Major General Chip Chapman, a military expert and former UK counter-terror chief said Heathrow Airport 'prioritised profit,' during his interview with Rachel Johnson on Friday.
Thousands of homes have been left without power and more than 100 people were evacuated after a transformer within the North Hyde electrical substation caught fire in Hayes.
Heathrow Airport said it is ‘able to restart flights’ but warned passengers to stay away unless specifically advised to do so by their airline.
Counter-terrorism police are investigating, although no cause has been confirmed yet.
This closure is likely to cause delays and cancellations across the globe as thousands of travellers see their plans thrown into chaos.
An airline industry insider told LBC the impact of the fire "will cause chaos for at least a week," adding that the "national & international ripple will be felt everywhere."
Major General Chapman also said the closure would hit the UK's reputation and make it look more like a 'third world country'.
Listen to the full show on Global Player: https://app.af.globalplayer.com/Br0x/LBCYouTubeListenLive
#racheljohnson #heathrow #heathrowairport #fire #airport #uknews #russia #counterterrorism #defence #security #ukpolitics #LBC
LBC is the home of live debate around news and current affairs in the UK.
Join in the conversation and listen at https://www.lbc.co.uk/
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Thousands of homes have been left without power and more than 100 people were evacuated after a transformer within the North Hyde electrical substation caught fire in Hayes.
Heathrow Airport said it is ‘able to restart flights’ but warned passengers to stay away unless specifically advised to do so by their airline.
Counter-terrorism police are investigating, although no cause has been confirmed yet.
This closure is likely to cause delays and cancellations across the globe as thousands of travellers see their plans thrown into chaos.
An airline industry insider told LBC the impact of the fire "will cause chaos for at least a week," adding that the "national & international ripple will be felt everywhere."
Major General Chapman also said the closure would hit the UK's reputation and make it look more like a 'third world country'.
Listen to the full show on Global Player: https://app.af.globalplayer.com/Br0x/LBCYouTubeListenLive
#racheljohnson #heathrow #heathrowairport #fire #airport #uknews #russia #counterterrorism #defence #security #ukpolitics #LBC
LBC is the home of live debate around news and current affairs in the UK.
Join in the conversation and listen at https://www.lbc.co.uk/
Sign up to LBC’s weekly newsletter here: https://l-bc.co/signup
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NewsTranscript
00:00Let's go straight to Major General Chip Chapman. He's the former counter-terrorism chief at the
00:05Ministry of Defence and he joins us now. Thank you so much for joining us, Major General, this evening.
00:13You've heard all the politicians saying no evidence of foul play, but the counter-terrorism
00:19police are leading the investigation. So what does that tell us? It doesn't tell you as much
00:24as you probably think it might, Rachel. So it's not either evidence of a terror act or a state
00:30act of terror. What it does give you is the speed of reassurance and the assets which can be brought
00:36to bear where the motive is initially uncertain. So it could be that the involvement leads to
00:42a terrorist incident, such as it did in Skripal, but it doesn't have to be such as, for example,
00:47in Rudokibana, where that was mass murder at the end of the day, not terrorism, despite the belief
00:54perseverance which a lot of people have in saying that that was a terrorist attack. Why people go
01:00towards this terrorism thing in terms of critical national infrastructure is, of course, because of
01:05Russian operations in the grey zone, which does include deniable attacks. But the sad reality is
01:11that both in terms of technology people and processes, there are some arcane and archaic
01:17technologies around in the critical national infrastructure. And we have seen both at Gatwick
01:23and Heathrow in 2019, that in terms of risk registers of companies where the bottom line
01:30is profit, that sometimes it's profit over business continuity. So what happened here
01:36in the backup systems coming in is they prioritise safety systems, that's not full operations,
01:44that is not full business continuity, which is why they partially prepared safety operations,
01:50not fully prepared, although now they're sort of react and recovery in terms of resilience
01:55looks quite strong in terms of saying, for example, that there will be 100% operations tomorrow.
02:01I think a lot of people will be wondering how on earth, even the experts teams of counterterrorism
02:09can establish the cause of a fire, even a domestic fire. I mean, I know, it always seems
02:15extraordinary that when something's gone up in smoke, you are able to determine what the,
02:21you know, the first match struck where it was. Will they be able to tell whether cyber was
02:27involved in this, whether it was arson, or whether this was an accident? And how clearly will they be
02:35able to tell us? Well, I think we'll be able to do all of those things, in fact. So you have a
02:40parallel investigation by the London Fire Brigade, looking at what happened on the ground.
02:46But also, of course, because all the systems are automated there, you'll have a sort of digital
02:51record of what happened in the moments before to see if this was an outage by some overcapacity
02:58or something. So it will be quite easy to find that out. But of course, what also the agencies
03:04are going to be doing within counterterrorist command is looking if there's any footprint
03:09within the sort of signals intelligence community, the human intelligence community,
03:13to see if there were any warning signs for this, should this have been a terrorist attack. But
03:18I don't think it is. I think it's just arcane, archaic infrastructure, which has led to this
03:24lack of business continuity as we saw in 2019. And that's sadly where we are, where in terms
03:31of risk registers, people often look at impact and likelihood. They overprioritize the impact,
03:40but don't look enough at the likelihood. And at the bottom line is often profit. And that's why
03:46people don't deal with these things in a coherent matter. So when they're doing the investigation,
03:53I would say that they'll look at the risk register of the Heathrow Airport holdings
03:58significantly to see what was on that and what money they actually spent on having a resilient
04:04system to have this backup should something have failed outside of their control with the
04:09substation. I see. Well, according to one former airport boss I spoke to, Heathrow didn't have
04:18full 100% airport redundancy. I suppose if that substation went out, they would automatically
04:24switch to another one and carry on at full capacity. But apparently, that's quite normal
04:29for large infrastructure installations. It's not unusual. So I mean, to what extent do we blame a
04:37lack of investment and upkeep of the infrastructure if it is determined that was at fault?
04:45Well, again, this comes down to what we call the criticality scale in these things,
04:49in terms of what categories of substantiality does this reach? So for example, in national
04:56terms, a significant event would be 10s of millions of pounds of disruption,
05:00a substantial event would be a category three, millions of pounds of destruction. And in terms
05:05of impacts, if there are no fatalities and casualties, which I think your report mentioned
05:09earlier on Rachel, then they look at economic impacts and public outrage. Now, if no one's
05:15killed, people will forget very quickly if 100% operations are there tomorrow. But the bottom line
05:22is people, as I've said, often just look at not prioritising business continuity, which is why
05:28we've had two different aspects in the last six years with both the drone things, which they didn't
05:33invest against in 2019, and full business continuity in this event in 2025.
05:40Okay, now in terms of liability, if, as you predict, the sort of black box for this incident
05:46will show that this was an accident rather than deliberate foul play, where does liability rest?
05:53Because the airlines have all been affected, but it wasn't their fault. This was a bit of
05:59national infrastructure that started burning and is still burning as we speak. So
06:07this has incurred a huge amount, I don't know how much, millions, I would imagine,
06:11for the airlines affected, but it's very unlikely they're going to recover any of it. So
06:16will this lower confidence in Britain as a place to do business?
06:21Yeah, it could be because one of the things that you have on a risk register when things
06:25go badly wrong is the reputational risk. And if that goes, it's very, very difficult to recover
06:31that. So that is the real significant thing. Yes, people will have had economic disruptions,
06:36but the reputational damage to UK PLC, to Heathrow, and our ability to do business and
06:42business continuity 24-7 is sort of shattered by things like this. It just makes us look like
06:49a sort of heading towards a third world country. And that's not good in terms of your global vision
06:54and your global outlook for the future. Thank you very much indeed for your time
06:59and expertise, Major General Chip Chapman, former Counterterrorism Chief at the Ministry of Defence.
07:04And I think that is where this conversation takes us. Chip Chapman, who's the expert,
07:10says he doesn't think this looks like foul play. It looks like an accident thanks to underinvestment.