The ever rising cost of the ATOL arm of the CAA

Why are record amounts of Air Travel Trust (ATT) funds being spent on admin, accounting and legal costs? This has risen more than threefold over the last 5 years.

ATT, Audit and Legal fees:

Is it a coincidence that these audit and legal costs rise in proportion to how late the ATT trustees are in producing the annual ATT accounts? The ATT accounts were last on time in 2016, 5 days late in 2017, 18 days late in 2018 and for the past 4 years they have been more than a year late, breaching their deed of trust each time. The ATT trustees are CAA employees and are answerable to the Secretary of State for Transport.

The CAA states that:

‘Like most regulators in the UK, we are funded by the charges we levy on the industry we regulate’

For the ATOL arm of the CAA we take this to mean the ATOL licence fee which raised £37,086,857 in 2021-22. However contrary to this statement about funding, the CAA are also able to charge the Air Travel Trust (ATT) for their time, which is a practice that has been on the rise:

Following a FOIR the CAA shared that the 2022 payment of £1,779,600 was for 17.7 CAA Employees, giving an average pay per administrator of £100,542. One assumes the very generous pension contributions are an additional cost.

Two questions occur:

1) Why are these costs not covered by the revenue from the ATOL Licence fee? Instead the APC fee, paid by the travelling public fund these highly remunerated administrators.

2) What is the explanation for the threefold increase in administration charges between 2017 and 2022?