London Luton Airport (LLA) is one of the UK’s largest airports and carried 10.5 million passengers in 2014, this increased by 16.9% to 12.3 million in 2015. The airport indirectly employs over 8,600 staff and is a key economic driver for the region.


As a fundamental part of the UK’s economy and a pillar of critical national infrastructure LLA is well aware of the requirement to plan for emergencies and disruptions. Taking into consideration the increase in frequency of risks such as extreme weather or security concerns, along with experiences of others in the sector, LLA has developed a comprehensive suite of incident response, business continuity and crisis management arrangements. In doing so they have sought advice and support in relation to best practice and exercise and training provisions from Risk and Resilience Ltd.

Specialists, now part of our team, initially supported LLA in the development and exercising of their crisis management and Emergency Operations Centre provisions prior to the London Olympics in 2012. In particular this supported enabled LLA to establish capabilities for crisis management in four fundamental areas; (1) selecting the specification for a crisis management facility and developing the capability, (2) developing the processes and establishing the team for managing information in a crisis, (2) developing the Concept of Operations and plans for the crisis management team and crisis decision support and (4) producing a suite of coherent documents to function as the crisis management plan.

Risk and Resilience was subsequently engaged by LLA to provide role specific training for key staff and teams involved in the crisis management arrangements. We met with the LLA lead to agree the aims and objectives of the courses before developing the material, facilitating the on site delivery and reporting the evaluation feedback to LLA.


“Airports operate with little room for disruptive events and any incident has the potential to induce significant secondary impacts. Our practical crisis management arrangements and well trained teams provide the means by which we can maintain situational awareness, identify key issues and take timely decisions in such events ”.

Liam Bolger

Senior Manager Airfield Operations