As many people will know, A&A introduced page charges for UK authors during 2020. This was a commercially driven decision and there were subsequent negotiations between JISC (who represent all UK universities who subscribed to A&A) and the publisher, and it is very likely that all of your libraries were also part of these discussions. Unfortunately the agreement that A&A proposed that would have removed the requirement for UK authors to pay directly was considered too expensive by the JISC members and was subsequently withdrawn. Unfortunately this means UK authors will have to continue to pay page charges to publish in A&A.
You may find that your institution’s open access budget can cover these charges in some cases, but whether that is the case and the details of the implementation would need to be confirmed with your open access contacts.
Although this is clearly very disappointing for our community, it might be helpful to remind everyone that Monthly Notices of the RAS (MNRAS) now has a solar editor (Ineke de Moortel) and an increasing number of solar physics papers are now being published there. There are no page charges for UK authors (for papers with 20 pages or less). Publication in Solar Physics also remains free for UK authors.