forgot to include that nsl is in jeopardy with option one aswell. do not be fooled. it will be sold off if there is a yes vote.

hold at SATAN

Jobsfortheboys,

Option 3 - those crafty buggers are pulling a fast one by dazzling us with stats and numbers based on questionable assumptions and without fully exploring other options - remember lies, damned lies and statistics!

NSL will be sold, for sure, because if these guys are the hardnosed business gurus that they keep saying they are, NATS will be split. It may not necessarily be a staright forward NSL/NERL division, but a re-alignment and then dump the rest. Barron's reputation precedes him I'm afraid

anotherthing

jobsfortheboys

Hold at SATAN has it right - you are looking at things wrongly. Where do you come up with the notion that a no vote will result in I assume this is the line that was spun by the management rep??

Vote yes and will be more likely because the burden of a good pension scheme will be gone, making NSL more saleable


The pension fund needs help - no doubt about it. The options for voting are

1. Vote yes if you believe that there are no other ways to help the pension fund and believe that NATS has investigated all avenues of funding, including sticking it's hands in it's pockets and taking out some of the huge profits it has made, despite shelling out on the WD move and other projects.

2. Vote no because although you agree that the fund needs help, you either believe there may be other funding options available to us that need to be explored or simply you do not trust management have come up with the best solution for everyone, considering they do not explain at theses briefings all the other options they have allegedley considered.

This is a huge financial decision we are being asked to agree to - would you buy a house or a car and accept the first deal a salesman pitched at you, based on trust and the salesmans say-so? That's what we are being asked to do here - we are being presented with one solution and being told that all other solutions are no good - but we are not getting it explained to us why that is the case.

If they did explain things thoroughly and the figures made sense, then people would vote yes, I however am very wary of voting for something so far reaching with regards to my financial well being, without being fully conversant with the facts.

Are management taking this seriously? You have to question that very closely when you hear of the management representatives at some of the briefings being unable or unwilling to answer basic questions (as per previous posts in this thread).

Voting no is not saying we want the company to be re-nationalised, or that we think the pension scheme is fine if left alone - it's saying we do not necessarily believe that this solution - the only one that is being presented to us - is in our best interests and is the only viable one. Why should the employees (apart from senior management) take all the pain when the company posts increasing profits year after year??

eglnyt

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.

anotherthing

eglynt

How aboput this - We (NATS) starts being more frugal with the money from profit that it re-invests into the company. Then we dont waste millions on projects that are doomed to fail (due to short sightedness or ridiculously short timescales) such as TC North, Central, AMAN, iFacts etc.

Use a company other than Cartus for the Prestwick move - I can give countless stories where Cartus have been less than diligent witht he WD move, and who picks up the bill?? Yep - NATS. My move alone cost the company over £50k more than it should have because the sale of my house was so mismanaged... I did not lose out, but NATS did. This was despit me advising Cartus of a buyer at the price they offered me for my GSP - they then sold my house for £50k less than the GSP, a year later!!

250 kts

Money spent on airspace design and capacity improvements can't just be shifted across to pay for the pension though. It is specifically set aside for such projects as part of what NATS put forward to the regulator for costs. I don't think the airlines would be too happy with NATS saying thanks for the cash boys but s*d your capacity gains because we're using it to shore up the pension.

Del Prado

so what you're saying is, the regulator will not allow the present pension arrangements to remain?

eglnyt

There are two different issues here.

Firstly the regulator is determined to control NATS costs. It has agreed an investment plan with NATS and allowed a certain amount of profit to fund that investment but if, in the regulators view, NATS has failed to control costs and instead of investing that money has used it to fund operating costs then in all probability it will take action to stop that.

Second the regulator has little choice but to respect Parliament's wishes and allow pass through of pension costs for those staff covered by the Trust of Promise and probably also has to allow pass through for any staff in post before it indicated that something had to change. However it is not obliged to allow NATS to continue to offer the same pension provision in the future. There is nothing in the Transport Act that requires the regulator to consider the view of NATS staff in it's decisions. The size of the potential costs to customers is such that the regulator may feel that it isn't meeting its obligations under the Transport Act if it doesn't do something. Certainly other regulators have already acted to curtail pension costs and it would be surprising if the CAA hadn't noticed that.

anotherthing

We are a service industry - why can't we, like every other service provider, pass the cost of our pension (an overhead), onto our customer?

We have been PPP'd against the wishes and better judgement of employees, by a political party who swore blind they would not sell us off, and in doing so, we also get screwed for £600+ millions worth of public coffers debt, and at the same time, we capitulate even further by being told we should not be allowed to pass on our legitimate costs to our customers...

Complete and utter horsesh!t!!

We (NATS) are either a business or we aren't, what does Barron want?
If he wants us to be a business, then we should be allowed, like every other business, to pass on costs to our customers. If Barron will not fight the regulator to allow that, then Barrons' ability as a business mogul is seriously in doubt.

Either that or he is Kow-Towing to the regulator as it assists his mandate from Tony Blair, which is to shut the pension scheme down and make parts of NATS (namely NSL) fit for sale.

eglnyt

In normal competitive business you can pass whatever costs you like onto your customer. That's the environment that NSL operates in and it's quite free to pass its pension costs on. Unfortunately that cosy arrangement only works as long as all your competitors do the same. As soon as one reduces its costs the others will usually have to follow suit or go out of business. Airports will pay a premium for the NATS service but there is a limit to that premium especially at the smaller airports.

NERL is effectively a monopoly where a whole different set of rules apply. I'm sure Paul Barron and any other CEO would love to be in charge of an unregulated company with a monopoly and just pass on whatever costs are incurred but it was never going to happen. The Government decided that NATS should be a regulated business and laid down in the Transport Act exactly how the Regulator should regulate. It also laid down an appeals process through the Competition Commission but gave that body very similar guidance. NATS does what it can to influence the regulator's decisions and invests a lot of effort in doing that but there is a limit to that influence however good your Chief Executive.

The Government PPP deal is at the root of all this but we lost that battle some time ago. We are where we are and no amount of dreaming will get us back. Even if NATS does return to the nationalised fold things will never be the same again.

DotMac

So how should we invest money in the company then? If we don't invest, and invest heavily into projects like you've mentioned - how do we grow and develop the next generation of ATC systems and airspace designs?

These things are bl**dy difficult to do. Every ANSP finds them difficult, and NATS does a lot better with projects than most other ANSPs in the world. There's not a big ATC World type store where you can go and buy these systems from. They take a lot of time, money and effort to develop and put into service. We hear tidbits of the latest system that's gone into x and they have this feature in y and why have we got this crap system in the UK. Don't believe it, there isn't a true COTS system out there that would allow us to replace our systems here. These developments are VERY expensive.

mr.777

Four words for you...North East Airspace Development. Hundreds of hours of manpower and money wasted on something that doesn't work...hardly world leading.

Also, does investing in the company include spunking more money on pointless award ceremonies that the real workers never see the light of day of? Or pointless initiatives like Vision 2011 that mean absolutely sweet FA in the context of a busy summers day in the ops room?? When I last checked, NATS was still in the business of providing ATC.....though you wouldnt think so these days. Not ranting at you personally DotMac, more of a general rant

BAND4ALL

Add NIBS to the list, tw@ts