Power Outages: North of England

Baroness Hayman of Ullock Excerpts

Thursday 2nd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

They are indeed private companies, but resilience is in their interests as well as ours, and they are very tightly regulated through Ofgem. They will be seeking to learn all the lessons they can so that the system is suitably resilient in future.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

I feel increasingly frustrated by the lack of appreciation of the fact that many residents in the rural north have felt utterly abandoned by the Government. What have the Government done practically to support people who have had no heating, no water and no hot food? It is not good enough—I am really sorry to say this. The Government knew the extent of the crisis in advance. The noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, asked about the Army and the Minister talked about the fact its personnel were not qualified electricians. Surely, however, the Army could have gone to rural areas and brought in gas heaters, hot food, generators—anything to mitigate the impact. It has been appalling for many people.

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

I know that it has been appalling for many people; I come from the area myself and have spoken to many MPs in those areas. I have been contacted by many residents. There are Members of this House who also live in the north and have suffered. With regard to the noble Baroness’s questions, we are giving all the support we can to the companies responsible for delivering this, with the appropriately trained engineers. In answer to her question about generators, more than 750 have been deployed since the incident began. Almost 1 million customers experienced disruption, but 950,000 have had their power restored. As I said, 20,000 people are still, unfortunately, cut off from electricity supply, but I know that engineers are working at this moment to try to get them restored.