Question to the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero:

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, what assessment he has made of the potential implications for his policies of trends in the backlog of grid connection; and what steps he is taking to help reduce connection times for businesses.

Government has worked closely with the National Energy System Operator and network companies on their programme of connections reforms which have already reduced the queue for generation and storage connections by over half.

Government is also developing further reforms to the grid connection process for demand, to manage the backlog of speculative data centre applications and enable prioritisation of available capacity for strategically important demand projects.