Disruption at Heathrow

Earl Russell Excerpts

Tuesday 25th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Earl Russell (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the Statement and join him in paying tribute to the firefighters, all the emergency services and everyone who worked to extinguish a significant fire and return services to normal. This incident not only affected Heathrow but cut power to 63,000 homes, and 100 residents were evacuated.

The Minister is correct that this is an unprecedented incident. I welcome the intention to learn all and any lessons that arise from it and from the Heathrow internal inquiry and the NESO six-week initial investigation that have been announced. A single incident should not have been able to shut an airport. The mere fact that the cascade was not prevented offers us wider opportunities to ask serious questions about our preparedness, the resilience of our energy infrastructure and the urgent need to make new risk assessments with fresh minds.

The fire was the result of 25,000 litres of an oil-based cooling system overheating and catching fire at North Hyde substation. The significant fire required 70 fire- fighters to get it under control and resulted in a series of events that ultimately meant that more than 1,300 flights were cancelled, a further 670 flights impacted, and some 200,000 passengers suffered. We need to understand, at the point of ignition, what caused the fire. Are there flaws in substation design? Was this substation being overused, causing it to overheat? Why does it appear that there was no prior knowledge of the overheating while it was taking place? Could it be that something as simple as a few pounds spent on a remote temperature sensor could have alerted system operations to the problem and perhaps prevented the fire?

I welcome the involvement of the counterterrorism police, who have the skills to make rapid assessments of the causes. I note that in the last few hours the Metropolitan Police has confirmed that this incident is no longer being treated as a “potentially criminal matter”.

There is some confusion over the interpretation of events, and that concerns me. The Government and NESO say that while one of the main substations went offline, two alternatives remained available to provide the power required and additional reserve generation capacity at the airport gave some further limited capacity. Heathrow meanwhile argues that energy supply was insufficient to ensure the safe and secure ongoing operations and proceeded

“to reconfigure its internal electricity network”.

This meant, in effect, that every computer and safety system had to be turned off and on again. It is this act that caused the impacts. I ask the Minister: did Heathrow game plan and stress test the falling offline of the whole of this substation and, if so, what were the predicted impacts and consequences. If not, why not? When is the Heathrow inquiry expected to give initial findings? Will the NESO inquiry work with and have some access to the findings of the Heathrow inquiry? How will fundamental disagreements between the findings of the two inquiries, if they exist, be addressed? When will the Government respond to the National Infrastructure Commission’s report Developing Resilience Standards in UK Infrastructure?

To conclude, wider systemic and broader national risks to our national grid and critical energy infrastructure must be considered. Considering known terrorism-related attacks on other western countries’ energy infrastructure, including undersea cables, I call on the Government to undertake a full review, with the inclusion of the National Security Adviser, of our critical energy infrastructure—its susceptibility, resilience and levels of redundancy—including vital transport services and other services such as hospitals, key computer systems and telecommunications.

[The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab)]

My Lords, I share the sentiments expressed by the noble Lords who have just spoken about the firefighters and other emergency responders who went to the site of the substation fire when it first broke out and brought it under control. They are undoubtedly very brave and I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, that when they arrived it was not clear what they were facing, so they were all the braver for tackling it directly. I also share the thanks of the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, to the many workers at Heathrow Airport and, indeed, those who work for airlines, who not only had to work hard to get the airport back online but have dealt with the further disruption caused to flights, not only in Heathrow but across the globe.

I must express great sympathy for all those whose flights were delayed as a consequence of this incident. They are the passengers—the noble Lord, Lord Moylan, referred to them—and many people’s personal and business activities will have been delayed and disrupted due to this very extraordinary outage. I am happy to express sympathy for those people. I hope that, now, as Heathrow is returning to normal, their travels have resumed.

Both noble Lords referred to the two inquiries. My noble friend Lord Hunt, who is sitting beside me, is the Minister of State for Energy Security and Net Zero. He has commissioned the National Energy System Operator to investigate the power outage. That will deal with understanding wider lessons from the power outage. Noble Lords will know that Heathrow Airport Ltd, which owns and operates the airport, has asked Ruth Kelly, former Secretary of State for Transport and an independent member of its board, to undertake a review of its internal resilience. That review will analyse the robustness and execution of Heathrow’s crisis management plans, the airport’s response and how it recovered the operation. The first report, from NESO, will be made to the Energy Secretary, and the Secretary of State for Transport has asked to see a copy of the second report. Heathrow has agreed to that, and we will report back to the House in due course.

The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, asked whether I thought compensation was adequate and whether passengers needed an apology. They certainly need an apology. Everybody’s reasons for flying are different, but all of them expect to fly at the time on their ticket. Clearly, they deserve an apology, even though this was an extraordinary event. Do I think the compensation is adequate? The compensation for airline delays is set out, and it depends, in part, on which airline it is. Not only are people legally entitled to a choice between a refund within seven days or to be rerouted to their destination, including on flights operated by another airline, but they are entitled to care and support, such as refreshment or, if necessary, overnight accommodation, while waiting for a delayed or rerouted flight.

The questions about the reliability of the supply, security and the judgments that have to be made by the airport operator will undoubtedly be addressed by the two reviews that have been spoken about. Both noble Lords asked about timelines. We do not yet know what they are, but it would be better for both reviews to be thorough than it would for them to be quick. I know from some experience of this in different transport modes that, very often, you have to dig deeply to find out the root causes and understand what can be done. There is no doubt that the number of systems in a modern airport is huge, and they are very sophisticated. It will take some time to discover whether or not you can get them restarted any better.

The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, asked about the expansion plans for Heathrow—not merely the projected third runway but the expansion of terminals. There will of course be a relationship with this. We would expect Heathrow Airport Ltd to have resilience plans, which will scale up to whatever capacity the airport has. I would expect the Kelly review to look at how any expansion would be dealt with and whether or not expansion might make it easier to invest in such systems and resilience in order to obviate such a thing happening again.

The noble Earl, Lord Russell, is absolutely right to refer to the 63,000 people affected by the power outage. Many of them were not affected for long, but, nevertheless, even in the middle of the night there will be people who need power for various reasons, including medical reasons. Our sympathy goes to them as well.

On the confusion about capacity and the airport’s ability to recover, and the downtime when the power supply was cut off, we are expecting the two reviews to interact on this to a degree where there is no gap between them. There should be no question about whether they are comprehensive. I am sure that the Heathrow review will undoubtedly look at whether there was a game plan at Heathrow and at how much it has stress-tested its systems. I do not have anything further to say until the reviews have reported.

The noble Earl was completely right that the Metropolitan Police has recently reported that it does not believe this was a criminal act and is not pursuing that line of inquiry. I am sure that is a relief. I will look further at the government response to the National Infrastructure Commission report, and if I have anything to say I will write to the noble Earl about it.