Prime Minister Andy Burnham will use the Labour Party conference on Tuesday to announce the creation of Great British Grid, a publicly owned operator designed to wrestle control of the electricity network back from the private sector and drive household and business bills down to European parity. The new body, which will sit under the existing Great British Energy umbrella, represents the first state-owned entity in electricity transmission since the Thatcher-era privatisations of the 1990s. Burnham will argue that the current market structure leaves British consumers uniquely exposed to volatile global wholesale prices while delivering some of the highest unit costs on the continent.
A new architecture for the network
The centrepiece of the proposal is a mandate to cut connection queues that have left renewable projects and industrial investors waiting years for grid access. Under the plans, businesses will be granted a statutory right to “self-build” the infrastructure required to hook into the system, with Great British Grid offering co-investment to remove the financial barrier that currently forces developers to rely entirely on incumbent network operators. The government believes this dual-track approach — public capital working alongside private finance — will introduce genuine competition into a segment of the market that has functioned as a series of regional monopolies for three decades.
Officials stress that the new entity will not nationalise existing assets. Instead, it will act as a strategic counterparty, commissioning new lines, upgrading substations and coordinating spatial planning across transmission and distribution boundaries. The hope is that a single body with a whole-system view can end the fragmented decision-making that has seen wind farms in Scotland paid to switch off while gas plants in the south fire up to meet demand.
The cost-of-living imperative
“We have a cost crisis,” Burnham will tell delegates. “We all know it. The price of energy is crippling for businesses, and British billpayers pay some of the highest energy costs in Europe. We have an energy system where prices are dictated in markets miles away, while families and businesses here shoulder the costs. Once again, the British public has lost control.”
The rhetoric is deliberate. Polling consistently shows energy affordability ranks alongside the NHS and immigration as a top-tier voter concern. By framing grid reform as a cost-of-living intervention rather than a purely climate measure, Number 10 is attempting to build a coalition that stretches from green manufacturers in the Midlands to pensioners in coastal constituencies. The ten-year target — aligning UK prices with the European average by 2036 — provides a measurable benchmark against which the policy can be judged, though critics note that wholesale commodity prices, largely set internationally, will remain the dominant variable.
Industry reaction and delivery risks
Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh described the move as “another step towards mending the decades of Tory policies which ripped out public control from our energy systems,” adding that “the only way to bring down bills for good for homes and businesses is through clean power we can control.” The language signals a clear ideological break with the post-2010 consensus, but the practical challenges are formidable.
Network operators, regulated by Ofgem, have already committed to £70bn of investment over the current price control period. Integrating a new public player without disrupting those plans — or spooking the institutional investors who finance them — will require delicate regulatory choreography. There are also questions about workforce capacity. The UK faces a shortage of high-voltage engineers and project managers; adding a state-backed competitor for talent could inflate costs further unless training pipelines expand rapidly.
Why it Matters
Great British Grid is the most significant structural intervention in the UK electricity system since privatisation. If it works, it could unlock the renewable capacity needed for net zero while finally delivering the cheaper bills politicians have promised for years. If it stumbles — bogged down in procurement disputes, planning delays, or regulatory capture — it risks becoming another expensive layer of bureaucracy atop an already creaking system. The next parliament will be defined not by the announcement, but by the steel-in-the-ground delivery that follows.
