28,000 bags held up in Heathrow chaos

The Heathrow Terminal 5 (T5) fiasco has led to 28,000 bags being placed in temporary storage and it could take up to a week to get them back to their owners, the British government announced today.

British Aviation minister Jim Fitzpatrick told the House of Commons that passengers using the new £4.3bn (€5.4bn) terminal had suffered “an unacceptably poor experience”.

Passengers should get the assistance and compensation to which they were entitled, he said.

Mr Fitzpatrick was speaking on a day when BA had to cancel a further 54 flights at T5, with a further 50 being axed tomorrow.

Mr Fitzpatrick said that, in the days since T5 opened last Thursday, the baggage system had become “clogged” and had stopped functioning on a number of occasions.

He went on: “Delivery so far has fallen well short of expectation.”

He said he had visited T5 and had seen “just how devastated individual staff members were”.

Mr Fitzpatrick added: “The travelling public is not interested in who is to blame... but rather in being properly treated when things go wrong.”

He said the British Department for Transport had been in constant touch with BA and with Heathrow operator BAA and the department was assisting BA with appropriate help with security.

Shadow transport secretary Theresa Villiers said: “Both BA and BAA have let their customers down badly.”

She added that the T5 debacle had enforced views that Heathrow was “a national embarrassment”.

Queues did die down today at T5.

Analysts reckoned the baggage problems that have wrecked the terminal’s opening days could cost BA anything between £20m (€25m) and £50m (€63m).

BA could at least take comfort from the fact that some passengers appeared prepared to give the airline and T5 the benefit of the doubt this morning.

Velma Henderson, from Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, arrived this morning to find her flight to Los Angeles had been cancelled but she said: “I’m not too annoyed just yet because they say we can get on a later flight.”

She said the new building was very impressive and the media coverage over the weekend had given her some concerns about her and her husband’s luggage but otherwise they had not expected any disruption to their travel plans.

Richard Newton, arriving with his wife, Caroline, from Stourbridge in the West Midlands, said: “We arrived on the National Express coach right outside the building and walked straight in. There were no problems with any of the lifts like they’ve been saying and it’s a very impressive building.”

Dawn Reece, from Essex, who was seeing off her daughter, Natalie, on a gap-year trip to Japan, said: “We’ve had absolutely no problems this morning. It all seems to be running very smoothly and since Natalie was going on a long-haul flight we weren’t particularly worried. It’s a lovely building and it’s all very impressive.”

But Scott Basolo, who was trying to return to Los Angeles, said: “It’s really not ideal as an image of Britain. I’ve been in the West Midlands this week and all the folks I spoke to were just horrified that it had been such a disaster.”

Meanwhile, British foreign secretary David Miliband today issued an appeal for Heathrow authorities to “get their act together” after revealing that he had been approached by a furious counterpart during an informal gathering of EU ministers at the weekend.

The unnamed politician apparently lost his luggage while changing planes at Heathrow, and has been warned it may take “weeks” to locate.