Flip-flopping carried airlines into this mess

Ministers must accept some responsibility for the chaos at airports rather than simply blaming aviation chiefs

Love him or loathe him, Michael O’leary has a knack of saying what most people think, but feel it is not always appropriate to say. With tens of thousands of holidaymakers enduring half-term hell at airports up and down the country, O’leary knows what needs to be done.

“Bring in the Army!”

A little over the top? Perhaps. But, as the Irish businessman rightly points out, this is not an uncommon move on the Continent. This is not the way we typically do things in Blighty, as compared with across the English Channel where workers’ penchant for going on strike is somewhat more prolific.

As yet, parachuting in the military does not seem to have featured in Grant Shapps’s thinking. Indeed, the Transport Secretary appears to believe his work is done.

Shapps has spent most of this week pointing the finger at airlines for selling seats to customers for flights that were always going to be cancelled.

He does have a point here. Despite their protests, airlines have seriously over-promised and under-delivered. They simply should not have been offering seats unless they were certain that the flights would take off.

The Transport Secretary hit the nail on the head in his statement on Wednesday night: “The scenes we’re witnessing at airports are heartbreaking, with holidaymakers missing out on their first trips abroad after the pandemic.”

So what is the Government actually going to do next? Not a lot, it would seem.

Shapps said he has “made the changes needed to allow the sector to prepare for summer”. This, he might argue, has been to “fast-track” vetting procedures to ensure airport workers are not terrorists. In reality, it meant unblocking a bottleneck in the Government scheme – one that should not have been there in the first place.

“Now we need industry to do their bit,” Shapps said. “We do not want to see a repeat of this over the summer.”

The problem is that there is very little that can be done quickly without Government help. And Boris Johnson’s administration needs to wake up and realise why they need to do more.

Tui, the world’s biggest travel operator, has cancelled a quarter of its flights from Manchester airport during June. From what I have been told, unless it pulls a rabbit out of the hat, a reduced timetable is likely to run into the following months.

Manchester is far and away the biggest regional airport in the UK, welcoming nearly 30m passengers each year before the pandemic hit. Though situated in the North West, its size and broad selection of flights means it is popular right across Johnson’s Red Wall constituencies.

After foregoing holidays abroad for two years and now facing a cost of living crisis, one of the few things many households still have to look forward to is their two weeks in the Costa de Sol or Kavos. But now even this is in peril. And voters, already reeling from No10’s partygate scandal, may blame Johnson if they are forced to swap sunny Sicily for soggy Skegness.

Yes, the airlines, airports and ground handling companies are to blame.

But the reasons behind their failings are important. Why did they over-book? Why were they woefully under-staffed and unprepared?

The answer, as bosses have repeatedly said, is steeped in Johnson’s flip-flopping on travel restrictions during the pandemic.

The lack of a cohesive policy for the best part of two years has seriously undermined the aviation industry’s faith in the Government.

So when omicron hit in December, the reaction from the travel industry was entirely logical.

Laden with billions of pounds of debt (because the Government, quite rightly, did not offer the multibillion-euro bailouts that were doled out like Smarties on the Continent), they halted hiring plans to save costs. Bosses assumed that, as had been the case throughout the pandemic, Britain would be the last to lift Covid travel restrictions.

And yet the UK was the first. The sector’s answer was to put on as many flights as possible as Britain flung open its borders earlier than expected – and hope against hope that they would be able to staff them.

Given recent policy history, what else could they have done?

Solving the current conundrum cannot be done by the sector alone. Aviation is chronically understaffed. Blue-collar workers no longer have to endure back-breaking work for baggage companies on a minimum wage with anti-social hours. They instead enjoy a slightly better paid job working for Amazon in a warehouse that might come with perks like a gym.

Shapps has refused to go in to bat against Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, to demand that aviation workers be added to the shortage occupation list – which would make it easier to recruit staff from abroad.

It feels unlikely that the Army will be parachuted in either, but you never know.

Johnson and Shapps need to do more for hard-working families that desperately need a fortnight in the sun.

The blame-game needs to stop. Yes, aviation chiefs have failed. But their decisions were built on the foundations of Johnson’s policy flipflopping during the pandemic. Ministers must accept some responsibility for the mess.

The electorate will not thank them for snide digs at aviation chiefs alone.

‘It feels unlikely that the Army will be parachuted in but you never know’