L

Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)

Speaking in the House of Lords on 25 March 2025

Debate

Disruption at Heathrow

Contribution

The noble Lord may know that I am tolerably familiar with the essential nature of flights from Northern Ireland to mainland England, Wales and Scotland because of the Union Connectivity Review. In particular, I had to answer a question quite recently about the reliability of the first flight on Monday mornings, which clearly contains quite a large proportion of Members of both Houses. I repeat that I strongly recommend to the operator that, come what may, it operates that flight if it operates nothing else. I do not know currently what is going on in other airports in Britain to look at resilience, but I have no doubt that the outcome of the Kelly review and the—I will make sure I get the right initials—NESO review will be closely studied by all those airports because that is undoubtedly the case. Noble Lords can be reassured that the transport community as a whole takes a close interest in what happens in one place. Incidentally, I have seen—noble Lords might have expected me to—a review that Network Rail started on Saturday morning about the resilience of its power supplies, because in these circumstances you would start those sorts of reviews before you knew even what the cause was. That is a perfectly rational thing to do. So I have little doubt that that is going on in respect of other UK airports currently; I do not know that it is, but whether or not it is, I have absolutely no doubt that they will study very closely the results of the Kelly review and the NESO review—I would rather not use the initials, but it is too easy to do—to make sure that they are all as resilient as they can be.

More from Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)

Other recent Hansard contributions by the same speaker.

About Hansard

Hansard is the official verbatim record of proceedings in the UK Parliament. Every word spoken in the Commons and Lords is recorded and published — this page is a single contribution from that record.

Partner sites