It is scarcely unexpected to find that the Competition Commission is leaning towards a recommendation to break up BAA's airports into separate, competing companies. What is surprising is that it has taken the commission 22 years to decide that BAA was an appropriate subject for review.

The government's decision in 1986 to sell off the-then British Airports Authority as a whole rather than as separate, competing businesses, was controversial at the time, because of the blatantly monopolistic nature of the new company.

Even individual airports have many of the characteristics of a natural monopoly, let alone when they are sold in bunches that dominate entire regions - like the London area's Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, and Scotland's Edinburgh, Glasgow, Prestwick and Aberdeen airports.

In 1986, Margaret Thatcher's government made the decision to sell the authority's seven airports as a unit, because it was quicker and easier to do and gained more money for the exchequer. The monopoly would reasonably have been seen by potential buyers as a licence to print money, despite the government putting in place a price-capping mechanism administered by the Civil Aviation Authority's economic regulation group (ERG). The cap still exists, but the ERG recently gave permission to increase user charges by far more than inflation on the grounds that massive investment is needed to increase the airports' capacities because, particularly at Heathrow and Gatwick, logjam has already been reached.

Comments today by the commission indicate that it is fully aware that an additional reinforcement to BAA's monopolistic status is the dire shortage of runway capacity in the southeast. Even if Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted were sold off, the commission implies, there will soon be more demand for flights than the airports will be able to satisfy with their present resources. And even when Stansted gets its second runway and if Heathrow gets its third (it probably will), the air traffic service provider NATS predicts that the skies over the south-east will not be able to handle the demand created by the seemingly insatiable desire of people to fly ever more frequently on business and leisure.

So, the commission hints, even a split-up series of individual airports run as competing businesses will have total control over what air travellers can and cannot do, and what price they have to pay for the commodity, by virtue of its scarcity. When an airport is operating at capacity, and that capacity is capped by planning considerations over which they have no power, what incentive is there for the management to improve its services? Suppose, by making flying cheaper and more pleasant, Gatwick were to win airlines and passengers from Heathrow, how would its already overloaded system handle the additional traffic? And vice versa.

There is an air of caution about the competition commission's early statements, because they are aware that recommending splitting up the airports into individual businesses would not necessarily solve the problems travellers face today, let alone in the near future. It is not as simple as that.

Basically, successive governments have stalled for so long over decisions about what kind of a modern airport infrastructure the UK needs, and who should provide it, that whatever decisions are taken now are too late. The government is left with playing a desperate game of catch-up. This will be bad for the economy and for the environment, because an improved version of the status quo will still not be good enough.