Gavin Grey: UK correspondent on London police revealing the Heathrow Airport fire was not a criminal issue

An electricity substation fire in London that closed Heathrow Airport last week is no longer being treated as a criminal matter.

Metropolitan Police have announced there's no evidence to suggest it's suspicious - after briefly bringing in counter-terrorism officers.

UK correspondent Gavin Grey unpacks the findings of the investigation.

LISTEN ABOVE

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Givin grays with us given good evening to you.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Good evening round.

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Now you've got an update on the Heathrow Airport fire.
What was it suspicious or not?

Speaker 2 (00:11):
No police say it wasn't. The fire broke out on
Friday and resulted in the closure of Heathrow Airport, Europe's
busiest airport, an estimated quarter of a million people affected
and sixty three thousand homes lost power in an outage
caused by a fire at a nearby electricity station or substation.

(00:32):
We have since been told that actually Heathrow could have
received its power from two other substations, but chose to
shut down because it would take too long to close
all the systems down and reboot them. So lots of
people say, well, well, hang on a minute, that's the
whole point of a shutdown. And if you can't have
a backup system without actually having to shut the whole

(00:54):
thing down, then what's the point. This has been a big,
big concern. Lots of the two investigations, one by the
government and one by Heathrow pot itself to answer some
of these questions and about resilience of the major transport
hub in question, and plenty of people not keen on
Heathrow's response with such huge effects on people around the world,

(01:16):
but yet the police now saying no suspicious circumstances.

Speaker 1 (01:20):
Okay, interesting given the rightel reason a spring statement to
the House of Commons. We're all looking forward to this
because it's sort of like what is she going to cut?
How deep is she going to go? It will include
school lunches. What's on the menu?

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Yeah, and in nearly seven hours time or a little
under seven hours time now we will find out. But
it's not looking good. So there's a combination here of
low economic growth and higher interest rates on government borrowing,
and that's really been dealing a blow to the plans
that had been made to the government because they're to
their forecasts have been way too optimistic round about the

(01:57):
state of the economy, and the government has set its
non negotiable rules on borrowing and debt. This is they
are not going to borrow to fund day to day
public spending and to get government debt falling as a
share of national income by the end of the parliament.
If anything, though, that's going the wrong way, and so
we believe there could be more welfare cuts announced a

(02:18):
little later already she's announced about twelve billion New Zealand
dollars worth of cuts to welfare. She's also announced to
fifteen percent cuts to civil servants, so there'll be massive
amount of redundancies coming there. But the forecasts were that
the economy we'd grow by two percent this year one
point eight percent next year. The Bank of England says
it's going to be nearer to one percent, and that

(02:41):
means the little riggle room that she'd left herself in
her early calculations has completely gone, and so there is
now going to have to be some massive changes that
will result, really, I think in some problems for her.
The government had pledged no increase to personal taxes, but
now I think we're in a date where we may

(03:01):
well see a reversal of that. Maybe not this time around,
but maybe there'd be a hint of it in this
speech about what happens next time around in the autumn
budget in about six months time.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
Okay, nice one, Gavin, thank you very much for that.
Givin Gray are UK correspondent with.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Us For more from hither Duplessy Allen Drive listen live
to news talks. It'd be from four pm weekdays, or
follow the podcast on iHeartRadio