Oral Statement to the Commons on disruption at Heathrow by the Secretary of State for Transport

Mr Speaker, with permission, I wish to make a statement regarding the power outage, caused by a substation fire, that impacted Heathrow Airport operations on Friday 21 March.

I would like to 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 also want to 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 other public services involved, who worked 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 it does not reoccur in future.

Incident and Transport Impacts

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 11:30pm on Thursday (20th March) and was brought under control the following day. Due to the impacts, Heathrow Airport announced at 04:30am 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 (SSEN) redistributed power through other parts of their network.

By comparison, Heathrow is one of the country's biggest consumers of electricity – it requires as much power as a small city. What we know is that this was an unprecedented outage, and that it wasn't 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 this 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. This 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 to safely land planes. These back-up systems ensured 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 they were safely operating. By 4pm, 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 6pm, were so-called positioning flights, which were to get aircraft and crew to the right places to resume normal operations the following day. This was then 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 over 250,000 passengers able to fly to and from the airport on Saturday. Due to the 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 is acutely aware of the need to ensure that passengers are well looked after and their consumer rights are protected. This is why UK law ensures that airlines must provide passengers with a refund within seven days, or to be re- routed 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 alsoadded extra capacity into the system to help affected passengers. We also allowed rail tickets to be used flexibly to help passengers who were not able to use their original tickets.

Dealing with the fire

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 this incident has had on critical national infrastructure, the Met's Counter Terrorism Command are leading our enquiries into this matter.

This is due to the specialist resources and capabilities within that command, which can assist in progressing this investigation at pace to help minimise disruption and identify the cause.

It would not be appropriate to comment further whilst these investigations continue, but we will of course update the House once it is appropriate to do so.

Reviews

Whilst it is positive that electricity supplies were restored quickly, there will of course be learnings to ensure we avoid such incidents from reoccurring.

That is why on Saturday, my Rt Hon Friend the Energy Secretary, working with Ofgem, commissioned the independent National Energy System Operator (NESO) to urgently investigate this incident. The review will also seek to understand any wider lessons to be learned for energy resilience for critical national infrastructure. NESO have been asked to report back to DESNZ and Ofgem with initial findings within six weeks.

In addition, Heathrow has asked Ruth Kelly, 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.

Closing remarks

While colleagues across the House will appreciate that we do not yet know everything there is to know about this incident, I will try to answer questions from Honourable members with as much detail as possible based on the latest information I have at my disposal.

I commend this statement to the House.