Heathrow Airport has been closed all day today (Friday 21 March) by its operator due to a significant fire in a nearby electrical substation which supplies the airport with power.

In response, National Infrastructure Commission Chair Sir John Armitt said:

“Today’s incident highlights the need for infrastructure operators to be fully prepared for dealing with short term shocks, particularly from the knock-on impacts of failures outside their control. That means building resilience into all their systems, regularly stress testing, and increasing cooperation with other operators to identify risks arising from increasing interdependence.

“We’ve been clear the UK needs national resilience standards for our transport, digital, energy and water infrastructure. These will give clarity to operators and users about what levels of service they should expect in the face of short and long term disruptions, and ensure regulators have a clear yardstick against which they can ensure sufficient investment in resilience is made, proportionate to the risk.”

In the second National Infrastructure Assessment, the Commission recommended government publish a full set of outcome-based resilience standards for energy, water, digital and transport services, reviewed every five years, which would set out standards of service expected in response to a range of short term and long term shocks.

This recommendation built on earlier work by the Commission in its 2020 resilience study, which also called for a new resilience framework which infrastructure operators should use when thinking about building resilience into their systems, with a particular focus on stress testing those systems against interdependent risks from other connected infrastructure networks (e.g. digital or energy networks).

In September 2024, the Commission published new analysis which identified where the gaps in current resilience standards across infrastructure were, and how these could be addressed by government.