About our Strategy
The CAA’s Strategy is designed to help to position us for the future. It sets out our ambition to continually challenge ourselves to improve by drawing on a wide range of insights and evidence to deliver regulation in a way that the public, consumers, the regulated community and those who oversee us would expect.
Our 2021 strategy placed strong emphasis on our work to support industry as it recovered from the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, passenger numbers have returned to close to their 2019 peak in the UK, and our focus is turning to ensuring our regulation effectively protects them, while enabling innovation and sustainability, and providing excellent service to our customers. This refreshed strategy sets out our approach to the changing operating environment we work in.
The way we cement strategy and planning is also changing – moving to a yearly process of setting out clear, deliverable Annual Strategic Objectives and using them to focus our business planning and objective setting. These annual objectives replace our Board Priorities, and detail the activities where success is key to delivering our strategic focus. However, they are by necessity a small subset of the vital work undertaken across the CAA to support a safe, secure and sustainable aviation and aerospace working for consumers and the public.
Much remains familiar from our 2021 strategy – most fundamentally our focus on recruiting and retaining brilliant people who live our values and are supported to deliver our mission. The key priorities our people will focus on also remain the same, and while the names of each Strategic Focus Area have changed, and our Strategic Aims simplified, their substance has not. When we published our last strategy, we were clear that our core purpose to protect consumers and the public is timeless. This has not, and will not, change.
We are choosing to refresh our strategy now as we look to implement recommendations from reviews by both the International Civil Aviation Organisation and our own Public Bodies review, and as new Executives bed in. Delivering on our ambition will require significant engagement and support from government – to set strategic direction, and help us bolster and prioritise limited resources to achieve our shared priorities. As a regulator, our strategic ambitions cannot be realised without buy-in and support from those we regulate. Achieving that will require a relationship of trust founded on excellent customer service.
Our new Strategy is agile; it provides the foundations to continue to successfully deliver our core regulatory roles, as well as position ourselves to tackle new challenges and opportunities. It will also give us the flexibility required to respond to unforeseen shocks or seize new opportunities to deliver on our vision. Our Strategy will be delivered through our annual business planning process. It is designed to be both ‘always on’ and open to change as and when required, and therefore does not have a time period attached to it. In the future, we intend to update our Strategy on a yearly basis, as the context we operate in will change, and thus so will the Annual Strategic Objectives.
View our Strategy
View our Strategy at a glance
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