Heathrow Substation Outage: NESO Review

Debate between Michael Shanks and Luke Taylor

Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

I call the Liberal Democrat Front-Bench spokesman.

[Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)]

This report is an utterly damning assessment of our national resilience, this time through decay but also through a lack of readiness as the climate crisis changes the dynamics, with old equipment operating at higher temperatures just as the loads for climate control and air conditioning are at their peak. The British people will rightly be alarmed that the problem that caused this substation failure was known as long ago as 2018, but there is a much wider point here. Beyond the technicalities of this failure, the resilience of critical national infrastructure has been neglected for far too long.

As an engineer, I came to this place for precisely this reason: we are too short-termist and too narrow in our vision. We cannot possibly expect to remain a world leader in infrastructure if we cannot future-proof and seriously invest in the resilience of our assets. Building and maintaining infrastructure might not get pulses racing. There is no ribbon to cut when something just continues to operate efficiently, but that long-termism is an ideology that we should all get behind if we are serious about Britain’s future. The report outlined the many missed opportunities to fix the issues at the substation, and we will all have to look seriously into Ofgem’s consequential investigation into National Grid once it is published.

This is not just about grid resilience, though. This time it was a fire caused by a fault, but next time it might be a deliberate cyber-attack or an act of terrorism, which could have a more disastrous impact. We must look beyond the short term, with a strategic and long-term plan to join up national infrastructure and make it safe and reliable for all. The Government must bring about a strategy and act quickly to review the resilience of all similar assets, including every UK airport—they are all critical to our national economy and our society.

With that in mind, can the Minister confirm whether an assessment has been made of the likelihood of a repeat of this incident, at Heathrow and at all other pieces of critical national infrastructure? Also, are the Government taking this opportunity to finally pick up the National Infrastructure Commission reports from 2020 and 2023, which were ignored by the previous Government, and the report from 2024, which was not implemented quickly enough, and to implement standards and frameworks for resilience in key sectors such as aviation, telecoms, water and energy, which will future-proof our ageing infrastructure to make it reliable and safe?

[Michael Shanks]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to broaden this beyond the electricity system and North Hyde to take in wider questions around critical national infrastructure. He is also right about investing in the future. I always think that grids and networks set the heart racing a little faster, but that is just me. This is important, and this Government are investing in this infrastructure; just this week Ofgem announced record investment in it. I hope, given the importance of this statement, that Members on all sides of the House will recognise the importance of that investment.

On the points around wider resilience, the Cabinet Office is leading on trying to bring together what I think it is fair to say has been too fragmented a landscape in resilience across Government. My Department is responsible for a number of key risks in the national risk register. It is right that the lead Departments have expertise in certain areas, but if that information is not shared coherently across Government, we increase the chance of not getting the answers right. A lot of work is being done in that regard. We are also looking at how we share data across all sectors of critical national infrastructure within Government. We will say more about that in the resilience action plan, which the Cabinet Office is working on at the moment. Of course, the 10-year infrastructure strategy is also about how we will invest for the long term in the infrastructure that keeps our country running.