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.