Air Traffic Control Disruption
Monday, 14 September 2026
Contributions
Commons Urgent Question
The following Answer to an Urgent Question was given in the House of Commons on Thursday 10 September.
“May I begin by again apologising to passengers across the United Kingdom who faced significant disruption as a result of the issues that impacted NATS’s operation on 8 September, resulting in delays and cancellations for hundreds of thousands of passengers, as well as the disruption that it has caused for industry? Let me be clear that disruption of this kind is absolutely unacceptable.
To provide some context to the House, at around lunch time on 8 September NATS experienced an issue with its flight processing system at its Swanwick centre affecting the data that was available to controllers. The disruption had a significant impact across the UK aviation network resulting in widespread delays, cancellations and diversions. NATS worked hard to fix the issue, but that took time as the systems needed to be tested to ensure that they had fully recovered and operations could safely return to normal. My officials were in regular contact with NATS, airlines and airports during the incident to understand the issues impacting them and to offer Government support, such as granting night flight alleviations to support recovery at regulated airports including Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted.
NATS has confirmed that it was a technical issue and it does not believe it to be cyber-related. The Secretary of State and I met Martin Rolfe yesterday, and we have agreed that he will send a report to us by Wednesday 16 September setting out the cause of the incident and the actions being taken to ensure that this cannot happen again. The Secretary of State has also asked the Civil Aviation Authority to conduct an independent review to establish cause and to ensure that our air traffic control systems can get passengers to where they need to be, with an update to be provided to me within six months. We will work closely with both organisations as well as airlines and airports to ensure that lessons are learned and that any necessary improvements are implemented.
This morning, I met representatives from Unite the Union to hear directly about the impact of the incident on airport and airline staff and to discuss broader issues with them relating to the abuse of frontline transport workers. I express my and the Secretary of State’s gratitude to all those staff at our airports and airlines who provided support to passengers whose journeys were disrupted over the past few days. Our sympathies remain with all those passengers who have experienced delays to their travel plans or cancellations”.
Lord Moylan (Con)
My Lords, last week was a catastrophe for many families and businesspeople trying to go about their business, sleeping in airports and barely recovering, even days later, back on to the routes that they wanted to pursue. The day before this calamitous event, the noble Lord’s colleague in the other place, Keir Mather, said in response to a Written Question that all 34 recommendations from the inquiry into the previous NATS calamity in 2023 had been implemented. The very next day, it happened again. Do the Government still have confidence in the management of NATS? When are they going to get a grip?
The Minister of State, Department for Transport (Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill) (Lab)
My Lords, I first make it clear that this was an unacceptable event, and I apologise to passengers and others affected. The event was less than a week ago, last Tuesday afternoon, and the Secretary of State, the Aviation Minister and my department were all completely focused on alleviating the effects of this while it was going on—relaxing controls on night flights and so on—while of course making sure that safety was not compromised. The Secretary of State and the Aviation Minister met the chief executives of NATS and the Civil Aviation Authority the following morning, and the Secretary of State has commissioned a report into this event from NATS and asked it to report to her this Wednesday. The noble Lord should think this a very quick response, because the Government, as with everyone else, do not want these things to happen and regard it as unacceptable, but need to understand why it happened and what needs to be done to prevent it again.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, we have had three of these major events in a short period of time. When are we going to get a system to give some compensation to, or look after, those who have been inconvenienced? It is a great way to encourage people to get something right if they have to pay for it when it goes wrong.
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
I think the noble Lord was not intimately involved with the passage of the civil aviation Bill, which went through this House just a few short sitting weeks ago. On that Bill, there was a discussion, on an amendment principally proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Young, about whether there should be compensation. As the Minister handling the Bill in Committee and on Report, I took great succour from the statements of the noble Lord, Lord Harper, who was the Secretary of State during the last of those events. He said this: “The conclusion that I came to was that, if you were to change the position so that NATS was responsible for paying compensation, almost half the bill would land on the taxpayer, just over 40% of it would effectively end up on a different group of airlines—not necessarily all the ones hit by it—and a little bit would effectively land on the staff. The conclusion that I reached was that that did not really get you to a significantly better place than the current position, accepting that the current position is suboptimal ”.—[ Official Report , 16/6/26; col. GC67.] That is what he said at the time, and that is currently the view of the Government.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, I have the deepest respect for my noble friend Lord Harper, but three former Secretaries of State for Transport took a different view from the one the noble Lord has just read out. When NATS makes mistakes, the airlines pick up the tab. Last week, the airlines had pilots in the wrong place, planes in the wrong place and pilots running out of hours. Is it not a manifest injustice that the airlines have to pick up the tab for the failures of NATS, which recently paid a dividend of £171 million?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The noble Lord is of course echoing the case he made during the passage of the civil aviation Bill, which the Government disagreed with. Of course the event is unacceptable and we need to get to the bottom of it. The noble Lord, Lord Moylan, said it was another event and of course it is, but it looks, certainly at the moment, as though it is not the same event as in 2023. The Secretary of State and the department are relentlessly focused on finding out what the cause was and on preventing it happening again, which is the way to avoid costs such as the ones the noble Lord referred to being incurred.
Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)
In the absence of any back-up, as I understand it, is it sensible that eight airports were operated by only one system?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The noble and learned Baroness is certainly right that these systems have to be and should be more resilient than they are. The Secretary of State has recently written to the Civil Aviation Authority with its priorities for the next period of time, and top of the list of priorities for National Air Traffic Services is making it more resilient, for precisely that reason. How it is organised and how many airports it covers is a different question and relates to the geography of the United Kingdom. We have not heard it previously suggested that somehow the geography of what NATS covers ought to be different. It ought to be reliable.
Lord Grayling (Con)
My Lords, the Minister knows that I was one of the former Secretaries of State sympathetic to my noble friend Lord Young, and I hope his point will be considered again by the Government. More seriously, has there been anything so far to suggest that the trouble last week could have been caused by an external influence? Even if that proves not to be the case, does the Minister agree that the resilience of our system is exceptionally important? We saw last week what happens if the system breaks down. Will the Government commit to reviewing exactly how resilient it is, in what are somewhat troubled times?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The Secretary of State and the department are assured that there is no evidence at the present time of external influences. Therefore, we are waiting for the immediate report from National Air Traffic Services and the independent review that the Secretary of State commissioned at the same time from the Civil Aviation Authority. For more or less precisely the reasons the noble Lord set out, we need to be assured that this system is absolutely resilient. He is right that we live in troubled times; one of the things that needs to be reviewed is not only the absolute resilience of the system but its resilience against unfriendly actors and third parties.
Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)
My Lords, I declare an interest in that I used to be a government director of the PPP for NATS. In those days, the airlines made up 51% of the ownership of the operation. Has that changed? Do they still have an interest? Have they been canvassed on the views that have been expressed in the Chamber?
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
My noble friend is right that the ownership has changed. The airlines and one or two other institutions now account, I think, for around 40% of the shareholding. The work that the Secretary of State commissioned the morning following the incident originated because it was the right thing for a Secretary of State to do—both the immediate report from NATS, due on Wednesday, and the CAA report. I have no doubt that the board of NATS will consider this in due course, but it is right for public accountability that the Secretary of State decided to commission those two reports. I am sure the board and the shareholders of NATS know, but I do not think she asked permission and I do not think that is what the noble Lord is suggesting—but that would not have been right in any event.
Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)
Given that this constituted a major incident, what provision was made to ensure that the airport was cleared of passengers by making transport available to move them out of the airport? Some passengers could not deplane for more than five hours because the airport was over-congested. In a major incident, the usual policy is partly to have the crowd dispersed.
Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill (Lab)
The noble Baroness is right that, in these circumstances, people who are affected, particularly those waiting on planes, should be affected for the least amount of time and enabled to find the best possible care and assistance that they need. That is a responsibility of the airports concerned and of the airlines. Those entitlements are set out in UK law. During the civil aviation Bill, in this Chamber we discussed giving the Civil Aviation Authority stronger powers to take action to ensure that consumers are properly dealt with. I do not know the detail of what the noble Baroness has said, but I will go away and ask.
Source: UK Parliament Hansard API. Debate ID: 5406104.