Premiership clubs are seeking a substantial rise in the salary cap, possibly to more than £3m, after another poor performance in the Heineken Cup.

English clubs are worse off than their French counterparts, who have no salary cap and do not have to pay to upgrade their facilities because they play on municipally-owned grounds. The four Welsh regions each receive £2.6m annually from their union, £500,000 more than the Premiership's salary cap, although English clubs can spend an extra £450,000 on wages if they have a rugby league recruit and a squad of 40 to 42 players.

"A proposal to increase the cap is on the table," said the Premier Rugby and Gloucester chairman Tom Walkinshaw. Increases in previous years have tended to be by 2½%, but with the cap covering employers' national insurance contributions as well as perks, a number of clubs feel that - with their aggregate losses now £2m, down from £11.5m five years ago - they will be abl to sustain a rise of £500,000. That would take the cap to up to £3.1m, with allowances.

Since Wasps won the Heineken Cup in 2004 no Premiership club has reached the final, and of the six teams in the competition this year only Wasps have a realistic chance of winning their group. Leicester, Sale and Northampton are contenders for the two best runners-up slots. Finance is a central theme in the Rugby Football Union's consultative document on the future of the professional game, The Way Forward.

"We need to put elite rugby in England back at the top of the world game," said the RFU chief executive Francis Baron. "We want an informed debate to find the answer that is right for English rugby. We look forward to the support and input of the wider game as we seek to achieve this objective."

Bath yesterday appointed their acting head coach Steve Meehan on a full-time basis, ending speculation that the former England head coach Andy Robinson would return to the club.