The hype
Earlier this week the Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State, Oliver Dowden, honoured the good folk of Hartlepool with his presence, doing one of those hardhat interviews that are symbolic of a hands-on, no-nonsense approach to governing the country. On this occasion he was there to promote the activities of energy supplier SSE Able Seaton, who are in charge of the construction of what is destined to be the world’s largest offshore windfarm, due for location on Dogger Bank. When completed, the farm will comprise 277 wind turbines, each of which will be 260m in height, so we are not talking about a trivial investment here. Indeed, given the cost of the undertaking, and the extent to which transition to intermittent wind technology runs the risk of destabilising electricity supply, one would hope that the government has a very good reason for supporting and promoting the project. Publicly providing the necessary endorsement was, of course, what the hard-helmeted Dowden was in Hartlepool to do. And what better way to do it than to use the occasion to announce the publication of the latest incarnation of the National Risk Register, and to draw attention to what it has to say regarding climate change and energy security. Speaking to camera, he said:
“Well the first duty of government is to keep people safe, and in my whole experience as a minister during the pandemic, the more information you give people, you give businesses, the better prepared we can be, and this National Risk Register is giving more information than ever before about the risks facing this country, whether it’s from cyber, whether it’s from energy resilience, which is why I am here today, where we are building the world’s largest offshore wind factory facility, or whether it’s in relation to pandemics.”
So there you have it. Windfarms are necessary to keep people safe, in much the same way that the government did during the pandemic by keeping us all so well-informed. As for the detail, well it must all be in the register.
Reporting upon that detail, it is clear the Guardian had received the memo, as they ran with:
“Disruption to energy supplies after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and another pandemic, are two of the most significant risks to the UK shown in an updated government register that declassifies some threats for the first time.”
Similarly, the BBC, never one to miss an opportunity to put climate change front and centre, ran with:
“A future pandemic and extreme weather caused by climate change are among the key risks facing the UK, according to a new government register.”
Whilst others had a different take. For example, there was this:
“UK calls artificial intelligence a ‘chronic risk’ to its national security.”
And this:
“Likelihood of another pandemic and assassination of public figure revealed in national risk register.”
Or this from the Daily Mirror:
“Nuclear attack and internet blackout warning as 89 biggest threats facing UK revealed.”
I could go on, but the point already made is this: If the purpose of having a national risk register was to ensure that we would all be on the same page regarding our priorities of concern (particularly on Dowden’s page in which climate change and energy resilience seem to top the list) then it has already failed miserably. All that appears to have resulted is an orgy of cherry-picking that merely reflects the prior concerns of the journalists involved. But should we just all agree upon ‘future pandemic’, combined with whatever can be used to justify Net Zero, and leave it at that? Is that actually what the register says? Well, if you care to know the answer to these questions, then I invite you to read on.
The Register
Before I get down to detail, there are one or two general comments that I simply must get off my chest.
When first reading the register I found it very difficult to shake off the suspicion that the whole thing was just a massive PR exercise designed to reassure everyone that the government was fully in control. Dowden himself did much to raise this suspicion by saying in a press release:
“This is the most comprehensive risk assessment we’ve ever published, so that government and our partners can put robust plans in place and be ready for anything.”
Really? Ready for anything? Like they were ready for Covid-19? And has Dowden never heard of black swans?
Meanwhile, the register’s preamble is full of rhetoric designed to bolster confidence. For example:
“By focusing on our collective resilience, we can help the nation be more safe, more secure – and in turn, more prosperous. This National Risk Register plays a vital role in that process, allowing us to build towards an even brighter future.”
What? Even brighter? I’m an aging diabetic watching Europe slip towards World War III. So it’s going to get even brighter than that?
And as for the rigour of the process:
“This edition of the NRR is based directly on the NSRA – an internal, classified risk assessment that is used within government and by local resilience forums and their equivalents in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The NSRA is produced using a rigorous and well-tested methodology, based on international best practice. It draws on input and challenge from hundreds of experts from UK Government departments, devolved administrations, the government scientific community, intelligence and security agencies, and independent experts. The process is evidence led with 25,000 pieces of data used in the latest full assessment, finalised in autumn 2022.”
Rigorous and well-tested, eh? International best practice, eh? Hundreds of experts, eh? Evidence led, eh? Well you don’t need to say any more. You had me at ‘used within government’.
But if I may be allowed to get technical for a moment, the thing that struck me most was the register’s pseudo-quantification of the risks. The register uses a standard 5×5 risk matrix to classify the risks in terms of impact and likelihood. So far, so good – such matrices are just a two dimensional list used to prioritize risks for attention. However, they then tart up the matrix by applying a logarithmic scale and plotting the risks as points with error bars, thereby making the matrix look superficially like a graph. It all seems to be part of a ploy, used to give a false impression of scientific rigour. Well, I’ll be taken in just as soon as you can explain to me how subjective terms such as ‘limited’, ‘moderate’ and ‘significant’ can be allocated logarithmically.
But what of the detail? That, after all, is where the devil is supposed to lie. Let’s start by looking at the risks with the highest plausible impacts. In order of likelihood, the following were all deemed to be potentially ‘catastrophic’ to the UK:
1st Pandemic
=2nd A large-scale Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) terrorist attack
=2nd Complete failure of the National Electricity Transmission System (NETS)
=4th Civil nuclear accident
=4th Radiation release from overseas nuclear site
Whilst there is no explicit mention of natural disaster in the above list, it should be noted that an extreme weather event is posited as a possible cause of a complete NETS failure.
Of those risks that are deemed the most likely to materialise, the only ones considered to entail potentially even ‘moderate’ impact upon the UK are:
- Terrorist attacks in venues and public spaces
- Technological failure at a UK critical financial market infrastructure
- Disaster response in the Overseas Territories
- Attack on a UK ally or partner outside NATO or a mutual security agreement requiring international assistance
But what about the prospect of gas supplies being cut off? After all, isn’t that the biggest risk of all? Did Dowden suffer a visit to Hartlepool for nothing?
Well, it is difficult to say. Such a possibility features in the register only as part of a scenario in which there is an attack against a NATO ally or UK deployed forces, which meets the Article 5 threshold. This risk is described in the body of the register but it does not feature in the risk matrix. And if it isn’t in the matrix, we have no evaluation to work with. I suspect this omission may be for security reasons, but it is strange that the Guardian didn’t notice it.
Meanwhile, what about the BBC’s obsession: wildfires, heatwaves, storms, flooding and drought? Well, apart from the rather fanciful prospect of a storm knocking out the whole of the NETS, there is nothing in the register to get too excited about. Whilst heatwaves and major flooding are thought to be potentially ‘significant’, that is no more so than the potential impact of a cold weather event. Furthermore, severe cold weather events are judged to be significantly more likely to occur. Certainly, nothing in the weather event category comes close to earning the ‘catastrophic’ label.
The Unregistered
Earlier I suggested that the problem with risk registers is that, by their very nature, they can’t deal with the black swans that in reality dominate the risk profile. Consequently, it is perhaps instructive to dwell for a while upon the risks that do not appear to have made it onto the National Risk Register.
First, despite what the Daily Mirror thinks, there is no entry to deal with the possibility of a strategic nuclear attack upon the UK. Instead, there is an entry covering conventional attack, which carries a footnote that alludes to an unincluded, classified assessment of nuclear attack. The risk I referred to earlier regarding the triggering of Article 5 talks of disruption to gas supplies, and yet fails to consider the possibility of nuclear escalation. Presumably that is because there is nothing in nuclear escalation that could possibly help the Net Zero cause. There is certainly no mention of the catastrophic impact that any conflict may have on Dowden’s beloved Dogger Bank windfarm. So much for energy resilience.
Accidental nuclear escalation between other countries is included but the register seems only concerned with the impact this may have on British Nationals overseas, together with any indirect consequences for the UK. Finally, there is mention of nuclear fallout within the UK, but this is as a result of terrorist activity or a nuclear power accident.
Then there are all those missing entries associated with the Net Zero project. Nothing, for example, regarding blackouts during prolonged spells of becalmed weather. Nothing regarding the economic and societal fallout from a severe restriction on future transportation and travel. Nothing regarding the likely failure to meet the Net Zero target simply because of the sheer impracticality of it all. Nothing regarding the environmental risks associated with ramping up battery production to the levels required. Nothing regarding the political, economic and social instabilities that such a transition may entail. Nothing regarding the severe national security risks associated with becoming dependent upon a technology industry almost entirely dominated by China. And nothing regarding the almost total failure to deal with the climate risks that the UK’s Net Zero transition is intended to address — unless the ‘developing’ countries play their part. If Net Zero related actions get a mention, they are only identified as risk management measures, they are never considered to be risks in themselves. This is another reason why the National Risk Register comes across as being little more than a government PR exercise.
But let us not get too overwrought about any of this. Anybody who has ever been involved in creating risks registers for their organisation could tell you how fruitless the exercise generally seems to be. The risk that materialises and causes the most damage is almost invariably one not to have been registered. Those who should be taking note of the contents of the register never seem to do so. And the primary source of corporate risk is never external but always seems to have its genesis in the misdemeanours of the boardroom. Dowden put his finger on it when he said that the primary duty of a government is to keep its people safe.
And with that in mind I have to say that the greatest risk to the citizens of the UK has to be the UK government.
Erratum
Please note that this article inaccurately implies that the risk of an attack on gas supply is not featured in the NRR risk matrix. This implication follows from the fact that the only military conflict scenario that suggests such an attack is the triggering of Article 5, and the risk of Article 5 being triggered is not featured in the matrix. Whilst this is true, the article should have recognised that the risk of disruption to the gas infrastructure is also described as a ‘Geographic Risk’ and, as such, is covered in the risk matrix under the generic ‘Conventional attacks on infrastructure’. No such attacks are deemed to be potentially ‘catastrophic’ and none are deemed to carry the highest likelihood.
Climate Scepticism 
“Well the first duty of government is to keep people safe, and in my whole experience as a minister during the pandemic, the more information you give people, you give businesses, the better prepared we can be . . . . . . . ”
You can’t get much more gut-wrenchingly hypocritical and dishonest than that. ‘Keeping people safe’ during the ‘pandemic’ consisted of a blistering propaganda campaign which deliberately exaggerated the risks of Covid in order to terrify the populace into compliance with useless, psychologically and physically harmful mask mandates and deadly lockdowns, mass murdering old folk in care homes with Midazolam, banning the use of safe, effective pharmaceuticals such as HCQ and IVM in order to justify the mass rollout of unprecedentedly harmful ‘vaccines’, including administering said ‘vaccines’ to pregnant women and then covering up the results of safety trials:
https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/why-is-the-mhra-hiding-critical-safety
The government is indeed the greatest threat to the health, safety and security of British citizens, simply because the health, safety and security of British citizens does not figure at all in policy-making, except in those instances where it is deliberately and knowingly compromised in order to follow a supranational agenda dictated by unelected and democratically unaccountable globalist elites.
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Do note the unintended and unreported impacts of building these montrous virtue-signalling prayer wheels.
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Taken from Dowden’s statement for the Covid-19 enquiry, prepared on 18/04/23:
“To my recollection, at no point was the specific risk of a novel coronavirus pandemic raised as one that required particular attention. Of course had we been alerted to a specific significant risk in relation to a novel coronavirus or had the benefit of hindsight that such an event was going to occur, we would have taken a different approach. I am therefore broadly content that the Government took reasonable and proportionate steps commensurate with the perceived risks at the time and the requirement on every Government to effectively allocate scarce resources.”
As Dowden says, risk registers enable you to create robust plans and be prepared for anything!
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Also, whilst we are talking about allocation of ‘scarce resources’, there is this:
“Deputy PM defends pause of pandemic prep to plan for no-deal Brexit”
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/covid-19-inquiry-oliver-dowden-no-deal-brexit-preparation-pandemic/
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Besides which, Dowden has already said he is sorry:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/oct/13/senior-tory-says-sorry-for-mistakes-in-covid-pandemic-handling
Interestingly, he said at the time that, “This was an unprecedented crisis, a once-in-100-years event.” And yet the National Risk Register 2023, of which he is so proud, places the likelihood of a recurrence within the next 5 years as being somewhere between 5-25%. It’s good to see that the guy in charge of national risk assessment is on top of the figures.
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How can it be without precedent if it happens once in every hundred years? But now that the ‘unprecedented’ once-in-100-year event has happened, there’s as much as a 1 in 4 chance that it will reoccur in just 5 years. Just like 40C heatwaves I guess.
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Jaime,
That will be because climate change is making pandemics more likely 🥱
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/subtopics/coronavirus-and-climate-change/
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The biggest threats to the UK currently aren’t from AGW, Putin or Internet collapse but from Dowden, Hancock, Sunak and Hunt, to name but a very few.
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Catweazle666,
Not forgetting Starmer, of course.
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John,
The final sentence definitely nailed it.
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To elaborate upon the problems associated with net zero’s almost total dependence upon Chinese technology, here is an article discussing some of the problems from the perspective of the USA:
https://www.ft.com/content/ca7283a3-53e6-4066-a9f9-91adb3cf8d2b
Admittedly, it focuses more upon the moral issues rather than national security, but the article does quote David Scaysbrook, a managing partner of Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners, an Australian firm that both builds and invests in renewable energy, as saying:
“You have to ask the question, what clean energy technologies can we make at scale to achieve the green energy transition in the west that don’t currently depend on China?
The answer given is, “Not much”.
That sounds like something that should be in the risk register to me.
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I looked in vain in the register for mention of an EV fire on a ferry or in the Chunnel.
But I did see that a humble beetle is on the list: Agrilus planipennis, a buprestid (jewel beetle). It lives on ash, is spreading west from Russia at “up to” 25 miles per year, and might arrive in the UK in about 2050.
We already have 10 species of this genus in the UK, and most of them are rare. So it would be somewhat surprising if a newcomer, very similar in most respects, were to cause wide-scale damage. The issue would be that the beetle is, in Europe, without its (Asian) specialist natural enemies, so might go unchecked. Of course, once they’re here there’s really nothing that can be done, so it seems a bit pointless worrying about them (a bit like Chalara ash dieback; I genuinely do not see the point in felling infected trees).
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One of the details in the National Risk Register that I chose to leave out of my article is perhaps still worth mentioning now.
The register draws a distinction between malicious and non-malicious risks. An example of the former would be a terrorist attack. An example of the latter would be a natural disaster. The point of interest is that wildfire risk is placed in the latter category. But is that right?
I think a much stronger argument could be made for placing the risk in the category of malicious acts, albeit ones having environmental impact. Getting this categorisation right is important for two reasons. Firstly, as I have previously explained, the likelihoods for malicious and non-malicious risks are calculated over different time periods. Secondly, malicious risk is basically a security issue, where risk levels are deemed a function of threat level (itself a function of motivation, opportunity and capability) and vulnerability. It is by addressing these factors that one will therefore reduce the risk, i.e. by putting wildfire risk in this category one would focus attention on the correct approach to risk reduction, rather than doing something ineffective and inordinately expensive to address a supposed chronic, underlying risk (i.e. climate change). At the very least, it will place climate change in its proper perspective as being just one of a number of factors that may contribute to vulnerability.
See below an article on this year’s Portuguese fires. I believe it fully justifies the re-categorisation of wildfire risk in our own National Risk Register.
https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/2023-08-05/how-many-fires-were-started-by-arsonists/80134
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John, that’s a very interesting point, and a very relevant one. I wonder if there’s space for you to get involved with the next Risk Assessment? They could probably do with some help, since they do seem to be a tad confused.
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Mark,
My previous comment is precisely the sort of challenge I used to make when I used to review risk registers at work. Had I been one of the ‘hundreds of experts’ who were involved in challenging the National Register I would have criticised it for getting the categorisation wrong. I wonder if anyone did so and was ignored.
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The BBC are on it again:
“As it happened: Six dead in Hawaii wildfires”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-us-canada-66454968
But what is the cause of the tragedy? Need you ask? It’s a natural disaster only made possible by climate change. Or is it? For example, does Hawaii have a historic problem with arson that seems to be getting worse? Well…
“Although 75% of wildfires are deemed accidental and thus easily preventable in Hawaii, according to researcher Dr. Clay Trauernicht of UH CTAHR Cooperative Extension, we also have a challenging arson issue. It’s rare for authorities to catch arsonists and even more difficult to prosecute arsonist.”
Yes, but these wildfires are something new aren’t they? Well…
“Fires have been terrorizing our community my whole life,” she said. “Every summer, our mountains are on fire. I really hope that this million dollars that the community is requesting for the Waianae Kai Wildfire Preparedness Plan can be granted by the legislature.”
https://www.hawaiiwildfire.org/news-center/tag/arson
I could do this all night.
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It might also be worth pointing out that the biggest threat to Hawaii and its residents is probably volcanic.
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Only one island in the Hawaiian Chain (the Big Island) is actively volcanic Mark. Going to Oahu for instance (and especially Kauai) would offer little volcanic threat.
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John. Like most new ideas I learn about, eventually I challenge them. So when I read one of your more recent posts – the one where you advocate examining events as to whether they were malicious or not – the challenge quickly arose. Take the recent wildfires in Hawaii. Perhaps they were all arson and therefore malicious, but their spread and intensity are the result of unusually strong winds which are natural and therefore the main effects of the fires are due to natural causes. So when do fires switch from being malicious to being non-malicious? Or is it once designated malicious always malicious?
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Alan,
“Take the recent wildfires in Hawaii. Perhaps they were all arson and therefore malicious, but their spread and intensity are the result of unusually strong winds which are natural and therefore the main effects of the fires are due to natural causes.”
There might be an added dimension to this malice: arsonists noted the weather forecasts and deliberately planned to light fires in the presence of strong winds. The main effects of the fires are then due to arsonists deliberately exploiting a combination of hot dry weather and unusually strong winds.
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But Jaime if arsonists exploited weather conditions doesn’t that make the fires hybrid? Also correct designation would require knowledge of the arsonist’s thoughts. All I really am saying is that separation of malicious from non-malicious is going to be difficult, if not impossible, on occasion. So I question whether it can always be employed
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Alan,
I may have confused the issue somewhat by referring to ‘malicious and non-malicious risks’. I was being lazy by not saying ‘risks that are due to either malicious acts or not’. It is the act that carries the malice, not the risk and not the resulting fire. Even so, there is a validity to your comment. Risk is well known to be a function of likelihood and impact. Therefore, to reduce a risk one may choose to reduce either likelihood or impact. In the first case one is militating against the risk materialising. In the second case one is mitigating the risk impact. Which one chooses to do is down to opportunity and cost, and this can influence how a risk is categorised. The fact is that the register has a group that focusses upon the act (whether malicious or negligent) rather than the impact, as the basis for categorisation. This is done because the concepts of security are deemed important in managing the risk. I think wildfires would also benefit from being treated as a security issue, not because it fits better semantically, but because improving security is likely to have the biggest influence on managing the risk. By categorising wildfire as a natural disaster first and foremost, one invites a risk management strategy based upon mitigating impact through the reduction of ‘fire-spreading weather’, and I think this is a bad idea from both the opportunity and cost standpoint.
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Yet in California, impact (by spreading) of fire was to be reduced by owners of hilltops -usually covered with tinder dry grass in summer and early fall – individually removing said grass. There was no talk of arsonists, but much about barbecues running amuck.
How, in the malicious category, can you differentiate between malicious arsonists and criminally neglectful barbecuists? And should you? The more I think about this, the more complex it gets.
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Alan,
Yes, that is the problem with risk — the more one analyses it, the more complicated it seems. The knack seems to be to know when to stop analysing and how to decide what the important details are. There tends to be no right or wrong decisions to be made here, it’s just that some can prove more fruitful than others. In this case, I think the issue is whether one should think about wildfires as being primarily natural events or the result of man’s acts and omissions. I respectfully suggest that the latter is a more fruitful way of looking at them because it emphasises the extent to which changing delinquent behaviour will manage the risk. I strongly suspect that this is not the way the wildfire risk is perceived, merely because there is a narrative to be protected. Hence the insistence that only the climate has changed over the years even though there is ample evidence that other trends are germane, particularly trends in arson.
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More on the Net Zero risk of relying upon China:
“Britain must rapidly reverse its culture of “non-existent” investment in exploration for key green energy metals on home soil or face a future of Chinese dominance in an area vital to future economic security, a mining company boss has warned.”
https://inews.co.uk/news/uk-china-race-minerals-electric-cars-green-energy-mining-2532295
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Very interesting, thank you for the discussion John. It’s good to supplement one’s appreciation of current events. Your last post strongly suggests that decisions upon risk classification could be strongly influenced by one’s environmental views or politics
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I have come to realise that my article is inaccurate in implying that the risk of an attack on gas supply is not featured in the NRR risk matrix. This implication arises due to the fact that the only scenario that suggests such an attack is the triggering of Article 5, and the risk of Article 5 being triggered is not featured in the matrix. Whilst this is true, the article should have recognised that the risk of disruption to the gas infrastructure is also described in its own right and is covered in the risk matrix under the generic ‘Conventional attacks on infrastructure’. No such attacks are deemed to be potentially ‘catastrophic’ and none are deemed to carry the highest likelihood.
I will be adding an erratum for the above.
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More on the categorisation of fire risk.
There is an entry in the register called ‘Major Fire’. It falls within the category ‘Accidents and System Failure’. Even so, malicious activity (arson) is listed as a possible causation, as is lightning strike. In that respect, I’m not sure how this differs from wildfire, i.e. why is wildfire not just treated as another instance of major fire? They even occupy the same place in the risk matrix. As far as I can see, the only reasons for treating them separately were:
a) It enables discussion of climate change as being a cause specific to wildfire.
b) It enables arson to be identified as a potential cause of a major fire but not, strangely enough, a wildfire.
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Just to illustrate what I have said here regarding Dowden’s injudicious claim that the risk register enables the government and its partners to be prepared for anything, notice that it did not include an entry for complete failure of the National Air Traffic Control System.
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Dowden has obviously never watched Gremlins, or Gremlins 2.
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Or perhaps he has never heard that old computer programming adage: Garbage In, Catastrophe Out.
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Gosh. Today’s BBC News had a contributor who partially blamed the closure of schools because of aero-concrete failure on climate change. Woke me up as I spluttered in disbelief. Is there nothing that cannot be placed on the climate change risk register?
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Alan, I can confirm that you were not dreaming – this really did occur. Unless we are suffering a collective hallucination.
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Alan/Jit, that’s interesting. So far as I can see, neither the BBC report on its website, nor indeed the Guardian article about this story mention climate change. It’s rather crafty of the BBC to sneak in to a radio report a highly dubious reference that its editors presumably felt shouldn’t appear in writing.
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Alan/Jit/Mark – I can Confirm BBC TV news at 1pm had that story & mention climate change at the end.
as I recall, the reason given was something like “as it rains more due to climate change this will weaken & corrode the rebar in the aero-concrete faster”.
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It’s not just modern buildings which are decaying due to climate change. I visited Sweetheart Abbey near Dumfries in June this year and it was all fenced off and scaffolding erected around the structure because the building was being inspected for the danger of falling masonry. The notice said something about ‘climate change causing extra erosion’ or something. It’s confirmed here – HES actually have a project to “manage the impact of climate change on Scotland’s national heritage sites.” In June, ‘climate change’ was manifesting as drought and wall to wall sunshine in Dumfries & Galloway, then ‘climate change’ turned to wind and rain throughout July and August. Buildings old and new just can’t cope it seems! Buildings built many centuries ago in particular have never seen weather so extreme as today, hence the ‘acceleration’ in decay.
https://www.historicenvironment.scot/about-us/news/new-measures-introduced-to-manage-the-impact-of-climate-change/
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Jaime, they’re pushing that claim hard now in Scotland:
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I read somewhere recently that it’s become less windy in Scotland which is putting a dent in GDP because the Scottish economy is now so heavily dependent on the wind industry. There should be no shortage of whale bones in future museums though as more and more whales wash up on beaches in remote northern Scotland because of increased shipping traffic to and from offshore wind farm sites plus sonar imaging of the sea bed.
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And here we go again.
Where in the National Risk Register is there an entry to cover the discovery of the widespread use of a defective building material in schools, hospitals and other public buildings, leading to emergency closures on a national scale, and requiring a remediation bill likely to run into hundreds of millions for the taxpayer?
You were prepared for anything were you, Dowden?
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It’s interesting how the NATS failure is being reported in the news today.
“Air traffic chaos caused by ‘one in 15 million’ event”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66723586
The purpose of such headlines is to impress upon a gullible public that no one could have reasonably seen it coming. However, when you read further it turns out that the calculation is based upon the number of flight plans that were processed between the system first being commissioned into service and then failing – 15 million. Such is the volume of flight plans handled, this took only five years. A once-in-five-years failure is not normally considered unforeseeable. By that, I mean that whilst the specific circumstances of failure may be unusual, the opportunities for such failure, or related failures, were so many that failure due to data input integrity should have featured prominently in both the NATS safety assessment and business continuity planning.
The other point made is that the system operated as designed. Which is very true, insofar as when it failed, it failed safe. However, when it comes to NATS, mission continuity is a matter of national importance, and so a better system would have found a way of dealing with the error without total shutdown. They are talking about preventing such a thing happening again. I certainly hope so. There will always be a tension between safety imperatives and service availability. The NATS Safety Strategy 2030 states, ‘We must evolve from a view of service versus safety to service with safety’. What they mean by that, and how they intend achieving it remains to be seen:
Click to access TheFutureOfSafetyInATM2030.pdf
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“Britons should stock up on torches and candles in case of power cuts, says Dowden
Analogue advice given by PM alongside measures to better prepare UK for future pandemics, disasters and cyber-attacks”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/dec/05/britons-should-stock-up-on-torches-and-candles-in-case-of-power-cuts-says-oliver-dowden
No mention of overdue reliance on renewable energy and electrifying the whole of society, though.
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He forgot pitchforks…
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“UK is failing to put climate crisis at centre of national security measures, MPs told
Experts say changing climate is ‘threat multiplier’ and that US and Germany already include it in planning”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/14/uk-is-failing-to-put-climate-crisis-at-centre-of-national-security-measures-mps-told
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“Escalating armed conflict is most urgent threat for world in 2025, say global leaders”
Not climate change, then? Oh, hang on a minute:
“World Economic Forum says responses from experts in business, politics and academia also highlight climate crisis”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/15/escalating-armed-conflict-is-most-urgent-threat-for-world-in-2025-say-global-leaders
Global leaders have said that escalating armed conflict is the most urgent threat in 2025 but the climate emergency is expected to cause the greatest concern over the next decade, according to the World Economic Forum.…
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Mark,
Groan!
Mind you, I’m sure they are right to say that climate change will ’cause the greatest concern’. Whether it should do is quite a different matter.
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Notalot reporting on the updating of the risk register.
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Jit,
Thank you for the heads up.
After only a cursory look at the new register I could see that nothing significant has changed. And so:
a) There is still a foreword intended to give false confidence in our government’s ability to keep us safe.
b) The front cover continues to feature a climate change-related risk, even though such risks are not particularly high up on the list.
c) If the coverage given by the Standard is anything to go by, the press will continue to highlight the climate change-related risks, even though they are not particularly high up on the list.
d) There has been no change to the assessed scale of climate-related risks such as heatwaves or major flooding, so the following comment made in my article regarding the 2023 register still applies to the latest version:
I’ll add further comment if anything else occurs to me.
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From Standard article we get this link – Danger to life UK wildfires could last 7 days sparking evacuations, Government warns as Los Angeles fires burn | The Standard
Partial quote –
“The threat from wildfires, as the planet warms with climate change, has been updated in the Government’s 2025 National Risk Register.
It warns of a “reasonable worst-case scenario based on a sustained and widespread extreme wildfire” which could take four to seven days to bring under control by the authorities including hundreds of firefighters. “Evacuations would be necessary, with a high risk of casualties and/or adverse health impacts,” it stressed.”
Wonder what the “worst worst-case scenario” looks like!!!
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Dougie, that sounds like rubbish to me. We don’t have any chaparral in the UK. The heathery bits of our uplands are not that extensive to burn for a week. In the lowlands? Inconceivable.
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Dfhunter,
“The threat from wildfires, as the planet warms with climate change, has been updated in the Government’s 2025 National Risk Register.”
No it has not. The level of threat (i.e. the risk level) for each risk is portrayed in a matrix indicating both the likelihood and impact of the risk. The risk matrix for wildfire risk in the 2025 register is identical to its predecessor, i.e. the posited likelihood and impact are identical, as are the bars indicating the uncertainties. Furthermore, this is how the wildfire risk scenario is described in the previous issue:
And this is how it is now described:
Spot the difference.
The only change to the register is that it now provides additional information for each risk in the form of ‘variations’ of the scenarios, and the wildfire risk entry is no exception. However, to say that the threat has been updated in the register is not just misleading, it is an unadulterated lie. The only way we can give the Standard the benefit of the doubt here is to assume they didn’t actually bother to compare the two versions of the register and took it for granted that the threat has been increased. Actually, I don’t know which is worse!
Journalists, eh?
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John – thanks for calling out bad/misleading journalism. Must admit I had my suspicions when I saw the Standard article headline –
“Danger to life UK wildfires could last 7 days sparking evacuations, Government warns as Los Angeles fires burn. The alarm was raised about the growing risk of wildfires as the planet warms”
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Dfhunter,
It isn’t the phrase “growing risk of wildfires as the planet warms” that particularly concerns me, after all there is a statement to that effect in the register. Rather, it is the specific statement that the threat has been updated in the register when it clearly hasn’t. The growing risk, for what it is worth, is simply not growing fast enough, and no matter how much it grows it cannot get large enough to justify ammendment to the register as it stands. There would have to be a fundamental change to the risk for that to happen. In the meantime, it’s all about journalists hyping the situation.
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“Urgent action needed to ensure UK food security, report warns
The UK’s food supply has been threatened by recent events, such as the war in Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/06/urgent-action-needed-to-ensure-uk-food-security-report-warns
Urgent action is needed to secure the UK’s food supply in the face of climate change-induced extreme weather, the imposition of tariffs and global insecurity, a report has warned.…
I’m not sure I agree with the underlying reasons put forward, but I do agree with the conclusion. Why, then, does this government’s plans include taking 10% of agricultural land out of productive use? Why plaster agricultural land with solar panels.
...Increased domestic production is needed, as well as changes to food distribution systems, the introduction of town-to-town food resilience education exchanges, and research into current thinking around stockpiling and rationing in order to better prepare the country for food shocks, according to the report by the National Preparedness Commission.
“To safeguard our future, we must prioritise resilience at every level – from local communities to national frameworks,” said Lang.
“There is a gap between the official risk and resilience framework which presents a picture that all is OK, and the realities that people in senior and frontline roles read differently.
“There is too much complacency about UK food security and civil food resilience barely features at all in forward planning.”...
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Mark – “National Preparedness Commission” is another new one for me. From the blurb –
“The National Preparedness Commission was created to promote better readiness for a major crisis or incident – seeking to achieve this by supporting policy change and other activities that will enable the UK to prevent, withstand, recover and ‘build back better’ from major disruptions.
The Commission’s work is both strategic and practical. Recognising that what is needed to be better prepared for many shocks is the same whatever the initiating crisis or incident, we believe a ‘threat agnostic’ ‘whole system’ approach to preparedness is needed alongside the existing focus on specific known risks. We think the time has come to stop merely ‘admiring the problem’, and to bring decision-makers and experts from different sectors together to tackle issues head on, and harness collective capability and insight.
Preparedness is everyone’s business, and it will take the participation of every element of society to respond to the challenge. The National Preparedness Commission is committed to enabling a better-prepared UK.”
Wonder If NZ will be included. from the about link –
“Plans for developing the NPC were underway well before the Covid-19. That event, and the speed with which societal norms had to be changed after the pandemic struck, demonstrated clearly the need for the Commission’s work, and the first meeting of the National Preparedness Commission was held in November 2020.
At the same time, the foundations were being laid for a stronger national focus on preparedness. In December 2020 the National Risk Register was published by the Government, highlighting 38 major risks facing the UK, and in July 2021 the Rt Hon Penny Mordaunt MP, Paymaster General, launched a call for evidence on a national resilience strategy, to which the NPC submitted a response.
Since then, the Commission has continued to ‘hold Government to account’ on national preparedness, engaging constructively with the authors of key Government policies and frameworks, and commenting on revisions of key documents such as the National Risk Register and the Integrated Review (both revised in 2022). NPC evidence and recommendations are valued by stakeholders in Government and beyond. Many of the themes highlighted by the NPC in its first two years were picked up, for example, in the UK Government Resilience Framework, published in December 2022 and we continue to contribute as that Framework is developed. Policymakers and decision makers in other sectors actively seek our input into preparedness challenges – often looking to us to broker cross-sector conversations.
Our focus in the medium term is to ensure that the right focus and resources are applied to national preparedness – whether that be in Government, private sector or in the community. That will require continued effort, open conversations and a continuation of the pragmatic approach for which we have so quickly become recognised.”
B/S springs to mind.
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Given that the electricity substation fire near Heathrow seems to be the very sort of incident that you would expect to be covered by the National Risk Register, I thought it might be a good idea to take a look at what it says. It’s obviously far too early to say whether or not this is the result of an accident or a deliberate act of sabotage, so let us look at both possibilities.
Firstly, as an accidental event it would come under Chapter 4, “Accidents and System Failures”. Specifically, it should be covered under “Regional failure of the electricity network”. The scenario description reads:
But in describing the assumptions behind this scenario, the register says:
This may be why the register says nothing regarding how the probability of such eventualities can be reduced; risk management seems to be entirely a matter of planning for recovery. And as far as impact is concerned, the register says:
Well they got that wrong. The closing of the UK’s largest airport has had both national and international impact.
Of more interest to me, however, is the possibility of terrorist attack, since that is something that should be guarded against. This is what the register says under “Conventional attack: electricity infrastructure”:
This complacency continues with:
But don’t worry:
Once again, the register seems inappropriately focused upon recovery rather than prevention. Which is a shame. When I look at aerial shots of the substation concerned, I see a very vulnerable facility that is of critical importance. I do wonder what security measures were in place to protect against the ‘unlikely event’ that we may have all just witnessed. We will have to wait and see how this one pans out, but only a fool would dismiss out of hand, at this early stage, the possibility that Russia has something to do with this.
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And just in case anyone thinks I am behaving like a foil-hatted conspiracy theorist, I should point out that Russian attacks on European soil are already a long-standing suspicion amongst security experts:
This AP map shows sabotage across Europe that has been blamed on Russia and its proxies
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And predictably the speculation is already underway:
Counter terrorism police probe Heathrow fire amid claims of Russian sabotage: Substation blaze fits the pattern of Putin’s disruption attacks in Europe, and exposes ‘vulnerability’ in UK infrastructure, say experts | Daily Mail Online
But our national risk register says not to worry. It’s storms you need to be worrying about, and that is why we must have Net Zero by tomorrow.
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The Telegraph has an interesting take on this story:
“Heathrow ‘forced to shut down because of net zero’
Airport bosses faces accusations that back-up power failed to kick in after they replaced diesel generator with biomass version.”
How did the Heathrow fire start? Everything we know so far
Behind a paywall unfortunately.
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Meanwhile, Ed Milliband and the Met Police are doing their best to play down the fears of sabotage. Apparently, the only reason why the investigation is being led by the counter-terror police is because they have the best resources to get the job done quickly. Yeh, right.
On the other hand, the papers are having a field day, providing a long list of quotes from security experts, my favourite of which is this one:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/33963424/fears-putin-behind-heathrow-blaze-russia/
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John R, I think the condition monitoring system of an overheating transformer should trip the transformer off-line and thereby operate in failsafe mode. Since this clearly has not happened in the vitally important Hayes transformer case, my first reaction would be to call in the security services to ensure that there had been no foul play. Once I had established that there had been no foul play then I would call in the transformer experts to establish how and why the safety systems failed to danger. I would also be asking why the various back-up systems failed to avert a complete system failure; did we not have strength in depth? Clearly not. Regards, John C.
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John C,
That sums it up nicely. Whichever way you look it, there is no acceptable scenario to be had here.
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Putin may be laughing; Plane Stupid may be too. Making the assumption that this was an accident caused by decrepit infrastructure, it’s still odd that their goals are so aligned.
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Paul Homewood is following up on this story too:
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With remarkable irony, the meltdown on the BBC about the collapse in flights to and from Heathrow was something to behold.
Whatever the cause of the outage, I was impressed by the drama caused by normal activities becoming unavailable because of electricity failure. People were appalled. I am convinced that as net zero increasingly has this effect across all aspects of life, this is how net zero will die.
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Mark,
“Whatever the cause of the outage…”
Here is an interesting article on that topic:
“What Caused the Fire That Shut Down Heathrow Airport?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/21/world/europe/heathrow-power-fire-investigation.html
A number of things stand out for me. Firstly there is this:
That seems good advice, but it is rather at odds with the government’s headline statement provided in its risk register. If you remember:
Also of note is an expert’s assessment that keeping the airport running “would require at least 20 massive diesel generators the size of 40-foot shipping containers, each one capable of generating a megawatt of power.” Even so, this would only allow for 6 hours of operation before the generators would need refuelling. Suffice to say, Heathrow has no such system in place, such was its misplaced confidence in the resilience of the grid.
The cause of the fire is as yet undisclosed, but if it is an accident (as the article suggests) it would seem to be, in the words of Ed Milliband, ‘unprecedented’. It won’t be too long before people start talking about black swans, which means it couldn’t have been predicted. Yippee!
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Speaking of black swans, I’m pleased to see that the Business Continuity Institute is already looking to preempt that narrative:
Heathrow power outage: A wake-up call for systemic resilience | BCI
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Today’s edition of Radio 4’s Any Answers? covered resilience problems at Heathrow and other important sites. I didn’t hear the whole segment. I heard someone banging on about privatisation (not entirely unconvincingly) then a somewhat calmer resilience expert came on the line. The programme can be streamed here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00296x2
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According to John Sullivan, who knows a bit about these things, the loss of the transformer may indeed have been an extremely rare event, a Black Swan even, but the shutdown of Heathrow itself should not have resulted from that catastrophic failure, which was probably due to gross incompetence, therefore a culpable failure.
https://johnsullivan.substack.com/p/disinformation-and-the-heathrow-shutdown
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Jaime,
That’s an interesting article from John Sullivan. I’m sure he is right in calling out the volume of ill-informed speculation coming from politicians and ‘experts’. However, I think his own unsubstantiated speculation that woke DEI is at the bottom of this and similar incidents rather lets him down and puts him in the same camp.
Speaking of experts, I see that The Conversation has done its bit by gathering a panel together to discuss the issues:
“Heathrow closure: what caused the fire and why did it bring down the whole airport? Expert panel”
https://theconversation.com/heathrow-closure-what-caused-the-fire-and-why-did-it-bring-down-the-whole-airport-expert-panel-252834
At least one of the experts on the panel backs Sullivan up in saying that Heathrow has more than one supply feeding it and that it should have been more than capable of sustaining operations whilst transferring to the alternative, on-site substations. As such, the problems look to be operational weaknesses rather than design vulnerabilities. That said, The Conversation just couldn’t help itself, giving the final word to a group of experts pushing the climate change angle:
Climate change means the grid will face more threats like this.
So even an incident that clearly had no link to climate change provides the perfect opportunity to hype the risks associated with climate change! I’m just waiting for Ed Milliband to come out with this take.
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What a noise would have been made had this fire occurred, say at 3 in the afternoon on a 40-degree July day!
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It seems the vulnerabilities at Heathrow were identified in a report way back in 2014, and it does seem that they are design vulnerabilities after all. In detailing the report the Telegraph, stated:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/22/heathrow-airport-warned-weakness-single-grid-link-decade/
So it seems that with the systems in place, the Heathrow operational staff were never going to cope. As I have said, there seemed to be an overconfidence in the resilience of the external supply. Despite the warning from the report, Heathrow management were treating the substation fire as if it were an unthinkable possibility. As for Milliband’s reference to the ‘unprecedented’ nature of the substation fire, Professor John Loughhead CB OBE CEng, Fellow and electrical engineering expert at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, has said:
https://www.theiet.org/media/press-releases/press-releases-2025/press-releases-2025-january-march/21-march-2025-iet-experts-respond-to-heathrow-closure-due-to-substation-fire
So no black swan after all.
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John,
The questions I have after reading that Telegraph article are:
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One possible reason for 3 substations is that T1-3 is a long way from T4 and T5, on the other side of the runway, and T4 and T5 are both separate units. Therefore it would be more practical for each cluster to have its own substation. But that thinking is undermined by what the article seems to suggest.
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Jaime,
Here’s Heathrow’s CEO attempting to answer some of your questions, and not making a particularly good job of it:
How Heathrow became reliant on a single electrical substation
I’m also a little unsure exactly what role the biomass generator has to play in all of this.
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John,
So basically, they’ve got three substations which can run the airport but only one is configured to do that job and if it fails, either or both of the other too can’t be quickly put into use to power operations at the airport. So they need an emergency backup (diesel generators) to provide power whilst a new transformer is configured to take power from the grid. But the emergency backup is not a backup to provide power to the whole airport, just enough to safely land planes in the air. The biomass generator is not a backup either, just an exercise in virtue signalling. Great. A major First World international airport and critical transport hub dependent upon Third World contingency planning. So, who needs DEI hires to mess things up when the ‘backup’ which is not a backup functions entirely ‘as expected’ resulting in the airport getting shut down for a day? Pathetic. And then the CEO says he’s ‘proud’ that the systems in place functioned entirely ‘as expected’! Yeah, nice smooth transition to a Third World service! Maybe some of those DEI hires, if they exist, felt right at home!
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Gives a whole new meaning to “single point of failure”…
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Jaime,
Yes, something like that. I’m still unsure regarding the details, but whatever happened, and however it happened, it seems to have been fully predicted ten years in advance. That’s why I say risk registers are a waste of time. Even when the risks are documented they are rarely adequately dealt with. Management have always got something better to do.
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Kathryn Porter at Watt-Logic:
“Heathrow blackout after substation fire highlights infrastructure vulnerability”
https://watt-logic.com/2025/03/24/heathrow-airport-blackout/
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Mark,
That’s a more comprehensive, knowledgeable and detailed explanation of what I summarised above, with this important addition, pertinent to Net Zero zealotry:
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It’s time that I qualified my reservations regarding risk registers by acknowledging one of risk management’s most important practicalities: more often than not, risk cannot be removed entirely but must be reduced to an acceptable level. This implies that all risk management operates within the constraints of a risk acceptance policy reflecting the risk appetite of the organisation concerned. Everything that the CEO of Heathrow has said since the substation fire suggests that the events that have unfolded are in keeping with the airport management’s current risk acceptance policy. Apparently, everything worked as planned and the CEO is proud of the airport’s response. In fact, he was so relaxed about it, he was still determined to get in his beauty sleep whilst the airport went through the painfully slow process of getting back up and running. This impression is reinforced by the fact that the risk was fully identified in a report written some ten years ago. Did the management respond to this report with a massive investment in backup facilities to provide further resilience? No, they just acknowledged and accepted the risk. After all, it would take an ‘unprecedented’ event for the risk to come to fruition!
Given the risk acceptance policy that seems to have been in place, one can understand why the likelihood of the event has since been downplayed. Experts and fools alike are saying it was unprecedented. Meanwhile, others will point out that substation fires are not that rare. Whoever wins that debate will not only get to set the yardstick by which accusations of complacency can be measured, they will also provide the backdrop for any further debate regarding whether or not the current risk acceptance policy is appropriate. Whatever the truth, we are left with two important questions. Firstly, one has to wonder to what extent stakeholders to the risk (i.e. the public, airline companies and the UK government, etc.) were party to the establishment of the current risk acceptance policy. Reactions to the event would seem to suggest that they would not have endorsed the policy had they been consulted. Secondly, where do we go from here? The financial costs of now putting in place sufficient resilience will, no doubt, be made much of. But we also have the elephant in the room to deal with: net zero. The extended quote provided by Jaime in the previous comment makes it clear that putting in place sufficient resilience to avoid a recurrence is incompatible with net zero strategies. It will be interesting to see, therefore, whether there will be any revision of current policy, or indeed things are destined to get even worse for Heathrow, given the worsening state of the national grid system (not to mention the template that has now been provided for would-be terrorists). Climate alarmists are keen to take advantage of every extreme weather event by saying worse is still to come. Maybe it’s time we used events such as the Heathrow debacle to say the same regarding net zero and blackouts. Heathrow looks like it is destined to be a crucial test case.
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It seems the Heathrow power outage story won’t die:
“‘We warned of power issues before Heathrow outage'”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clynmyg7zk9o
Business groups in west London have said it was “no surprise”‘ there was a power outage at Heathrow Airport last week.
The West London Business group said its members had warned National Grid, the National Energy System Operator (NESO) and watchdog Ofgem for some time about a lack of electricity capacity in the area, including that the energy supply was oversubscribed…..
That sounds like a metaphor for net zero Britain.
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“Nearly 200 properties without power after fire”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj0q6e83j8mo
Nearly 200 properties are without power after a fire in an electricity substation.
The blaze, in Albert Road, West Bridgford, Nottinghamshire, was reported to National Grid at 15:56 GMT on Sunday....
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A short and simple (simplistic?) analysis, but I put it here as its on-point:
“The Heathrow shutdown: a disaster waiting to happen
The resilience of our national infrastructure has withered as governments have chased environmental fads.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/03/24/the-heathrow-shutdown-a-disaster-waiting-to-happen/
…The term ‘resilience’ used to refer to the fortitude of engineering systems in the face of adversity – indeed, it might once have been used to describe the grid’s capacity to manage local outages. But today, in a political climate informed by Net Zero, ‘resilience’ has come to be interpreted principally as the protection of the environment against climate change.
The Heathrow shutdown has exposed the folly of this way of thinking. Successive governments have allowed Net Zero to inform their approaches to all aspects of our national infrastructure. Protecting the environment and reaching climate-change targets have been prioritised over the needs of the nation and its citizens….
…And in the National Grid, we have an incompetent electricity operator presiding over an increasingly complex but fragile system. It’s entirely preoccupied with integrating more and more sources of renewable energy into the grid, rather than keeping the mains on.
The crisis at Heathrow was all too predictable. Successive governments’ climate-change obsession has created a warped set of priorities, as panic about a climate apocalypse in the future eclipsed concerns about network maintenance in the present.
The real lesson of Heathrow is that the British state needs to refocus on what matters – on rebuilding the kind of robust, reliable infrastructure that is essential to modern life. Otherwise, before long, it won’t just be Heathrow that is struggling to keep the lights on.
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I speculated a few days ago that Heathrow’s risk management may not be particularly well integrated with its stakeholder management. That suspicion appears to have been fully confirmed today:
Meanwhile, Heathrow’s boss is still playing the ‘unlikely event’ defence whilst also hiding behind the safety issues:
Following the NATS debacle (see earlier in this thread) it was made clear that this sort of thing shouldn’t be a case of trading off availability of service against operational safety. If you recall, the NATS Safety Strategy 2030 stated, ‘We must evolve from a view of service versus safety to service with safety’.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cdde00r6e8ro
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The investigation into the Heathrow Airport substation fire has concluded, and it seems that the National Grid was negligent in not fixing a known fault. Predictably, the Heathrow Airport management have been quick to take advantage of the findings:
Heathrow considering legal action against National Grid over fire
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly22eelnxjo
My thoughts:
a) Faulty equipment was to blame, and such faults are not uncommon. And yet the UK’s National Risk Register, Chapter 4, “Accidents and System Failures” said this about “Regional failure of the electricity network”:
That should not be the register’s focus. Equipment usually fails when it is either badly designed, badly installed, or badly maintained. For example, weather had nothing to do with the Heathrow fire.
b) There was a recent fire in a substation on Teesside, and immediately the finger was pointed at the weather:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2lqx22d15o
And yet there had been no extreme heat. Once again, weather seems a handy scapegoat distracting away from what was almost certainly human failure. The National Risk Register’s obsession with extreme weather has a lot to answer for.
c) The Heathrow fire was eminently avoidable. The risk was known about but nothing was done about it:
This just underlines what I have been saying about risk registers being a waste of time, e.g. when talking to Jaime:
d) Heathrow management is blaming it all on the National Grid, and yet their own culpability in failing to ensure business continuity was made plain in an independent report back in 2014:
They should not be allowed to shift blame away from themselves. They had a duty to plan for possible failures of the national grid, and they failed miserably in that regard.
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“The report also said that “it was not known to the energy companies” that the loss of one of the electrical supply points – of which Heathrow has three – would result in a power outage to some of the airport’s critical systems. “The review also found that energy network operators are not generally aware whether customers connected to their networks are Critical National Infrastructure,” it said.”
No mention of Heathrow backup power I can see in that article (generators). Someone is covering their ass IMHO.
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dfhunter,
The BBC article appears to imply that, had the energy companies known about the criticality of the substation, the corrective maintenance would have taken place. The report suggests that better communication would have helped.
How about if everyone just did their job?
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John – it seems as if, as you suggested, that instead of getting finger out to sort “Critical National Infrastructure” problems now & in the future, they use the finger to point anywhere but at themselves.
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Here is a link to Kathryn Porter’s Watt-Logic blog which discusses the Heathrow substation failure.
Kathryn mentions in the clip that several years ago there was a similar problem at Atlanta airport inthe USA, following which the airport installed their own generator station. So the knowledge was out there but, sadly, inadequate action, it seems, was taken at Heathrow. Regards, John C.
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It’s brilliant isn’t it? Heathrow didn’t bother with a backup plan because they couldn’t believe that the energy companies wouldn’t keep on top of their maintenance, and the energy companies didn’t feel the need to keep on top of their maintenance because they couldn’t believe that Heathrow wouldn’t have a backup plan.
There’s got to be a name for this phenomenon. Ah that’s it — folie à deux.
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“Scientists warn of severe climate-related risks to UK economy and security
Experts lay out scale of changes needed in ‘first-of-its-kind national emergency briefing’ in Westminster”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/27/limate-related-risks-uk-economy-security
A host of eminent scientists have warned politicians, business and community leaders that the UK risks severe climate-related risks to its economy, public health, food systems and national security.…
…Speaking on climate, Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the Universities of Manchester, Uppsala and Bergen, said: “The choice is between deep, rapid and fair decarbonisation of modern society, and an organised-ish technical and social revolution; or ongoing rhetoric and delay as temperatures [rise]. And then we’ll have a revolutionary style change that will be both chaotic and violent.”…
…Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, said that a collapse in the Atlantic meridianal overturning current (Amoc) would leave London freezing in winters of -20C, “and yet the summers would still be hotter than today’s”, leading to a situation where the UK would be 100% reliant on food imports. “We have got to do everything in our power to limit the amount of time we spend above 1.5C [above preindustrial temperatures],” Lenton said.….
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Mark – thanks for the link –
““This event is about resetting the national conversation, especially in the face of growing misinformation,” said Prof Mike Berners-Lee, the climate writer and pioneer in carbon footprinting, as he introduced the talks. Nine experts gave stark assessments of the scale of the changes needed to adapt the country to the rapidly changing climate and ecological situation, and potentially stave off the worst potential outcomes.”
Wonder who the “9 experts” might be. This is my count from the article –
1 – Speaking on climate, Kevin Anderson, professor of energy and climate change at the Universities of Manchester, Uppsala and Bergen
2 – On nature, Nathalie Seddon, professor of biodiversity at the University of Oxford
3 – Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter
4 – Mark Rylance was among the prominent figures who attended the briefing. Inequality is a core part of the climate problem, the actor told the Guardian…“I’m a very wealthy person and I have to do more about this. We have got to do more about our collective addiction.” He accused billionaires of funding climate denying misinformation. “They do it because they don’t want people to act collectively, they want people to feel powerless. They should do better things with their money.”
5 – Richard Nugee, a retired general, said politicians focused on the threat from Russia were failing to see the greater threat of the climate crisis.
Might be wrong but the article header “Scientists warn of severe climate-related risks to UK economy and security” & “A host of eminent scientists” is just a tad misleading, verging on “misinformation“. bold mine.
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dfhunter,
Yes indeed. And there’s a huge irony in complaining about billionaires funding misinformation when one looks at the output from many of the “green” blob organisations funded by (so-called) “green” billionaires.
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Those in charge seem to be looking in the wrong direction again:
“‘Massive disruption’: UK’s worst-case climate crisis scenarios revealed by scientists
Scientists say government must prepare for unlikely but ‘plausible’ 4C rise in temperature and a 2-metre rise in sea levels”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/dec/18/massive-disruption-uk-worst-case-climate-crisis-risks
The worst-case impacts of the climate crisis for the UK have been laid bare by scientists, ranging from a scorching 4C rise in temperatures to a 2-metre rise in sea level. Another scenario sees a plunge of 6C in temperature after the collapse of key Atlantic Ocean currents, massively disrupting farming and energy needs.
The impacts, some of which are linked to climate tipping points, are seen as low probability but plausible…
…The research was commissioned by the Met Office as part of the government’s climate resilience programme. A House of Lords report warned in 2021 that not enough attention was being given to low‐likelihood but high‐impact risks.
The Climate Change Committee, the government’s independent advisory body, has said the UK needs to “adapt to 2C and assess the risks for 4C”. Adaptation plans published in 2023 were criticised as being “very weak”….
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