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Civil Aviation Authority review: Report and summary of responses |
A call for evidence on the effectiveness and efficiency of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) was published on 28 November 2022 and remained open for responses until 29 January 2023.
The Report, with Ministerial Foreword, Executive Summary and Review Recommendations can be found here.
Stakeholders, individuals and organisations submitted responses to questions using an online web form. In total, 444 responses were received online or by email. The majority of responses followed the call for evidence questions. Where email responses did not follow the call for evidence questions the review team analysed them individually. These 26 responses could not be included in the call for evidence quantitative analysis but they were considered by the review.
The call for evidence asked questions spanning a range of areas relating to the work of the CAA. A wide range of stakeholders responded. Some responses were very detailed and expressed a broad range of opinion. This report summarises the key trends from major stakeholder groups, as well as some question responses which have informed the recommendations.
Responses to the call for evidence were split into 2 main groups:
- responses from 287 individuals
- 157 responses on behalf of organisations
418 of these responses used the web survey and 26 organisations provided email responses. Some of these email respondents did not follow the structure of the call for evidence, and we have analysed these emails separately rather than attempting to assess how they might have responded to the call for evidence questions.
A list of respondents, including the organisations that responded, can be found in overview of individuals and organisations who responded to the call for evidence.
This report is exclusively a summary of responses to our call for evidence and does not include feedback gathered at the stakeholder events and consultations held with commercial airlines, airports, General Aviation (GA) sector, airport community groups and emerging technology companies as well as meeting with numerous other stakeholders. These meetings also informed the review’s recommendations.
The full summary can be found here. From the summary:
Trends in responses from General Aviation
To account for the breadth of the GA community, we combined responses from a number of the individual sub-categories, including private pilots, professional drone operators and sports and recreational aviation participants. In all, we received 135 responses from these subgroups.
Responses from the GA community were generally more negative than average across all individuals. 59% of responses from the GA community expressed negative views and 13% of responses from the GA community expressed positive views.
Like other individual respondents, the GA community felt most positive about the CAA's enforcement of consumer protection, 35% of responses being either agree or strongly agree and effectiveness at regulating the sector, 27% of responses being either agree or strongly agree.
The GA community gave the most negative responses to the question on how the CAA's customer service compares to other regulators with 84% of responses being disagree or strongly disagree. and the CAA's effectiveness at acting on feedback 83% of responses being disagree or strongly disagree.
Trends for individuals
Questions in the call for evidence were structured to give 5 options, ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Strongly agree was always a positive response to the question.
In total, around 70% of all respondents were individuals expressing their own opinions.
Across all questions and individuals, 15% of responses either agreed or strongly agreed with the questions and 57% of responses either disagreed or strongly disagreed.
Looking at sub-groups of Individuals, members of the public and passenger or cargo customers of UK aviation had the most positive responses, with 27% responses from members of the public and 30% responses from passenger or cargo customers of UK aviation being agree or strongly agree.
By comparison, aeromedical examiners and commercial pilots had the most negative responses, with 69% of responses from aeromedical examiners and 67% responses from commercial pilots being disagree or strongly disagree.