EU tolerance of French air traffic control strikes is unacceptable

Times

17-07-2025

Summer has landed. So what better time to spend hours at an airport, waiting to take off? Or, better still, find your holiday flight's been cancelled — and all because of those French air traffic controllers, who are once again on strike.
It's becoming such a summer ritual that Michael O'Leary, the Ryanair boss, has branded the walk-outs 'recreational': the sort of thing that, by some bizarre coincidence, increasingly happens when ze beau temps est arrivé. The controllers have blamed 'short staffing'. Too right — they're making it worse.
Whatever, this holiday season is already off to a cracker. On stats from Eurocontrol — the European organisation for the safety of air navigation — the froggie strikes on July 3 and 4 caused about 7,400 flights to be delayed across Europe, with more than 2,800 cancellations. Passengers affected topped a million, with those figures probably an understatement as the impact rolled on into the next day. As for the airlines, they collectively clocked up a £100 million-plus bill.
O'Leary's opposite number at easyJet, Kenton Jarvis, disclosed the effect on his carrier — £15 million of costs — adding that he's 'extremely unhappy' with a situation that brings 'unacceptable challenges for customers and crew', plus 'unexpected and significant costs for all airlines'.
Jarvis says he's 'spoken to the secretary of state [transport chief Heidi Alexander] about it because it affects UK consumers', adding: 'I don't think the French government are comfortable with it' either. Who really knows? But Britain needs to crank up the political pressure here because there is an easy fix.
France is not the only country causing air traffic delays; plenty suffered when the pandemic hit the recruitment of new controllers. But it's the worst offender 'by a country mile' as Jarvis put it, well ahead of Spain, Germany and the UK, as the website Air Traffic Control Ruined Your Flight underlines. Alongside the strike-happy staff, there's a key reason too. Unlike other nations, including Italy, Spain and Greece, France does not allow 'overflights' — ones that merely pass through its air space — during strikes. And, as Eurocontrol notes, while a third of European flights 'cross, land or take off in France' each day, almost 60 per cent of them are overflights.
Protection for French overflights during strikes is an issue O'Leary has been raising for six years with the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen — or von 'Derlayed-Again', as he likes to call her. This month he wrote to her again, saying 'it is up to you as president' to 'protect the single market'. So, 'it is unacceptable that every year, the commission washes its hands of responsibility for Europe's single market for air travel, by claiming that air traffic control is a 'national competence' '.
As he noted, 270,000 travellers in the EU alone had their flights cancelled due to this month's strikes: a figure that would be cut by '90 per cent' if the EC insisted on 'France protected overflights' during walk-outs or the EU allowed Eurocontrol to 'manage' them. Requesting she 'please now act or quit', he said: 'It is unacceptable that over your six years as president … you have taken zero action'. It is. Von der Leyen did not reply.
Given the impact on British travellers, the government should be badgering both her and President Macron, fresh from a state visit to Britain, to fix this problem. Because right now, it's out of control.
First puzzler from the Office for Notional Statistics' latest job figures: how does this even happen? 'UK payrolled employee growth for May 2025, compared with April 2025, has been revised from a decrease of 109,000 reported in the last bulletin to a decrease of 25,000'. Or, to put it another way, last month's stats were wrong by a mere 84,000 people. Where were all those worker bees hiding?
True, the monthly jobs stats are invariably revised. But that's a hell of miss for a key input into the Bank of England's interest rate decisions. How's it meant to know what's going on in the labour market with figures like that yo-yo'ing around?
• Britain runs on ONS statistics. What happens when they're nonsense?
Anyway, second puzzler: what sort of thought experiment was Rachel Reeves indulging in before her budget? Did she somehow convince herself that if she jacked up payroll taxes by £25 billion a year, chased wealth-creating billionaires out of the country and had her boss, Sir Starmergeddon, pass laws giving untried workers first-day employment rights, it would result in boom time for the jobs market? If so, she's predictably out by even more than the ONS's dodgy stats.
The inevitable has happened. Unemployment has now hit a fresh four-year high at 4.7 per cent, with payrolls contracting in a year by 178,000, or 0.6 per cent, and falling in seven of the eight months since her budget. On top, hospitality and retail — big employers of young workers — have been hardest hit.
As the Federation of Small Businesses put it: 'If you make it more expensive and riskier to give someone a job, the result will be fewer jobs.'
Still, don't expect Reeves to grasp that. After all, her budget didn't affect 'working people'.
More hot air. 'Plans to slash electricity network costs for energy-intensive businesses by 90 per cent are set in motion as government launches new consultation'. A consultation, no less. Yes, luckily this one is only due to last four weeks, while Jonathan Reynolds, the business secretary, gets 'industry views' on upping the discount on electricity network charges from 60 per cent to 90 per cent for energy-intensive businesses. But it's meant to save 500 of them 'up to £420 million per year'. So what is his consultation for? They're hardly likely to be opposed to it.