Argyll News: Remember the row on Ofcom hiking VHF transmission fees for Lifeboat and Mountain Rescue services?

The consultation period on Ofcom‘s proposals for a massive hike in its prices for marine and aeronautical VHF transmission came to an end on 30th October.

As For Argyll reported at the time, the change in pricing strategy Ofcom proposed would be crippling for the lifeboat and mountain rescue services. Both of these are charitable organisations staffed mainly by voluteers and dependent on the public for donations.

Significant media attention was paid to the situation and Ofcom has stayed pretty quiet since – ‘considering carefully the responses received from stakeholders’.

It has now issued a short update on its post-consultation intentions for the ‘Administered Incentive Pricing’ (AIP) scheme it has proposed. This name and acronym not only has a grimly determined ring to it but is foolishly open to confusion in the aeronautical industry also centrally affected by this specific Ofcom scheme.

In the aeronatical world, an AIP has long been an Aeronautical Information Publication, defined as ‘a publication issued by or with the authority of a state and containing aeronautical information of a lasting character essential to air navigation’.

Anyway, the key points of the Ofcom update on its own AIP are:

‘We are considering a number of issues in more detail, working closely with consultants with expertise in the maritime and aeronautical sectors, and we will be discussing these issues with the Civil Aviation Authority and the Maritime and Coastguard Agency’.
‘We have no plans to change the fees for VHF communications channels before April 2010 at the earliest’.
‘We have no plans to alter the current arrangements under which mountain and lowland rescue services make use of radio channels co-ordinated and paid for by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency’.
‘We have no plans to charge AIP to ships and have proposed that we should not apply AIP to aircraft either’.

There some oddities in the announcement, however hard it tries to sidestep more controversy.

It says specifically that: ‘We do not expect fees for radar and aeronautical navigation aids to be subject to any change related to this policy until some time after 2010′. This suggests that it expects fee rises to come into play in other areas soon after the start of 2010.

Since price rises are about additional revenue generation, the exclusions and deferments already noted in this document raise questions about where the money is going to come from.

However, Ofcom says that, in the Spring of 2009, it will provide further information on the next steps it plans in the introduction of AIP and that it will ‘hold a number of stakeholder workshops before publishing further proposals for consultation’.

For Argyll’s two previous stories on this matter were: