Ms Catherine Gubbins:

Mr. Harrison has made an important point. The group is completely self-funding. One of key priorities is to protect our financial profile, maintain our credit rating and have a credible story when going to external markets, meaning we can continue to be able to borrow. The overall price cap and trajectory comprise a key component of our ability to engage with the rating agency and external investor community so they will have confidence in our ability to fund, borrow and invest in the capital programme over the coming years. As part of our engagement with the regulator, we highlighted significant concerns about how it approaches this and considers our ability to fund ourselves, particularly when we have come off the back of the Covid period, which really demonstrated the exposure of the aviation industry in general to significant pandemics and, obviously, the general economic cycle. We have made this point to the regulator historically.

As Mr. Harrison said, we feel that the regulator has left us too little margin to deal with potential risks that might be around the corner, particularly in the context of the general macroeconomic environment and increasing interest rates, for example. It is important that we are able to fund ourselves. Indeed, it is a priority for us and the challenge is to effect that as we move forward. Our concern in this regard is related to our concerns around the regulatory price cap.