Continuing travel chaos proves UK’s transport system isn’t fit for purpose

The Man Who Pays His Way: Whether you’re travelling by plane or train, the heatwave has managed to grind British transport to a halt

Thousands of travellers will wake up on Saturday hundreds or thousands of miles from where they needed to be. On what is probably the busiest weekend of the year, British Airways’ cancellations to and from Heathrow have just topped 60, with easyJet grounding dozens of departures.

“All airlines operating in and out of London have been affected by severe weather which moved into the London area overnight from the continent,” says BA, with some exaggeration: plenty of carriers have barely noticed.

Passengers booked on easyJet’s lunchtime flight from Gatwick to Nice are being told: “Due to mass disruption across our network yesterday caused by poor weather conditions, your aircraft is out of position and is unable to operate your flight.”

As the biggest airline at the Sussex airport, easyJet – and its thousands of unhappy passengers – are being disproportionately affected by the extreme heat and attendant thunderstorms.

And on the railways? Travellers who have decided to stay in Britain could hardly feel smug. “East Midlands Trains are advising customers not to travel to/from London St Pancras International today,” says the train operator worst affected by tangled overhead power lines that led to torn-up journey plans.

All of this mayhem could easily lead you to conclude that, once again, our transport infrastructure has been found lacking. Add it to the list of any other national embarrassments you may currently be feeling. After all, this week it was extreme heat that caused all this disruption, but go back six months and pretty much the same story could be written after a spell of intense cold.

Surely they are sniggering in Schiphol and Stuttgart about Britain’s inability to run its planes and trains when the going gets remotely tough? I don’t believe they are. Amsterdam Schiphol suffered much worse problems on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, after a fuel system failure led to 250-plus flights being cancelled. And rejuvenating the Hauptbahnhof in Stuttgart, by no means one of Germany’s premier-league stations, is €1bn over budget and running two years late.

An economically expansive nation would invest billions in better rail infrastructure and build new runways at Heathrow, Gatwick and for that matter Stansted. There have been accusations that transport is exacerbating the very problems that are making this peak weekend so miserable.

“Doing nothing is not an option,” the then-transport secretary, Alistair Darling, told me at Gatwick 15 years ago. Since then, of course, that has proved the strategy of successive governments.

The British win the global prize for extracting the most from the least. Gatwick and Heathrow are, respectively, the busiest single-runway and two-runway airports in the world. On Friday the lack of slack in the system was painfully evident, but most of the time we get away with it. Both airports are aiming to boost capacity without actually building a new runway: Gatwick by pressing its standby airstrip into use, Heathrow by squeezing in even more take-offs and landings before a third runway opens (or, in these uncertain times, doesn’t).

On the railways, Trans-Siberian levels of weatherproofing are not usually necessary for our largely benign weather. The human distress and economic loss incurred when the network goes into meltdown is substantial. But as a nation, we have proved as reluctant to invest in resilience as we are adept at muddling through.