Heathrow Substation Outage: NESO Review

Graham Leadbitter Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Deputy Speaker]

I call the SNP spokesperson.

[Graham Leadbitter (Moray West, Nairn and Strathspey) (SNP)]

The report by NESO has clearly uncovered serious structural failings at National Grid, but let us not forget that the Government’s response to the outage was severely wanting as well. On the Monday following the outage, the Transport Secretary confirmed that she was relying on the contents of a three-day-old conversation with Heathrow, with no assessment from the Government and no conversations with National Grid. Can the Secretary of State assure the House that sufficient lessons are being learned in Government to ensure that, when the power supply to critical national infrastructure is affected in the future, the Government are not left without answers again? Additionally, Members will understand the phrase “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”, meaning “Who guards the guards?” Why did it take such a serious outage for the National Grid to be audited like this? Surely better oversight may have identified the shockingly poor risk management.

[Michael Shanks]

Since I did not realise in my statement earlier this week that the hon. Gentleman is now the SNP’s energy spokesperson, I welcome him to his place—I hope he will bring the same customary sunshine that his predecessor in the role did to our deliberations in this place.

On the incident itself, clearly there are lessons to be learned from the way the energy infrastructure worked on 20 and 21 March, and for Heathrow on the configuration of its internal network and how that worked. The incident itself is clearly one we want to avoid at all costs, but actually the process was carried out safely, passengers were informed and the disruption was kept to an absolute minimum, but if an airport such as Heathrow closes, there will be disruption. I am not sure that I take the hon. Gentleman’s criticism of the handling of the incident. He is right on the broader point about how we ensure we are regularly auditing the processes of maintenance work going forward. The three transmission owners in the UK have a responsibility for doing that, and that is regulated by Ofgem, which regularly checks on this. The second part of Ofgem’s review announced today will look specifically at whether those maintenance backlogs and any other long-standing issues have been resolved, and look at the lessons we can learn on ensuring that those processes actually happen and that we do not just have things sitting on a list but not actually delivered.