Ministers are as much to blame as airlines for travel chaos

Going abroad this year? Best of British luck to you. If you’re flying, you’re going to need it.

Cancelled flights and chaos at airports cast a dark pall over the platinum jubilee extended weekend, in fact over the whole of the half-term holiday week, for those who sought to escape.

There have been stories of mad dashes by road and rail so that children could get back in time for exams. Having missed return flights, through no fault of their own, some are now going to miss the boat at school and that is simply unconscionable.

“Clearly, [airlines] have been taken by surprise by the way people have returned to travel after two years of being locked down, but I’m not surprised – we were saying all along: ‘You will need to be ready for this,’” transport secretary Grant Shapps said.

Passing the buck is one of the few areas in which the government has displayed some level of competence. That was a fine example of the art from the secretary of state. Give the man a promotion.

He promised that his department will “work with” the industry to ensure that this dog’s dinner isn’t simply the hors d’oeuvres ahead of a massive main course in the summer.

Trouble is, he has also ruled out doing anything that might actually help, such as allowing airlines to import some of the workers they can’t find, or even drafting in the army to clear the backlog, a suggestion that looks extreme until you see some of the scenes from airports in recent days.

That is not to say that airlines such as easyJet and WizzAir, which have cancelled dozens more flights in the last 24 hours or so, don’t deserve some of the blame for what’s been going on. Ditto some of the airports, which were too quick to fire workers when the industry was in the pandemic doldrums – although this mightn’t have happened had Shapps and his colleagues recognised the specific problems faced by the industry and offered the support sought by unions and others.

It did not require a degree in divination to see that an almighty cock-up might follow on from pandemic-era layoffs in the travel sector. The industry needs people. The trouble is, people are proving hard to find, even in a rapidly deteriorating economy. If the airlines had any sense, they would sit down with the unions (Prospect would like to do this) and talk pay and especially conditions with a view to attracting workers.

Britain has a substantial pool of “economically inactive” people who have left the labour force. At least some could be lured back if the jobs on offer paid properly and didn’t leave them feeling like they’d spent the day on a military training exercise with the shouty drill instructor from Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket screaming in their ears when clocking off. Sometimes that “drill instructor” has three or four kids at their side, and three or four pints inside, but sometimes he or she comes from management.

One of the problems with the low-cost airline model, which has become dominant, is that it has been achieved through bearing down hard on staff. That worked for the industry’s leaders when they had the whip hand. When jobs were less easy to find, they could apply the squeeze. But now, the boot is on the other foot and airports have a substantial medium- to long-term problem.

Better pay and conditions for workers means higher costs and potentially higher prices for travellers, but it also ought to mean a better service. Those caught in the chaos would be ready to accept paying a little extra to avoid the expensive consequences of cancelled flights or missed holidays.

The situation is particularly bad for more vulnerable passengers – those of us with disabilities for example. Frank Gardner, the BBC’s wheelchair-using security correspondent, has been chronicling his experiences of getting left on planes long after everyone else has disembarked. Of course, he has to travel for his job; some of us have given up travelling at all. Questions of rights and, yes, discrimination have to be raised in the midst of all this.

Which brings us neatly back to Shapps. During his interviews, he talked of “proper dispute resolution” and a “proper charter” for passengers, even an automated refund system similar to the one that operates for trains. These are regulatory measures that could motivate airlines to improve if they led to higher costs.

However, Which? has warned that existing government plans to reform compensation rules for flights in the UK could “slash average payouts by £163 per passenger and weaken a vital deterrent against delays and cancellations”.

So Mr Shapps looks as if he’s spinning to such an extent that the England cricket team might want to consider his right arm for their next Test.

If setting our own rules is supposed to be one of the benefits of Brexit, why would they be changed to skewer the consumer?

Which? also suggests beefing up Civil Aviation Authority powers to levy fines, and enforcing rules requiring airlines to rebook passengers using another airline if it will get them to their destination. These are ideas worthy of consideration.

Shapps could also help by granting more visas to allow the industry to import more labour. Better pay and conditions for workers, with an eye on recruitment and retention, is something the travel industry surely needs to get to grips with. But swift action is also required to head off something really nasty in the summer.

The truth of the matter is that the current travel chaos is a problem created as much by the government as it is by the industry. It is the toxic legacy of Brexit, the pandemic, and ministers’ constant buck-passing.

Better to get a grip now, especially for the travelling public.