The Government is likely to provoke uproar on Tuesday when it outlines plans to raise up to £500 million by selling 51 per cent of the state-owned National Air Traffic Services (NATS) - despite declaring shortly before the general election that 'our air is not for sale'.
A senior industry source said industrial action would be 'a last resort' for controllers, who have not been on strike for 20 years, but was 'an option'.
Even the mildest action by controllers, such as refusing to work extra shifts to cover for sick colleagues, could cause extended flight delays, warned the source, because 'they are operating pretty close to 100 per cent capacity'.
Controllers last year reported 49 cases of air traffic overload, twice as many as the previous year. These are defined as times when individual radar operators have more aircraft on their screen than they can safely cope with.
Controllers and the parliamentary transport committee have warned of the increasing risk of a mid-air collision over the densely populated South-East as air traffic grows to record levels.
The committee is opposed to privatisation and there is growing unrest among Labour backbenchers about the Government's plans. Gavin Strang, a Transport Minister until he was sacked in the reshuffle last summer, said privatisation would be a mistake. 'This plan has not been devised to enhance safety standards and improve our national security,' he said. 'It has been driven by financial considerations.'
John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister, will squeeze in the announcement of the sell-off on Tuesday morning, hours before Parliament rises for the summer recess. Prescott hopes to appease controllers by offering them a 5 per cent stake in NATS. The Government will keep 49 per cent and private companies will be offered the chance to buy a 45 per cent share. Whitehall and union sources said it was believed the Government would sell its stake later.
The Civil Aviation Authority, the government body of which NATS is a part, is keen to break the shackles of public-sector spending controls and expand internationally if other countries follow Britain's lead in privatising their air traffic systems. The CAA has reported that 1998 was one of the safest years for passenger flying in Britain, with six serious near misses attributable to air traffic control errors, compared with 11 in 1997.
The privatisation plan comes when the new £450 million air traffic nerve centre at Swanwick in Hampshire is running six years behind schedule. It was meant to open in 1996 and take the strain off the elderly radar centre at West Drayton, near Heathrow Airport, but in final testing before it was to become operational the computer software developed glitches that are not expected to be sorted out until 2002.
A senior source familiar with the project said this weekend that, although technological bugs had caused some of the delay, the rest was down to poor project management by NATS.
'Public sector bodies tend to think they can change things - such as over-ambitious changes to the specification - and the project sinks into delays,' he said. 'Private sector clients come up with a specification and stick to it.'
