Airports must take more measures to stop being so badly affected by adverse weather conditions, according to the House of Commons’ transport committee.
The committee has launched a new report “Ready and waiting? Transport preparations for winter weather” which looks at the resilience of the UK’s transport system when bad weather strikes the country.
Committee chairman Louise Ellman (pictured) said: “Disruption to transport is not just caused by snow. We saw recently the impact of severe storms and flooding on transport services.
“At Gatwick, thousands of passengers were stranded over the Christmas period due to a power failure during stormy weather. The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) must get to the bottom of what went wrong and how airports across the country can avoid similar situations in the future.”
Ellman added that the committee recognised that “some progress has been made by government and transport providers to improve public information and passenger welfare during severe weather” but said that more had to be done.
“Embedding a culture of continuous review and improvement must remain a priority for government and transport operators to ensure that all modes and networks are made more robust year after year and that the sector is well placed to address further issues and changing patterns of weather,” she said.
The committee has made a series of recommendations on how to improve the way airports and transport operators provide information to passengers.
These include:
- CAA should set out how it will evaluate the impact of the new airport licence conditions on passenger welfare by spring 2015. CAA must also ensure that best practice on the provision of information and on passenger welfare is shared across all UK airports
- The Highways Agency should review barriers to providing comprehensive real-time information to drivers; identify technological and other solutions for doing so, particularly during periods of disruption; and develop a strategy to implement these solutions across the strategic road network
- The Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) should ensure that train operating companies develop more robust procedures to identify how long a period of disruption is likely to last and to communicate this clearly to passengers