NATS Redundancies
 

All contractors were served notice months ago, but now the company is discussing compulsory redundancies and the union is taking a shallow view, due to the bullying culture that is beginning to surface.

https://www.pcs.org.uk/latest-update...with-employers

Bloody'ell not ATC also, the UK government has really played this pandemic badly and the 14 day quarantine has scared the airlines into threatening more redundancies and the public not to travel. We need a vaccine asap to get the aviation world going again.

that is capitalism and deregulation my friend....

The Oxford teams vaccine trials looks promising, and provided there are no hiccups, it should be available later this year.
Prof Sarah Gilbert one of the leading lights.

Nine other teams also working on vaccine trials, so the odds may well be much better than 50:50.

It is puzzling how different the response to Covid-19 is compared to the continent, where governments spend billions on direct aviation programs, not to mention the fully government funded furlough programs until the end of 2021 for all businesses. Which allows stuff like one month furlough, one month full work which keeps aviation workers current in their job and saves the companies half their wages.

Ultimately NATS is now a commercial business and as such has to return a profit to the shareholders. If your customers have decreased their own business dramatically and as a result you are struggling to raise revenue then redundancies and cutbacks are inevitable. The airlines that are making massive changes at present are a pertinent example and I feel desperately sorry for those affected.

In my humble opinion, national infrastructure like ATC should be a government role. What happens if NATS goes under? What happens if the revenue incoming is drastically less than company outgoings, not just for a few months but potentially a few years?

I have no idea how many staff NATS employ. I have no idea how many of those staff are ATCOs and how many are office types. I have no idea of how many they are wishing to sack. Did NATS not go through this process a few years ago with airport controllers? IIRC they got rid of quite a few not that long ago.

Yeah, wake me up when they have got one. I could do with a long sleep !

I suggest you read the science kcockayne. The virus is a single strand of RNA that has only mutated once. It is amenable to vaccines. There are 9 leading projects using at least 5 different methods. We know patients often produce antibodies and we also now know that if re exposed the antibodies respond. All this suggests one or other vaccine will succeed and GAVI and the major players such as AZ and Sanofi are building capacity.

Separately there is possibly an evens chance the virus may simply disappear as did SARS and although we may get a resurgence of cases from easing lockdown too early, there is no evidence of the mythical second wave.

I would put money on a vaccine by Q4 and the end of new medical cases in 2021. The economic issues will take longer to resolve especially if idiots apply quarantine in June as opposed to February and scatter taxpayers' money to all and sundry instead of supporting those most effected.

Staff costs ( from last years returns ) were running at near enough 1B per annum.

Exactly this. I have flown all over Europe and in the USA but would say that UK ATC is the best and most professional I have worked with. For them to also having to join this constant race to the bottom is heartbreaking. The logical conclusion of capitalism and deregulation indeed.
At least the winds of change are blowing all over the world, I suggest as aviation professionals we start joining and start showing a bit of unity and backbone.

Of course it’s not just the airlines that are the customers and NATS also has a requirement through its license to keep airspace open regardless of the number of users.
A few examples could be police or medivac helicopters, survey flights, military, the royal family and government ministers.
Which means you need a minimum number of “bums on seats” regardless of the number of flights.
If flights reduce by 80% you cannot simply reduce the number of controllers by same without closing vital airspace and breaching the company’s operating license.

Which is why, as escaped ATCO said, this vital piece of national infrastructure should not be run as a for profit, commercial company.

escaped.atco The last tranche of operational staff voluntary redundancies was around 5 or 6 years ago and those were across the business, both at airfields and the centres.

It does not surprise me that they are looking to withdraw from the current redundancy agreement as it is very generous, so they will be looking to reduce that bill if and when staff are made redundant.

NATS currently has very little income as Eurocontrol has allowed airlines to defer en-route ATC charges.

NATS have also temporarily stopped paying into CAAPS (the pension scheme), at the agreement of the Trustees.

I feel for all my old colleagues who do a fabulous job every day.

The one consolation is that the government cannot afford to let NATS go under, however I fear the cuts are likely to be very painful.

I wouldn't bank on that......

This Govt is probably the most anti-aviation industry Govt we've ever had.

Rumour has it the Willie Walsh is taking over as CEO of NATS when he leaves IAG.

Is this just a humorous comment, or a serious suggestion ?

Just remember that once an ATCO is gone, that's it. To get a new one, even from another unit will take at least 6 months to a year to replace. If it takes 3 to 4 years to get back to where we were, NATS would still need to recruit like crazy to replace the staff who leave on retirement, If they cut back the delays could impact aviation for many years. It's not a race to the bottom, it's out of there and down the sewer to the sea. It would be catastrophic to the UK.

Doubt it’s nothing more than trolling. Walsh would have have a clear conflict of interest. It would be akin to insider trading. As the government retains a “golden share”, they would not allow this to happen.

I’ll back that up with the fact that the poster hasn’t voiced an opinion, on anything, in 6 years. So, troll it is.

In as much as I believe that the WW remark is just a troll, what I will be interested in is the career of the current NATS CEO. If or when the current chief carries out a cull and if it is perceived as being unfair or otherwise amongst the remaining workforce, it will make ongoing workforce cooperation very difficult if not impossible. Workers will realise they are simply an asset to be used and disposed as and when deemed necessary by the company, this realisation doesn't exactly produce workplace harmony or a happy atmosphere.

Someone that carries out a massive chopping session may well find that they themselves will have to voluntarily move on and for fresh faces to come in and try and pick up the remaining pieces of morale in order to put what's left of the company back together again - not an easy task.

It's always easy to manage a company when it's all going well and trends are upwards, you really see true personalities when things turn sour. Words are cheap, actions always much louder.

I’m interested to find out what the shareholders expect in the short term ? As NATS have arranged, yet another, pension holiday, there has to be some give and take regards the financial fallout. What NATS don’t appear to be doing, is conveying anything publicly since March. That troubles me a great deal, as they are quite a unique industry who have never seemed to master communication to the world in which they dominate ( by their own definition ).

The current head of the dutch air traffic control organisation (Michiel van Dorst, LVNL) is a former KLM board member and pilot. I have no idea what the conflict of interest could be.

Well, I really hope that you are correct in your optimism; but I guess that we will find out in the fullness of time. Let’s hope that it is not too full !

Time for NATS to be Re-Nationalised I think! :=

....because governments have a great track record of managing large infrastructure projects requiring almost complete modernisation....

I assume that LVNL is not a "for profit" business?

NATS have learnt nothing over the years about staffing. It has always irked the management that the staff they have in the summer are still there in the winter when the traffic is down by 50%. Everything is so short term in NATS and this knee jerk decision to give notice on the key agreement on redundancy is no different. Get out and borrow at a low rate and get all of the projects done that are usually constrained for 8 months of the year because of the operational staffing requirement.

The main service provider and the regulator one of the same - never going back there again!

I have been gob smacked by NATS last few years, the pension scheme has been paying out figure 2 or 3 times the value of a similar pension pot in local government! Then if you're old enough to retire leave and re-employed as consultant on more than were on before you took the pension pot! They seem to have been throwing away money! I won't even go into projects!!

There are 62 ANSPs that are regulated by the UK CAA...

Semi. It is a so called Zelfstandig Bestuursorgaan (Independant governing body). It has no shares, but is economically self sufficient and remains under some limited regulation and review of the government.

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Where's that figure from? Outgoings of ~£60m per month are more accurate, approx 80% of which is staff. I think total income last year was just shy of the £1b mark.

It's about 5000 people in total. I believe about a third (happy to be corrected) of that are directly related to the operation, i.e. ATCOs/ATSAs/Engineers etc. With the rest being backroom/project staff.

This
and this
are spot on.

If redundancies are to happen I would expect the majority to be the office staff. If you do the maths NATS can't afford to let many operational staff go. As has been mentioned there's an awful lot of retirements on the horizon (I think about a third of ATCOs are expecting to retire over the next ten years) and with a lead time of up to four years to recruit and train a fully qualified ATCO (never mind a couple more years of getting some experience under their belt) they're going to find themselves very short in a year or two once traffic is at 'normal' levels again. The CEO keeps banging on about how the size of the company will need to reflect the amount of flying going on. He seems to conveniently forget the fact we've been chronically understaffed for the past 5 years (overtime is the only thing that's stopped enormous delays over the summers) and are now probably at the correct level of staffing for what's expected to be normal traffic when all this is over. At the end of the day the funding model is flawed. The company can't grow and shrink at a moments notice to match current traffic as management types want it too. Of course none of us expect them to do the correct thing. We'll be picking up the pieces from the rash decisions currently being made for quite some time.

Twelve years retired - & nothing much changes ! Mind you, it was a lot different when I started. But, that was the good old DoTI. The rot started slowly when the CAA got into its stride & gathered pace when NATS became a “sort of” private/public company. I had left well before that, leaving some wonderful characters, ATCOS & ATCAs behind. We will never see that lot again - more’s the pity !

So similar to NATS but without the crucial need to make a profit or pay dividends.

There is no reason why a re-nationalised NATS couldn't/shouldn't be kept entirely separate from the regulator. Times have changed since the PP was initiated in the late 90's.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if they did come after the operational staff a la BA but fortunately ATCOs are not quite so readily available or easy to train as a pilot. I'm not sure I'd want to be an ATSA at present though

according to EU law, operator and regulator must be separate entities. Hence so many agencies (for nuclear energy, aviation....)

Easy to train
 

ATCO’s could be fairly easy to obtain and train if there are plenty that have been made redundant. Just like a pilot that doesn’t have to go back to their basic training and do a PPL an ex ATCO returning to the same unit perhaps would take a relatively short time to revalidate after a year or so off. I sincerely hope it doesn’t come to this but let’s not be too complacent and let’s try to be prepared for all the arguments and possible threats that may come our way.

Unfortunately Corbyn didn't win the last election, re-nationalisation is unlikely.

Out of interest, what do ATSAs do since Swanwick switched to EFPS?

"Unfortunately Corbyn didn't win the last election, "

A very large majority of the British population disagree with you..

Also remember it was a Labour government that launched the PPP, after stating “ our air is not for sale “ 🤬

I would like to think that anyone made redundant would think very hard about being taken back on, age dependent of course. There would be no guarantee that NATS wouldn't just have a reservoir of ex employees that they could dip into until they run out or have trained enough new people not to need to use them. Maybe a blanket ban on training until there is a commitment of no compulsory redundancies may be the way to go.

Paying people for work that is not required just in case they're required 2 years from now is an interesting concept.
What if it's 3 years? Or maybe just 1? That's the difficulty. No one really knows which way this is going.

may work if they return to their previous unit/sector, but an experienced ATCO going to a busy new unit will take around a year to qualify and many years to be experienced. You can’t just switch on the taps and train all of the shortfall either only one trainee at a time can be in position and the qualified ATCOs also need to have a go sometimes to keep their recency. A 10% staff shortfall could take a year or two to replace even using experience trainees. If we’re looking at traffic returning towards capacity then we’d better start recruiting now before redundancies have even been “offered”. Most ATC units were quite short-staffed before COVID19, relying on overtime to make up the shortfall. See also units with a change of ANSP contract taking years to return to safe staffing levels. NATS also has a retirement bulge looming in part caused by a historic short-sighted staffing cycles.