Energy Grid Resilience

Claire Young Excerpts

Wednesday 30th April 2025 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

I thank the Minister for advance sight of his statement. Our thoughts are with all those affected by these power outages, which are a stark reminder of how key our energy security is to our national security. That is why it is vital that the Government learn from this latest incident by acting now to boost our home-grown energy by supporting community-owned projects and increasing supply chain capacity.

Our constituents will be concerned to know about preparations in this country. What conversations has the Minister had across Government to ensure that the UK has robust plans in place in the event of similar situations occurring here? In particular, can he outline what contingency plans are in place to protect our transport network, our hospitals and urgent healthcare settings and our emergency communication capacity? The latter currently relies heavily on the mobile network for our emergency alert system, as well as being the primary way that most people stay up to date.

[Michael Shanks]

Let me repeat the point that I made to the shadow Minister. It is absolutely right to point out the widespread cascading impacts of power failure and just the sheer amount of our lives that is now driven by electricity. The hon. Lady also made the same point as the shadow Minister, which I did not respond to at the time, around preparations across Government. I am Minister in the Department responsible for energy resilience and security. The Secretary of State takes a very serious interest in this area. Right across Government, we have a number of meetings that are chaired by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who has responsibility for resilience, which includes looking at specific impacts. Most recently, we discussed some of the communications impacts of power cuts caused by storms, to make sure that people can still communicate, particularly via the mobile phone network. These are important points that we are taking forward.

Clearly, the energy system in this country is resilient, but the job of Government is to prepare for all eventualities, however low the chances. We take very seriously not just the preparations in place, but making sure that Government are ready to try out some of these processes and to learn from experiences such as this. There will be things that we can learn from the Spanish and Portuguese Governments, and we stand ready to do that.