ABOLISH THE TOOTHLESS WATCHDOGS

WHO is the greatest villain in the utter shambles that is the collapse of Monarch? The answer should be straightforward: the carrier that mired 860,000 passengers in chaos and misery.

In fact, the real culprits are the people you and I pay to safeguard us from such disasters, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).

Its manifest failure to do so speaks volumes about the pathetic weakness of those tasked with regulating the private companies we all depend on for needs such as travel, heating, electricity, water and broadband.

These watchdogs are there to protect us from the kinds of horrors facing Monarch’s passengers. But repeatedly, they have been shown to be toothless. When Dame Deirdre Hutton, the CAA’s chairman, announced with self-satisfied aplomb this week that Monarch’s passengers would be ‘ repatriated’, it appeared initially that the regulator was doing its job.

It had chartered more than 30 planes from carriers such as Qatar Airways and easyJet to help bring back 110,000 passengers stranded overseas.

In fact, this blanket rescue package will last a mere two weeks. Many people on longer breaks, including retired and elderly passengers, will need to pay to get home themselves.

Discipline

Other victims of the collapse include package holidaymakers already in hotels who have paid for their rooms in advance through Monarch.

They face being hit by bills which the airline failed to pay.

Then there are hundreds of thousands more who have paid cash or dipped into savings for future bookings and face long struggles with credit card companies, PayPal and others to recover their money.

Yesterday, shockingly, the airline’s administrators KPMG estimated that as few as one in ten passengers could be protected financially by the Air Travel Organiser’s Licence (ATOL) — even though the CAA has suggested that up to half of passengers would be.

The truth is that Dame Deirdre, known as ‘Queen of the Quangos’ because of the series of high- level public sector posts she has held, gave the appearance of solving victims’ problems — but what they really wanted was for her to enforce discipline on the airlines she actually polices.

Because Monarch is not the only carrier that has let down passengers. Just last month, Ryanair dropped thousands of flights from its schedule in a move that affected around 750,000 passengers, and was accused of effectively ‘cancelling Christmas’. What did the If the Tories want to defend free markets, they must reform the useless regulators that let airlines and utility giants treat us like dirt watchdog do? Failed passengers again. And when computers at BA crashed during a May bank holiday weekend this year, causing cancellations, delays and misery, the authority was largely invisible.

In all of these cases, the supposed guardian of British passengers failed to champion the real victims.

There is no doubt: this regulator is not fit for purpose. Nor can it escape the fact that it bears considerable responsibility for Monarch passengers’ plight in the first place.

For it was the CAA that judged the company that bought Monarch in 2014 — a rapacious investment firm called Greybull Capital, which specialises in ‘rescuing’ ailing businesses — to be a fit and proper owner of an airline deserving of an Air Travel Organiser’s Licence.

Powerless

Yet the most cursory glance at Greybull’s history — which includes ‘rescuing’ a number of firms, only to see them go into administration shortly afterwards — should have given the CAA pause for thought before granting it the licence.

It’s now all but impossible for the public to have faith in the CAA as a regulator on the side of passengers and consumers.

It often looks to be part of a cosy cartel more concerned with preserving the interests of the airline industry and airports than customers.

It has been helped in this by the fact that passengers see themselves as powerless.

Airline users tend to accept miserable service from carriers. They put up with poor website and phone experiences, rising charges for services such as baggage, delayed flights, short- notice cancellations, intrusive security and, in the case of Monarch, a collapsed carrier, as if these were an inevitable part of air travel.

A perusal of the CAA’s board members tells us a great deal about why they appear so unconnected to ordinary people. Dame Deirdre has one of the longest entries in Who’s Who and, among other things, has served as chairman of the National Consumer Council and the Food Standards Agency and deputy chairman of the useless Financial Services Authority in the run-up to the banking crisis of 2007.

But the CAA is no worse than most of the other regulators of utility businesses that daily affect our lives.

At the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, the Chancellor Philip Hammond and Business Secretary Greg Clark both delivered stirring denunciations of the Marxist nationalisation policies of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.

But even as ministers deliver their attacks on socialism, they seem to fail to understand the frustration of consumers treated like dirt by big utility companies. Consumers such as the commuters on strike-hit Southern Rail, and householders struggling with energy costs from privatised utilities that push up domestic bills even as wholesale prices fall.

More than three decades after Margaret Thatcher ushered in a free-market revolution by privatising British Gas, BT and the other former nationalised industries, consumers feel bitterly betrayed. Yes, service is immeasurably better than it was all those decades ago, and there has been large- scale investment by the private sector which no government, struggling to keep public finances under control, could have afforded.

But these privatised companies today have increasingly little regard for their consumers. And this brings us back to the regulators.

Many are headed by quangocrats such as Dame Deirdre, remnants of the Blairite era, who do not have the muscle to stand up to the companies they police. The result is a loss of public confidence in capitalism to deliver the services people want at affordable prices.

Prime Minister Theresa May and her government have sought to deal with the perceived failures of the free market by fiddling with company boards — demanding more worker power, for instance, and more diversity, or by insisting on reining in excessive boardroom pay.

While this is laudable, it misses the point — because it concentrates its fire on the wrong kinds of company.

Despised

It is not the Tescos, Unilevers, Rolls- Royces, Vodafones, Glaxos and other listed companies that have alienated consumers, but the utilities.

Thames Water — where Dame Deirdre also happens to be a director — is one of the most despised companies in Britain, having flooded the nation’s rivers with raw sewage and failed to stem endless leaks.

Ofwat, the water regulator, has fined it millions of pounds, but this hardly registers against more than £1 billion it has sent overseas in shareholder cash dividends.

Likewise, the Rail Regulator has failed miserably to tackle Southern Rail’s disgusting performance in letting the unions interrupt commuter services, causing massive disruption and lost income.

If the Tories really want to defend free markets, they must show the willpower demonstrated by Margaret Thatcher in the Eighties when she took on the trade unions and won.

They could begin by replacing weak regulators with powerful industrialists willing to challenge the established order.

They must give regulators, including the CAA, greater powers to fine miscreants who overcharge or fail to deliver the right services. A toll of up to 10 per cent of a utility firm’s turnover would force bosses to mend their ways.

More muscular regulation would serve consumer and producer interests and demonstrate to voters that there is free-market alternative to the deadly hand of Marxism.