An ‘ancient’ computer system has been blamed for the UK air traffic control failure that caused chaos at London airports on Friday.
The incident was just the latest in a string of computer problems that have plagued Nats in recent years at its headquarters in Swanwick, Hampshire.
Business secretary Vince Cable claimed Nats was running “ancient computer systems, which then crash”.
“We have to maintain a high level of capital investment,” he added.
Nats said it would be spending £575 million over the next five years on systems.
But Cable told BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show that Nats, under financial pressure, had decided to “forego capital investment” for many years.
He said: “We have to maintain a high level of capital investment.”
Deakin said that the software problem was “buried” among millions of lines of computer code.
“The challenge is that we have around 50 different systems at Swanwick and around four million lines of code. This particular glitch was buried in one of those four million lines of code,” he told the BBC.
“We haven’t seen that particular issue before,” he added.