A detailed review of the circumstances related to the closure of Heathrow Airport on 21 March 2025 has been released.
Chaired by Rt Hon Ruth Kelly, former Secretary of State for Transport, the review is generally favourable about the response by the Heathrow incident management team.
The evidence confirms that Heathrow made the right decisions in exceptionally difficult circumstances. Whilst the disruption was significant, alternative choices on the day would not have materially changed the outcome. The airport had contingency plans in place, and the report highlights that further planned investment in energy resilience will be key to reducing the impact of any similar events in the future.
The Rt Hon Ruth Kelly
28 recommendations are included in the report. Some of these are technical recommendations mainly of relevance to Heathrow Airport’s specific situation but some provide useful information for business continuity and operational resilience managers. Highlights of these include:
- Ongoing, two-way, communications is needed with third party suppliers during an incident which involves them.
- Strong relationships with critical suppliers and partners should be developed in general and a joint understanding about investment in resilience should be sought.
- Relying on one emergency communications system is inadequate, even if this is a system designed specifically for this purpose. The review recommends having a second means of contact for notifying key individuals during significant incidents.
- Long running incidents need effective rostering of Gold (strategic) Command to ensure resilience.
- Specific guidance is required on maintaining resilience in Gold Command during prolonged incidents.
- Relevant incident management and operational resilience plans should be reviewed and updated as necessary with learnings from incidents.
- Post-incident wellbeing actions to support people involved in incident response should be considered.
- Functional risks should be visible up to and including board level. High impact, low likelihood, functional risks should be considered as well as other risk classes; particularly those involving single point of failures. Periodic discussion should take place at an Executive level of the total operational consequences involved and on whether current controls and mitigations are adequate.
