Ed Miliband has made the confident and somewhat premature reassurance that there is ‘no sign of foul play’ in the fire that has occurred at the electricity substation serving Heathrow airport. Nevertheless, investigators combing through the debris will presumably be starting with the question in their mind: ‘Could this be a work of sabotage by Russia or some other hostile organisation or state?’
We keep making the same mistakes in ignoring resilience when planning infrastructure projects
Even if it turns out not to have been, bad actors will have gained a very useful indication of how vulnerable Britain’s infrastructure is to attack. With the airport due to be closed until midnight at the earliest, at least 1,350 flights will have been cancelled or diverted, and a minimum of 291,000 passengers will have had their travel plans upended. In practice, it will be far more than this, as the chaos will leave aircraft out of position for flights over the coming days. Moreover, this is not the first time that the soft underbelly of Britain’s aviation system has been exposed. In August 2023, a technical failure in the NATS (National Air Traffic Service) flight planning system caused a similar level of disruption.
We really do not seem to have much of a policy for national resilience – in spite of numerous warnings of the potential for terrorists and hostile states to undermine our infrastructure. Up to four years ago, the government was on the point of allowing a company close to the Chinese government to design and build our 5G communications network. This was until the US warned that it would no longer be prepared to share intelligence with us if we went ahead with the plan.
Today’s fire will surely raise further questions over the project to build a third runway at Heathrow – which the government came out in favour of just months ago. The perils of putting too many of your aviation eggs into a single basket are plain to be seen. Today’s disruption would be a lot less if we had a pair of runways in the Thames estuary which were capable of accepting planes diverted from Heathrow – rather than them having to be turned back en route from India and elsewhere.
We keep making the same mistakes in ignoring resilience when it comes to planning infrastructure projects. The original incarnation of HS2 – although less so its truncated form – involved putting almost every express train to the North of England on one railway line. What happens when that line is out of action? The Port of Dover and Channel Tunnel, too, are weak links in our infrastructure, in that they handle a quarter of UK food imports, rising to 62 per cent of fresh fruit and vegetables. A national resilience policy would look at developing other cross-Channel services to make sure that an event like today’s fire at Heathrow cannot undermine food supply.
As for the immediate questions over today’s fire, Heathrow needs to be asking why a backup generator which could have maintained the power supply to the airport was located on the same site as the substation? That seems an obvious error. No one seems to be looking at UK infrastructure and asking: how could a hostile state or terror organisation cause the maximum amount of chaos in the shortest possible time? Or if they are, their advice is going unheard.
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