Burnham to Launch Publicly Owned "Great British Grid" in Bid to Cut Energy Costs

Andy Burnham will use his first party conference speech as Labour leader on Tuesday to announce the creation of a new publicly owned body designed to invest in Britain's electricity grid, in what is being billed as the opening move of a broader agenda for greater public control of utilities.

The prime minister is expected to tell party activists gathered in Liverpool that the new company, to be branded Great British Grid, will accelerate grid connections by stimulating competition for transmission projects. He will frame the proposal as central to a newly declared goal of bringing UK energy costs into line with those of other European nations within a decade.

According to the plans, the body would invest in and compete for transmission connection projects alongside the three private companies that currently own and operate the grid across Britain. Full operational details have yet to be published, but Labour indicated that the entity would also make it easier for firms awaiting connection to finance connection infrastructure themselves, with GB Grid offering support and potentially co-investing in those projects.

Funding for the new body is expected to be drawn from within the existing budget of GB Energy, the public green investment company established by Labour last year and now headquartered in Aberdeen. That approach would allow the government to present the initiative as fiscally contained at a time when the public finances are under intense scrutiny.

The announcement forms part of Burnham's long-standing ambition to extend public ownership and control over key utilities, a theme he placed at the heart of his summer pitch for the leadership. He is expected to argue that faster connections to the electricity grid can help resolve a "cost crisis" in energy that has proven "crippling for businesses."

The backdrop to the proposal is a transmission network widely regarded as outdated and ill-suited to the demands of a rapidly changing energy system. Britain's grid was largely built around large fossil fuel power stations located close to centres of demand. The shift toward renewable generation, including offshore wind farms sited in remote coastal locations, requires extensive rewiring and new infrastructure in the coming years.

The scale of the challenge is substantial. Energy regulator Ofgem has estimated that around £70bn of investment will be needed in the grid between 2025 and 2031, roughly quadrupling the current rate of spending. Delays and bottlenecks have become a growing concern for developers of wind, solar and battery projects, many of whom face lengthy waits before they can begin exporting power.

Those concerns were reinforced earlier this month when the National Audit Office warned that the queue of projects waiting to connect to the grid had grown "significantly," while delays to individual projects were also increasing. The NAO's findings have added urgency to calls for reform of the connection process, which critics say is slow, opaque and poorly coordinated.

In his address on Tuesday afternoon, Burnham is expected to say that GB Grid will "work with the private sector and network companies" to "reform a broken energy market." He will add that the body "will increase competition to drive down costs and speed up delivery so businesses can connect faster and grow quicker," before concluding: "This is what more public control can do."

The speech will also see the prime minister promise an "honest conversation" with voters about difficult subjects, alongside the overall message of "hope" that has been chosen as the theme of the four-day gathering. He is expected to say that he initially wanted to deliver "the usual tub-thumping conference speech" but that "the patriot in me tells me something very different is needed."

Burnham's address comes ahead of a difficult Budget at the end of next month, with the government's room for manoeuvre narrowed by recent increases in the cost of UK borrowing. The fiscal constraints have fuelled speculation about which commitments may be trimmed or reviewed.

Ahead of the speech, the prime minister has promised to set out how he intends to fund his plans to provide free social care services to everyone in England. He has said he wants to place those plans before voters at the next general election, which must legally be held by August 2029 at the latest, before aiming to roll out the new system from 2030.

There has been speculation that, in seeking to free up future funding for social care, Burnham could signal a willingness to review the "triple lock" uprating policy for the state pension. Under that policy, pension payments rise annually by the highest of 2.5%, inflation, or average wage growth. Because of the UK's ageing population, the commitment is projected to add billions to the cost of pensions in future years.

On Monday, Chancellor John Healey declined to guarantee that the promise, which has featured in every Labour manifesto since 2015, would appear in the party's next election blueprint. Asked about the commitment, he told BBC Radio 5 Live: "The manifesto will be the manifesto at the time, I'm not going to do that now."

The twin themes of energy reform and social care funding are likely to define the political debate in the weeks ahead, as the government seeks to balance ambitious domestic priorities against constrained public finances. For Burnham, the conference speech represents an early opportunity to set the direction of his leadership, and the creation of Great British Grid is intended to signal that greater state intervention in critical infrastructure will be a defining feature of his agenda.