Air travellers trudging through BAA's hostile security screening at Heathrow and Gatwick this morning may not realise it, but the fightback on their behalf has begun. The Competition Commission has come out with all guns blazing and said that BAA, one of the country's least popular companies, should sell three airports — two of either Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted and either Edinburgh or Glasgow.

However, passengers and airlines hoping that the break-up of this monopoly will provide a quick fix will be sorely disappointed.

BAA has made it clear that it will fight tooth and nail to hang on to Heathrow and Stansted and an appeal, or even judicial review, can not be ruled out.

Its tactics today are typical — namely turning the debate into one about airport capacity and hammer out the familiar lament that here in the UK we are bad at making tough decisions, particularly when it comes to building expensive new infrastructure.

True, the Competition Commission appears to have muddied its own water by recommending that the Government should review its 2003 Air Transport White Paper that is meant to set aviation policy for the next 30 years.

But BAA's argument is a red herring. This company has treated its customers — both airlines and passengers — like a nuisance in recent years. Even before it was bought by a construction company, it acted like an empire-building, rent-collecting property developer rather than the service company it ought to be.

The problem for passengers is that a forced sale will not necessarily deliver the best new owners for the airports. The infrastructure owners and asset collectors who will want to buy BAA's offcasts only go shopping with large amounts of debt. Their future priority will inevitably be paying sky-high interest rates.

The commission may sound like it has finally got tough on airport operators but there is a long way to go before its recommendations will deliver the sort of service that would make British airports competitive, never mind pleasant, transport interchanges.

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