Heathrow Substation Outage: NESO Review

Debate between Graham Leadbitter and Roger Gale

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.