The Devolution of Political Power Requires the Decentralisation of Electrical Power
In a few hours, Andy Burnham will deliver the most important speech of his life – a Prime Minister facing his first conference as leader of a confused and fearful country. It is a moment of immense national significance.
Britain desperately needs Andy Burnham to succeed. Millions of Britons, myself included, wish him strength as he takes on the punishing cost-of-living crisis and challenges failed economic orthodoxies. Because he has not yet delivered his keynote, I do not know what he will say, and the operational details leaked last night of the £4bn ‘GB Grid’ are sparse. But right from his first appearance in the Commons as Prime Minister, he was saying clearly and repeatedly that “business is having to wait too long for grid connections.” What that means exactly is still a mystery. There could well be community energy exceptions or local provisions hidden in the fine print. The commitment shows Burnham’s heart is in the right place, but based on the framework released so far, it won’t assist us in breaking free from the centralised grid that has, for the last 100 years, dictated exactly where we are allowed to live, work, and play.
In the corridors of Whitehall and the backrooms of union headquarters, the whisperers have done their work. Infrastructure unions hungry for sprawling capital projects, civil servants who know no other model than 20th-century central planning, and political advisers hunting for a muscular, patriotic soundbite have surrounded the new Prime Minister. They have persuaded him that greatness lies in building a “Big Grid” – that creating a state-backed transmission company is the modern equivalent of Attlee’s 1945 settlement.
They have handed him a phantom lever. He will pull it with a great flourish… and billions of pounds of public money will vanish into corporate balance sheets. The structural crisis crushing British billpayers will remain entirely untouched. It is going to go horribly wrong.
Consider the reality beneath the political rhetoric. This is not the nationalisation of the grid. If Burnham were taking the high-voltage transmission system into outright public ownership, one could debate the ideological merits of a unified state monopoly. Instead, GB Grid is a shadow bailout, a reward for failure, and the first inkling that the energy executives, who have already cost us tens of billions in grid admin charges, will be allowed to walk away with their profits.
By stepping in to build network connections and co-invest in stalled works alongside private operators, the state is volunteering to absorb the most difficult, expensive, and delayed delivery bottlenecks. It is using taxpayer capital to clear a backlog created by decades of managerial failure inside incumbent monopolies like National Grid Electricity Transmission (NGET), where stalled maintenance and capital projects have piled up while connection queues stretched to 15 years. The private transmission operators will be handed a public safety net for their own operational failures, while their guaranteed returns and hollow regulatory models remain protected.
In my book OVERCHARGED, I quote an NGET whistleblower laying out the detail of this systemic incompetence and failure across many decades. HMG will not succeed where NGET failed, and will probably hire some of the same executives to do it. (For more detail on the background and how we got to this point, you can find the book here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/
Look closely at the fine print of what is being proposed today. The government plans to expand the rights of businesses to “self-build” their own grid connections, offering GB Grid powers to support and co-invest to bypass the queue. On paper, it sounds like practical deregulation. But who will actually benefit?
There is currently no UK spatial energy plan, which means there is no plan for where this £4bn will be spent. And in that vacuum, who will win? It will not be Community Interest Companies (CICs), or local solar cooperatives. Municipal energy schemes might get into the party—but only if they bring large employers along with them.
The real beneficiaries are the developers who have submitted 117 applications to connect gas-fired power stations directly to the gas distribution network, explicitly designed to allow AI data centres to bypass the electricity transmission grid entirely—driving a coach and horses through government carbon emission targets and the Climate Change Act. Big Tech has looked at Britain’s centralised transmission network, recognised that it is terminally gridlocked, and launched an off-grid dash. If the government is not careful, GB Grid’s “self-build” co-investment will end up subsidising the private wire escapes of Silicon Valley giants, leaving ordinary billpayers to underwrite a stranded, wheezing national network.
To understand why this approach may not work, the Prime Minister needs to look back exactly one hundred years. His announcement today is an eerie, tragic echo of September 1926. Then as now, a Prime Minister announced a secret backroom deal—one which protected the interests of large electricity companies at the permanent expense of the billpayer.
A century ago, as Britain stood at a similar crossroads, the nation possessed a diverse network of municipal and local power stations that were directly accountable to their communities. Instead of modernising and, above all, standardising that decentralised framework, the establishment opted for monolithic centralisation. Lord Weir held hearings in private, shutting out municipal authorities. They brought in Samuel Insull—the Chicago utility tycoon who pioneered holding companies that privatised profits while shifting infrastructure risk to the public—to advise on the framework. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin then forced the Electricity (Supply) Act 1926 through parliament with minimal debate.
Now Burnham is repeating Baldwin’s mistake. We are pouring £190bn (latest forecast, up from £151bn in July 2026) into a centralised “Great Grid Upgrade” that is fast becoming the energy sector’s HS2: an uncontrollable mega-project of pylons and subsea cables that locks 21st-century Britain into a 20th-century architecture.
Worse still, corporate voices in the energy industry are actively egging this on, calling for a “Macron-style top-down order” from Downing Street and demanding that the state force the country to “electrify everything.” That top-down hubris is precisely what created this vulnerability. Shoving every domestic heating system, every vehicle, and every industrial process onto a single national wire does not create resilience; it creates a fragile, captive market for an unaccountable monopoly. You cannot cure the failures of over-centralisation with a prime ministerial decree.
There is another path—one that truly delivers the public empowerment Andy Burnham entered politics to achieve.
If this government wants to lower bills permanently and devolve power away from London, it must recognise that the decentralisation of electrical power is the essential foundation for the devolution of political power. Real resilience does not come from stringing thousands of miles of copper across the countryside to feed a centralised beast. It comes from empowering homes, towns, and regions to generate, store, and trade their own power.
It means backing rooftop solar with the same seriousness given to offshore wind. It means deploying domestic batteries into millions of homes to flatten peak demand. It means reforming wholesale markets so local clean energy is not priced off international gas markets. Above all, it means giving community energy groups and municipal microgrids the exact same legal and financial freedom to generate and distribute power locally that Big Tech is currently carving out for itself.
Today is a critical moment. Andy Burnham holds the mandate and the goodwill of a country desperate for a leader who can deliver. But goodwill cannot change the laws of physics or network economics. If he pulls this phantom lever today, he will spend the next five years pouring billions into an unworkable centralised monument while energy bills remain among the highest in Europe.
Prime Minister: resist the whisperers. Do not rebuild the centralist illusions of 1926. Break the monopoly, empower the local, and give the British people real power over their own energy.
Remember – the devolution of political power requires the devolution of electrical power.