The strange thing about all of this is that the key event for the LGW mess (and to some extent Swanwick) was when an overweight male with multiple lung and heart conditions fell off his boat somewhere by the Canary Islands on Bonfire Night, November 1991.

NATS legacy staff are on something called Trust of a Promise, cunningly hidden under myriad documents as ToaP. This was a guarantee given to NATS legacy staff that even if TUPE'd to another outfit, such as ANS, they take their top of the range Defined Benefit Pensions with them. Consequently the incoming company would have to fix the pension fund in line with the pension reform legislation brought in after Maxwell's premature end - a fix which is unquantifiable before agreeing to take over a new ATC entity. The idea of a trade or market in ATC related matters is bogus, in my mind, when the main cost is labour, labour which is extremely inflexible and expensive as a resource (I'm not referring to individuals here) and where there is also a very restricted market on the second expenditure item, technology.