The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Monday 24 March.
“With permission, Mr Speaker, I wish to make a Statement regarding the power outage, caused by a substation fire, that impacted on Heathrow Airport operations on Friday 21 March.
I begin by acknowledging the disruption to everyone affected by this incident. Many homes, schools and businesses temporarily lost power, some families have had to evacuate their homes, and many thousands have had their travel plans impacted. I thank the firefighters and emergency responders who worked in difficult conditions to put the fire out, as well as Heathrow, the national grid and all the other public services involved for working so hard to get power back on and people back travelling again. This was an unprecedented event, and we must learn any and all lessons we can to ensure that it does not recur.
Let me begin by setting out what we currently know about the cause of the incident. A large fire broke out at North Hyde substation at 11.30 pm on Thursday 20 March, and was brought under control the following day. Due to the impacts, Heathrow Airport announced at 4.30 am on Friday that it would close until midnight that day. Power was restored to domestic customers in a matter of hours, after the operator of the local distribution network, Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks, redistributed power through other parts of the network.
By comparison, Heathrow is one of the country’s biggest consumers of electricity and requires as much power as a small city. What we know is that there was an unprecedented outage, and that it was not the result of a single point of failure on the electricity transmission or distribution system. The feed from North Hyde substation is one of three supply points to Heathrow, and the fire caused exceptional damage that took the whole substation out of service. The other supply points continued supplying to Heathrow Airport throughout the incident.
Heathrow’s view was that that supply was insufficient to ensure the safe and secure ongoing operation of all systems across the whole airport. It proceeded to reconfigure its internal electricity network to enable the resumption of full operations, utilising the other two external supply points. That required hundreds of systems to be safely powered down, and then safely powered up, with extensive testing. The airport has a range of back-up generators and uninterruptible power supplies, including diesel generators, to provide power to essential systems to enable them safely to land planes. Those back-up systems ensured that safety and security systems and protocols were maintained at all times, but they were never designed to support full operation of the whole airport.
By 2.30 on Friday afternoon, Heathrow began restarting systems to ensure that they were safely operating. By 4 pm, the airport was 100% confident that all systems were safely operating across the whole network, and announced that some flights would be able to restart that day. The first flights, from about 6 pm, were so-called positioning flights, which were to get aircraft and crew to the right places to resume normal operations the following day. That was followed by flights diverted to UK and non-UK airports, to allow passengers to be repatriated, and a small number of outbound long-haul flights. Since Saturday, Heathrow has been fully operational, with more than 250,000 passengers able to fly to and from the airport on Saturday. Due to knock-on impacts of the event, there continued to be some delays and cancellations over the weekend.
Overall, the impact of Heathrow’s closure led to over 1,300 flights and more than 200,000 passengers having their flights cancelled or diverted on Friday, and a further 110 cancelled on Saturday. The Government are acutely aware of the need to ensure that passengers are well looked after and their consumer rights protected. This is why UK law ensures that airlines must provide passengers with a refund within seven days, or passengers must be rerouted to their destination under the same conditions. We are closely monitoring to ensure that passengers are properly supported. To support the recovery, my department temporarily lifted restrictions on overnight flights, to ease congestion. Heathrow and airlines also added extra capacity into the system to help affected passengers. We allowed rail tickets to be used flexibly to help passengers who were not able to use their original tickets.
Regarding the cause of the fire, the Metropolitan Police confirmed that the fire is not believed to be suspicious. However, due to the location of the substation and the impact that this incident has had on critical national infrastructure, the Met’s counterterrorism command is leading our inquiries into this matter. This is due to the specialist resources and capabilities within that command, which can assist in progressing the investigation at pace to help minimise disruption and identify the cause. It would not be appropriate to comment further while these investigations continue, but we will of course update the House once it is appropriate to do so.
Although it is positive that electricity supplies were restored quickly, there will be learnings to ensure that we avoid such incidents reoccurring. That is why on Saturday, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, working with Ofgem, commissioned the independent National Energy System Operator to urgently investigate the incident. The review will also seek to understand any wider lessons to be learned for energy resilience for critical national infrastructure. NESO has been asked to report back to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero with initial findings within six weeks.
In addition, Heathrow has asked Ruth Kelly, a former Secretary of State for Transport and an independent member of Heathrow’s board, to undertake a review of its internal resilience. The Kelly review will analyse the robustness and execution of Heathrow’s crisis management plans, the airport’s response, and how it recovered the operation.
Colleagues across the House will appreciate that we do not yet know everything there is to know about the incident, but I will try to answer questions from honourable Members in as much detail as possible, based on the latest information I have at my disposal. I commend the Statement to the House”.
My Lords, I thank the Minister for advance sight of the Statement made yesterday.
The remarkable thing about this event is what it was not. It was not a hostile terrorist attack, but in the first few moments no one could have known that. Indeed, the natural suspicion would have been that it was. That circumstance can only enhance our admiration for, and our thanks to, the firefighters in particular, and other responders who rushed to the scene not knowing what would await them. We are all very grateful to them and all the others who pulled Heathrow back from this incident for what they did.
It is worth also saying a word of thanks to the staff of Heathrow Airport, and I would like to do so. It may seem a fairly simple thing to switch an airport off and then, a while later, just to switch it back on again. There are rare occasions when this happens. I am thinking of the example of Bangkok airport in 2008, when an occupation by protesters for a week caused the airport to be shut down deliberately. On that occasion, once it was safe to do so, it took a full five days to restart the airport safely. The fact that the staff at Heathrow were able to respond so well and so effectively to the changes—I cannot describe or imagine them—in electrical work required to operate the airport, and to do so quickly and safely, shows their skill and abilities, and is something that we should be grateful for and acknowledge.
Once it was clear that this was not a terrorist incident, everyone could relax. The chief executive of Heathrow was so relaxed that he went back to bed. But of course, the people who could not relax were the passengers affected by this event. Across the world, it is estimated that nearly 300,000 people were affected by this incident, spread out over 1,350 flights. Does the Minister think that they have received an adequate apology? Many of them will be receiving financial compensation, depending on their carrier and the jurisdiction that they live under, but is financial compensation simply enough? Is it too easy for us to think, “Oh, they’ve got their compensation and their refund—we don’t actually need to apologise”? I have not seen a great deal of apologising going on to people who were very seriously affected and disrupted in their lives and in their plans.
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”.
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.
My Lords, I refer to my interest as chair of the National Preparedness Commission.
I understand that the Daily Telegraph knows what happened. The headline today said:
“Blame Heathrow’s faceless foreign owners for airport’s meltdown”.
That may be a rather simplistic analysis, but it does strike me that there is an issue—this is a point the noble Earl raised—with the extent to which the contingency plans within the airport had been thought through and stress-tested. You cannot create it overnight, but had Heathrow considered, for example, as part of its risk analysis and appetite, whether it was possible to run part of the airport and keep some of the functions going? Had it considered its ability to switch from one source of power to another without having to switch off all the systems?
When it is known the extent to which Heathrow had contingency plans and stress-tested them, could my noble friend the Minister say whether his department has any powers to say to those who own airports that their risk appetite should be different? The economic consequences of disruption at Heathrow will always be enormous and the reputational impact for the country as a whole is enormous. Does the Minister have the power, if necessary, to tell the owners to take a different risk appetite?
20 of 38 shown
Turning to the specifics of the incident, it raises significant questions about Heathrow’s resilience and the safeguarding of critical infrastructure. The fact that the airport was reliant on this electrical substation which proved so vulnerable is concerning and the outage serves as a stark reminder that energy security is about not only affordability but ensuring the physical safety and reliability of our infrastructure. I would like to hear what the Minister has to say about that reliability and security.
I will say immediately that I recognise that it is not always the right answer to build in huge amounts of redundancy in the light of an event that may happen only very occasionally. These are difficult judgments to make. All that redundancy costs a lot of money. I know that the Government and Heathrow have to make difficult judgments about it. I would like, however, at least to hear in what direction the Government are going in making those judgments: whether they think they have got the balance right and what should be done. Given the essential role of airports to our economy, what discussions has the Minister had with the Minister for Energy Security and Net Zero regarding the security of energy supplies to our major airports? Can the Minister tell us what the timeline is for the Kelly review being undertaken on behalf of Heathrow Airport? Does he expect its findings to be fully publicly accessible?
Finally, will the Government assess the incident in the broader context of Heathrow’s expansion? I am not referring exclusively to plans for a third runway. Heathrow has significant expansion plans that fall short of a third runway that it is progressing with securing approval for at the moment. Does the Minister believe that the current infrastructure challenges at Heathrow raise wider concerns about the viability and resilience of that expansion? What steps will be taken to ensure that any future expansion does not exacerbate the vulnerabilities exposed by this recent disruption? What steps will be taken to ensure that any future expansion does not increase the airport’s vulnerability to this sort of event?
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 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.