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

Baroness Coffey Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Select Committee on picking this topic: it is vital for the country. It is important to local communities, which is a theme of part of what I want to explore today. I am conscious that the committee identified a number of issues. As an aside, when one looks towards the end of the summary, all of a sudden the paragraph numbers go out of sync, which makes me wonder what the committee removed from the report. However, there is enough in here for us to consider in detail.

One of the first things would be that so much relies on the strategic spatial strategy, although Nick Winser was right to point out that we did not have one before, so how much change will it make? A lot of eggs are in the basket of having this strategic strategy and I want to get clarity from the Government that it will definitely be ready next year. If there is an opportunity, will the Government say whether we are talking about quarter one or quarter two, or are we talking 31 December 2026? I am conscious that clean power 2030 is a specific choice by this Government to accelerate and decarbonise the electricity network to zero, which is one reason a lot of communities around the country are somewhat frustrated right now, because a lot of the planning and the work being done on this will not make much difference to the projects being considered.

The noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Bolton, mentioned something that I found very interesting. I had not picked this up, but I am glad she raised the fact that, in terms of the prioritising of connections, one of the criteria is now that they have to have planning consent. That is not what is happening right now, certainly not in the east of England. There is no doubt that there are current live planning applications—connections are being given, and indeed ASTI money has been granted by Ofgem. I raised this on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, suggesting that this sort of ASTI framework funding should not be available until planning consent has been given, because the underlying concern of a lot of communities around this country is that, for everything else, it does not matter what the planning process really does; the decision has already been made, in effect, by the Minister, by the actions of Ofgem or by the other organisations, such as NESO and others involved in this.

One reason I am grateful to the noble Baroness who chaired the committee so well is that I went on 4 March 2025 deliberately to question Nick Winser. The noble Baroness was gracious enough to let me ask a question, and it was about this transparency—this frustration that exists that we are almost going through the Emperor’s new clothes on some of these things.

I was struck by what the noble Baroness just said and I will be very interested to hear how that impacts on current planning applications. By the way, I do not expect the Minister to refer to this, but I will be attending various hearings in the next few days regarding Sea Link, and I encourage her to think carefully about transparency. I believe that Nick Winser talked about complete transparency being important for confidence, but when I asked the Government a while ago about the estimated cost of the Sea Link project, I was told it would probably be around £1.1 billion. When I asked that question again more recently, I was told we were not allowed to know the answer to that because of commercial considerations.

To come back to what the committee talked about, it is vital to get this openness and this publication. Actually, the very first recommendation that the committee made is about publishing key metrics on meeting the target every six months. That is why I was disappointed by the Government’s response, which talked about intending to publish statistics regularly. That is not the same. One thing that often happens with statistics—as I know as a Minister, frustratingly, but also as a Back Bencher trying to get information—is that quite often the statistics are from the previous calendar year and are published about 10 months later. You would probably not get the information for 2024-25 until sometime in March 2026, and so it goes on.

I think it does matter to recognise the amount of levies and carbon taxes and the amount of cost on consumer bills both for households but also for businesses. It is right and important, with these changes that the Government are continuing, from a process initiated by the previous Administration, that we can see more regularly how progress is happening and to hold to account both the Government and the different parts of the architecture that are critical in trying to make sure that we get on with aspects of this connection right around the country.

One thing about which I had a minor frustration was that I never really accepted the then National Grid’s assertion that it had to offer a connection to everybody, regardless. When it was asked about who those connections were, it said that it could not reveal that either, so we are in this forever black box situation. Again, transparency would help—it would help communities to understand what is happening in their area, especially when we see the connections now starting to involve much bigger substations. I appreciate that the National Infrastructure Commission seems to be in favour of this, but this is at the same time that there is no trust in whether a particular construction is needed, or whether it is just a case of lots of this infrastructure being dumped in certain parts of the country.

A lot is happening in East Suffolk. I have no doubt that the whole issue of energy projects is one of the reasons I lost my election last year and have ended up here, much to the chagrin of some people in this Chamber, I am sure, rather than perhaps the other. Nevertheless, it is still something that is deeply concerning to people, that lack of transparency, and I fear we are not getting any further with the new set-up.

As to why there is no confidence, some of it goes back about a decade to when a developer said that they would do a direct connection—a DC link—from its offshore wind farm right through to the substation at Bramford. At the time, with regard to the local council, I appreciate that the committee is suggesting that lack of resources may be one of the barriers, but that has not been my experience locally. My experience has been that the council has been very willing to work with developers to try to minimise the impact on local communities and come up with innovative solutions on how to do that. But by doing that, and expanding the tunnel that would be used for the trenches, all of a sudden, on a commercial basis, the developer decided to reduce the amount of electricity that it was going to generate in that way, and it was going to do it through AC, not DC. One key thing about the transmission of electricity is that it dissipates over time and distance and, as a consequence, if you have AC instead of DC, in a way you are underusing the substation, but you are generating a lot more infrastructure and having an impact on lots of agricultural fields, nature reserves and ancient woodlands right around the country. That lack of density, in effect, is problematic in terms of what we are trying to do on other aspects of government policy and improving our natural environment.

So it continues: by refusing to consider brownfield sites for connection and insisting on greenfield sites, we are seeing what local communities often perceive to be attacks on their green spaces and their pleasant natural environment. That, again, is frustrating. By the way, this has nothing to do with pylons. Not a single extra pylon would have been erected in East Suffolk in all this time, so I am not getting dragged down in that particular debate.

Nevertheless, one thing I think Ofgem should do in terms of prioritisation is be very clear and public about which connections it has given and which it is considering, and there should be healthy competition in getting what is a valuable resource. But, at the same time, what I would prefer to see from the Government and the various bodies involved, instead of creating many more links unnecessarily, is doing more to enhance, for example, the existing connections, from the Isle of Grain into Tilbury. There has already been some expansion of that; why not do more? We are talking about connecting two significant brownfield sites, not two areas where there are already significant environmental protections, although thanks to the Planning and Infrastructure Bill—it has not passed yet—all that will be, frankly, set aside and disregarded anyway. But that is not an ideal outcome given where we should have been.

On the recommendations in paragraph 5 of the report, the Government have basically said that the transmission networks already publish that. But actually it is the second half that really matters in order to hold the Government to account. The progress on the transmission network projects that NESO has identified as necessary is vital. The Government providing a clear steer on how Ofgem should balance the competing effects of energy bills is key. We need to continue to try to make sure that bills are affordable, rather than have some of the challenges that industry and householders face. I will not get into energy bills, as that is a completely separate debate and we have had some of that debate already when discussing things like the warm home discount.

On paragraph 18, I raised this on the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, so I will not do so again. Paragraph 24 talks about the connections that are prioritised, and it would be useful to know which ones have been dropped. Who has already been dropped from this list, and when will Ofgem, NESO or indeed the Government publish that?

On the 10-year infrastructure strategy, it is good that the committee has focused on making sure we get the electricity to where it is needed. One of the main issues with a variety of developments affecting interconnectors is that a lot of this is focused on getting energy to London and parts of the south-east. But, candidly, significant other parts of the country desperately need electricity connections, and it feels to me that that is not being properly considered. But I am sure the Minister will explain how they are prioritising the different aspects of connections.

There is one aspect where it is also difficult to hold Ofgem and ESO to account: the application of its duty on the consideration of biodiversity. It is impossible to get a proper answer on that. I can see that I have reached 13 minutes, and I have come to the end, so all I will say is that I will continue to fight the fight for transparency and openness. It is what our communities in this country deserve, and it is what Parliament deserves too.