Mr. Cathal Guiomard:

The Commission for Aviation Regulation welcomes the opportunity to talk to the Committee of Public Accounts today. We have provided a short background note on the work of the office and the challenges ahead. In this opening statement I will limit myself to three points: the work that the CAR carries out, the expenditures we have incurred for the purpose of carrying out that work over the last ten years, and how we measure our own performance.

The roles we carry out fall under four groups. We set a ceiling on charges at Dublin Airport for aeronautical charges the airlines pay to the DAA. Likewise, we set a ceiling on air traffic control charges the Irish Aviation Authority sets for Dublin, Cork and Shannon airports, which are also paid by the airlines. We enforce certain air passenger rights under EU laws. All of our functions, bar one, fall under EU legislation. In 2012, we received about 3,000 inquiries under this heading. About 400 of those were matters for ourselves to investigate. We license three parts of the aviation industry: airlines, travel agents and tour operators, and a class of firm at airports known as ground handlers. There are 62 airline and ground-handling licences in force at the moment, and about 280 travel trade licences. There is a more technical role, the last one, whereby under EU law we must choose the runway slot scheduling regime at Dublin Airport and, if required, select a professional services firm to do the actual slot allocation.

That brings me to a distinction we make in our costs, which are presented in the next slide. Between core and non-core costs, we class as core costs those which are substantially under our own control. Non-core costs are those which are essentially driven by the decisions of others. Those include scheduling, legal expenses and some of the administrative costs that arise when a travel agency or tour operator closes, and we refund customers or, if required, repatriate customers who are abroad. These expenditures are paid for by a levy on the industry.

I became commissioner in mid-2006 and the cost of the office has not increased since that date despite the boom time conditions that were in force in the early years. Since the downturn began, the costs of the office have been cut substantially. In 2012, they were one third below the costs of 2006, and our staffing was close to one fifth below the level of 2006. All of these figures are audited accounting information, except for 2012 which are our own estimates. They will fall to be audited by the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General in the course of this year, beginning shortly.

The final slide deals with performance. We measure and publish a total of 19 indicators of our performance. These were produced as a consequence of a Government statement in 2009 dealing with economic regulation. We developed those 19 measures in 2010 covering licensing, consumer protection, the travel industry and trends and costs of the office. We published them with the 2011 report and will continue to publish them. A selection are presented in the small table in the slide.

There is more information available about the office from our corporate website. We also have a dedicated passenger rights website, in a more user-friendly form, to inform members of the public as to what their entitlements are in the event of a flight being cancelled or delayed. Moreover, we would be happy to respond to any questions the Chairman or members may have.