Toilets out of order, stained carpet, wobbly baggage trolleys: Welcome to Britain! That’s the message we’re sending to the 148 million passengers who arrive at BAA’s UK airports each year.

Whether it is the claustrophobic low ceilings of Terminal 3 or the Kafka-esque winding corridors of Glasgow airport, flying out of BAA airports stopped being fun a long time ago.

You cannot blame BAA for every bad experience at a UK airport — London City’s overcrowded lounge and Luton’s dreary departure gates are not down to BAA, but as owner and operator of seven of Britain's biggest airports, BAA has a pivotal role in your next holiday.

The Competition Commission report did not go as far as ordering BAA to sell any of its airports — we’ll have to wait for August, or even later in the year, for that. The Commission did, however, say that there was no competition between BAA's three London airports and little competition between them and London City and Luton.

As owner of Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted, BAA argues that capacity restraints mean there can be little competition among the airports, but the airports owner does not come back on the Commission’s suggestion that BAA concentrates on only one project at a time, at the expense of its other airports.

Christopher Clarke, chairman of the BAA Airports inquiry said: “Over many years, BAA seems to have taken a sequential approach to development, notably at its London airports, and been prepared to limit development at one airport to concentrate on development elsewhere ... for example Terminal 5.”

Gatwick has been the victim of this strategy more than most — it has been the poor relation to Heathrow for years. Although BAA has poured its money and time into boosting Heathrow’s position as a European hub to compete with the likes of Amsterdam’s gleaming Schiphol, Gatwick has floundered.

The West Sussex airport has been widely touted as the most likely of BAA’s airports to be sold off, should the commission dictate a break-up of London airport ownership.

If Gatwick were to be sold to a company willing to invest in the airport, perhaps problems such as the snaking security queues, gloomy and stuffy check-in area and overcrowded fast food outlets would be addressed.

That said, a better Gatwick will never initiate a mass exodus of airlines from Heathrow, because the airport does not have the capacity to rival Heathrow’s network of connecting flights. But a leisure and charter flight focus does not mean the airport should be neglected.

Moving to Scotland, the commission suggested that there could be competition between Glasgow and Edinburgh, to which BAA’s response is that the two airports have distinct catchment areas, so will never compete.

BAA has a point — long-standing rivalry between Scotland’s two main cities means loyalty to one’s city would dictate airport choice for many lowland Scots. If one of the two were to be sold off, fierce competition would inevitably ensue — surely a good thing for the travelling public.

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