Consultation Hub

For comments from industry on the following main proposals:

• A general price increase of 2.6% across all Schemes of Charges in 2018/19;
• Proposals of specific charges to cover our costs in four areas where we are undertaking new activities, being

1. Cyber Programme
2. Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS)
3. Markets and Competition Work

• Proposals for revised charge concessions in respect of air displays held for charitable purposes and further clarification regarding multiple events.

This document includes the comments received and the outcome: CAA Response

We are grateful for those submissions received and after CAA Board discussion, we propose to implement all proposals made subject to three amendments.

• Markets and Competition Work – reduced funding requirements
• Air Display Charges – additional concessions
• Declared Training Organisations – charges now contained within the Personnel Licensing Scheme

Please see the CAA Response Document for details.

We called for evidence to assist us assessing whether the provision of TANS in the UK is subject to market conditions, as set out under Annex I of the European Regulation No 391/2013.

The responses to this document are available here. Our draft advice to the Secretary of State (see below) summarises and discusses the responses received.

We prepared our draft advice to the Secretary of State for consultation. Our draft advice is that TANS provision at the airports in scope of this review is subject to market conditions. If this draft advice is confirmed after consultation, we will advise the DfT accordingly.  The DfT can then apply to the European Commission for exemption from those elements of the EC’s Implementing Regulation No 391/2013 which apply to the provision of TANS. If accepted by the EC, the UK will not be required to calculate determined costs, set financial incentives, and to set terminal unit rates for TANS for RP3.

The purpose of this consultation was for the CAA to learn your views on new guidance that we have drafted to support our new airspace change decision-making process. This followed our consultation in 2016 about what the new process should look like.

The guidance that we drafted defines what will happen in the new process, including each stage a sponsor of an airspace change must complete; the stakeholders they must engage at each stage and our expectations of that engagement; and how the CAA assesses the proposed change.

We invited views as to whether the guidance is appropriate – including whether our description of the stages of the process are comprehensible, transparent and proportionate.

We had 113 formal responses to the consultation, which we have published where we have permission to do so.

The first eight multiple-choice questions asked to what extent (good, mostly, not sufficiently) the draft guidance was comprehensible, transparent and proportionate. For all three criteria (i.e. 24 results):

• between 57% and 76% of respondents rated the draft guidance overall and for each of the seven stages as meeting or mostly meeting each of the criteria
• between 29% and 43% of respondents rated the guidance as not meeting the proportionality criterion, with the poorest results on Stage 5 (CAA decision-making) and on the process overall
• between 24% and 32% of respondents rated the guidance as not meeting the comprehensibility and transparency criteria, except on Stage 5 (CAA decision-making) where 39% of respondents rated the guidance as not meeting the transparency criterion

Detail about how different stakeholder groups responded, and the reasoning they gave in their written answers, is set out and analysed further in our consultation report.

In response to the remaining questions:

• between 59% and 77% of respondents rated the guidance on temporary airspace changes (formerly Tier 1b) and airspace trials (formerly Tier 1c) as meeting or mostly meeting the three criteria
• for the proposed new category of a permanent and planned redistribution of air traffic, where we sought views pending a government decision on whether to go ahead with it, there was almost unanimous support to adopt all stages of the airspace change process and (if we exclude a high number of ‘don’t knows’) for scaling it based on potential noise impacts
• between 55% and 69% of respondents rated the draft best practice guidance on what we now call airspace information (formerly Tier 3) as meeting or mostly meeting the three criteria. 45% of respondents thought this guidance was not sufficiently proportionate.

Free text boxes on each question allowed respondents to give their reasoning and explain how the draft guidance could be improved. Recurring themes were:

• adverse comments, mostly from residents, about the length and complexity of our guidance, and requests for a more accessible, easy-read version.
• significantly more comments – from every stakeholder group – on the need for more detailed information to be included in most areas of the guidance document about how the process will work
• suggestions, mainly from industry, that case studies or illustrative examples would be useful
• comments that the draft guidance would not improve stakeholder engagement considerably outweighed those that it would; it was suggested that engagement needed to be more prescriptive or should be included at additional steps in the process
• responses were almost wholly supportive of the use of a third-party facilitator
• responses regarding the role of the CAA varied from suggestions that the CAA is too heavy-handed and the process disproportionate, resource-intensive and too lengthy (mainly from industry), to the CAA needing to regulate the industry more firmly (mainly from residents) citing a lack of trust in the CAA, or our process, or the industry
• many respondents (mainly residents), took the opportunity to share their frustration about aviation noise in general, or with the way industry engages with stakeholders, or with matters which are Government policy on airspace and noise to which the CAA, and our airspace change process, must adhere, and which are not in our gift to change.
• there were many recommendations concerning the actual airspace change process itself (for instance the length of stages, or the process relating to gateways), rather than the draft guidance that supports it.

To understand why some responses said that our guidance was not good enough, we need to understand what respondents would want to see instead. We have therefore gone into great detail as to what respondents said and our responses to specific issues in our consultation response document CAP 1615. We have rated every recommendation made to us as green, red, blue or amber – green means a change we have accepted and made to the guidance and red means one that we have not; blue means that we believe that the recommendation is already reflected in our guidance; and amber means either that a slight clarification is need to the guidance to produce the outcome we intended, or that it is a suggestion we will treat flexibly (we have not amended the guidance to mandate it, but believe it is currently a potential option in light of the wording).

We have taken on board the conflicting sentiments in responses that the guidance is too complex yet needs to be more detailed on certain aspects of the process. This highlights that the guidance needs to be transparent about a detailed and complex regulatory process while also being as accessible as possible.

Below is a high-level summary of the changes we made to the draft guidance to produce the final guidance. There are a large number of text changes, too numerous to list here, but many are just tweaks to language or clarifications.

We published all responses to the consultation unless permission was withheld.

The following documents set out how the process will work from 2 January 2018:

• CAP 1616 Airspace Design: guidance on the regulatory process for changing airspace design including community engagement requirements
• CAP 1616a Airspace Design: environmental requirements technical annex
• Statement of Need form – this is an online form that sponsors use to submit to the CAA at the start of the airspace change process
• CAP 1617 Airspace Design: CAA representative decision templates – to aid transparency about how we make decisions, these are example templates of the documents we will publish when we make a decision.
• CAP 1618 Airspace Design: Unusual aerial activities published in the AIP – this is a list of changes which do not need to follow the airspace change process.
• CAP 1619 Airspace Design: Guidelines on moderation of consultation responses – these are policy guidelines on the moderation of stakeholder responses relating to airspace change that are published by the CAA.