Complaints and enquiries - Air Transport Users Council

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The AUC’s principal concern was for the interests of passengers to be taken
fully into account in all regulatory decisions. We believed that that this would
be best achieved by giving the CAA a primary duty to consumers. We
questioned whether airlines would always make decisions in the best interests
of passengers – and, by extension, whether they could always be relied upon
to act as proxy for passengers’ interests in discussion of airport charges.
Different airlines would have different incentives in respect of airport
investment decisions such as on timing, scale or quality. And those views may
not always be completely aligned with their passengers’ aspirations. We
suggested therefore that there was, in theory at least, an inherent potential
conflict between shareholder profit aspirations and passenger interests in
service quality.
In addition, we suggested that regulation
was only part of the solution. Good
passenger experience at an airport
depended equally on good management
by airport companies and on the
Government playing its part in the
provision of surface access infrastructure
and adequate resources for border
control.
In March, the DfT published a further,
more detailed, consultation on the review
of economic regulation. We submitted a
response on the 2 nd June, a copy of which
can be found on our website.
Price control proposals for Stansted Airport charges for 2009-2014
In December, the CAA published a consultation on its proposals for the
setting of new price controls at Stansted Airport for the period 1 April 2009 to
31 March 2014. Our major interest in the consultation concerned the CAA’s
proposals on service quality in response to the Competition Commission’s
(CC)’s finding that BAA had failed in its provision of airport services of
adequate quality.
We agreed with the CAA that the evidence put forward by the CC was
sufficiently compelling for the CAA to propose to introduce a Service Quality
Regime at Stansted similar to the ones already in place at Heathrow and
Gatwick. We considered that these regimes had provided passengers with a
transparent and measurable benefit of price cap regulation.
In March, the CAA published its decision on setting a price cap for Stansted
from 2009-14. It introduced a regime with a set of service performance
standards and rebates under which the airport operator would reimburse
airlines up to seven per cent of airport charges where the airport’s service
performance fell short of the defined standards. The CAA decided to base