Power Struggle: Delivering Great Britain’s Electricity Grid Infrastructure (Industry and Regulators Committee Report)

Lord Liddle Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly in this debate without having the benefit of being on the committee or without any of the great expertise that others have shown. However, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor, on her committee’s work; it is a very granular analysis of the problems we face. I also hope the questions that my noble friend Lord Chandos asked of the Minister will be given a satisfactory answer. It seems to me that these issues are of fundamental importance to Britain’s future.

One of the reasons I wanted to listen to this debate was that it is of fundamental importance to whether we can achieve our climate change objectives, but it is also of fundamental importance if we are to be competitive in the industries of the future. That is a very vital concern. I was looking, for instance, at Mario Draghi’s report on European competitiveness. Item one on his list is electricity grids and the cost of energy. We are in a similar position to Europe in that it is absolutely fundamental to our future. That is point one.

I also reflect on the question of the electricity grid. Fifty years ago, I have to confess, I worked in the electricity industry. I was in the industrial relations department, literally trying to keep the lights on as there was always the risk of serious industrial action. Actually, there was not much risk when you had people like Les Cannon around, but it was a vital role. One of the things about the electricity industry in the 1970s was that it had been through the kind of radical transformation that it has to go through again now. When generation first came, it was all very localised. It was not really until the post-war era and nationalisation under Walter Citrine that the grid was put in place—one of the little remarked achievements of the post-war Labour Government—and then the whole thing had to be completely modernised in the 1960s and 1970s because of technological change that allowed these vast mainly coal-fired power stations to be built in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, which were transformative then of our electricity system. That meant the whole grid was designed on the basis of meeting the requirements of a coal-based electricity supply, and that now has to be changed completely to deal with what will be primarily a nuclear and renewables-based electricity supply, so it is a huge challenge.

In the 1970s—here I am going to sound very old-fashioned—the reason this great transformation occurred was because there was a body called the Central Electricity Generating Board, a dominant body, very dominant, which managed to drive this transformation through its important position and its powers. We went through privatisation in the 1980s. I thought at the time that privatisation, properly regulated, was not a bad idea, and there is no doubt that operating efficiencies were achieved, but the trouble with it was that it led to a business culture of sweating assets and not of building them. This culture is completely unsuited to the challenge we face now, which is of how we reconfigure our grid and our electricity system, and we have to do that in short order, as people have said—by 2030 or 2035.

It seems to me, as an outsider in this debate, that when we look at what is going on, the fundamental problem is that unlike the CEGB in the 1970s, there is no one clearly in charge. There are far too many people with fingers in the pie who have the ability to obstruct but not to make happen. What is particularly important is the triangle between the Government and Ed Miliband’s department on one hand, the regulator and the system operator. I congratulate the last Conservative Government: taking the system operator into public ownership was a very important move if we are going to carry out this job of modernising the grid properly. But it is in its infancy. Yes, there was an organisation before, but the organisation before was run in the commercial interests of the National Grid not the public interests of how this transformation should happen.

The fundamental problem is sorting out who is in charge and how we get drive and efficiency into the modernisation we face. At the moment, it seems to me that we have a target but we completely lack a plan. The plan is absolutely crucial, and it is very costly— £60 billion, as my noble friend Lord Chandos said. There was an interesting article in last week’s Economist about what is happening on the continent. In other countries, the amount of money being spent is vast. In France, the estimate is €100 billion. In the Netherlands and Germany, it is €200 billion. It is estimated by the EU that, within Europe, €800 billion will have to be spent by 2050 for the energy transformation and the grid that changes that go with it. So these are huge investments—huge things that have to be got right. The fundamental problem that our Government have to face up to is that we need a proper plan, and it needs a guiding mind.