Andy Burnham is expected to unveil a new publicly owned company to invest in Britain’s electricity grid in his first Labour conference speech as Prime Minister in Liverpool on Tuesday afternoon.
The Great British Grid, known as GB Grid, is billed by the Government as the first publicly owned player in electricity networks since the grid was privatised by Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1990.
The new body will sit within Great British Energy, the publicly owned green investment company Labour set up last year.
The goal, according to ministers, is to bring UK energy costs in line with other nations in Europe within 10 years.
UK household electricity prices were 18 per cent above the EU average in the second half of 2025, according to the House of Commons Library, although gas prices were 34 per cent below it.
Burnham will say: “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 announcement comes as bills are already rising. The Ofgem price cap is due to go up by 4 per cent next month, taking the typical annual bill to £1,723.
How would the ‘Great British Grid’ work?
The grid is the high-voltage network of cables and pylons that carries electricity from power stations and wind farms to homes and businesses.
It is currently owned by three private companies: National Grid Electricity Transmission, Scottish and Southern Energy, and Scottish Power.
GB Grid would not take these companies over. Instead, it would be a publicly owned company competing alongside them for the work of expanding and connecting the network.
The Government says this will come with “greater public oversight of network planning”, but has not yet set out what that means in practice.
The plan also targets the queue for infrastructure projects to connect to the grid. Businesses and developers that want to be plugged in currently have to wait for the network companies to build the connection.
The queue has grown significantly, according to the National Audit Office (NAO). The public spending watchdog found that the share of projects offered a requested connection fell from 64 per cent in 2019-20 to 16 per cent in 2023-24.
To speed this up, businesses will get new rights to build the connections themselves, with GB Grid able to help pay for them.
The Government says GB Grid will be funded from within Great British Energy’s existing budgets, meaning no new spending is required.
Andy Burnham made the announcement at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool (Photo: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire)What would it mean for energy bills?
Ministers have said GB Grid will help bring energy bills down, but have not provided a figure.
However, Burnham is set to suggest in his speech that costs will be lowered by increasing competition and driving down running costs.
The argument on competition is that a public rival bidding against the three private companies for grid projects puts pressure on prices.
At the moment, the three companies largely decide what building the network costs, and Ofgem – the government energy regulator – allows them to recover that through charges on bills.
With a new rival bidding for the same work, they would have to offer lower prices to win it, which in theory means a smaller bill for households. The Government has not said how much lower GB Grid’s bids would be.
When it comes to running costs, the idea is that a better-connected grid wastes less power.
The grid was built for power stations near towns, not wind farms far away, the National Audit Office says.
When it cannot carry all the power those wind farms produce, the system operator pays them to switch off. It then pays gas plants elsewhere to switch on instead.
These payments are said to cost £1.9bn in 2025-26 and are added to bills.
Faster upgrades could cut those payments. Ofgem estimates that speeding them up would leave a typical household about £30 a year better off by 2030-31 – even after the cost of the upgrades themselves. That covers the wider grid upgrade, not GB Grid alone.
But another part of Burnham’s plan could push costs the other way. Guidance laid before Parliament this month asked Ofgem to give more weight to UK jobs and manufacturing, The i Paper revealed. This means a British firm could win a grid contract even if its bid is more expensive.
The policy document states: “The Government recognises that this may come with a short-term cost trade-off.”
The i Paper reported that ministers have not calculated the cost to bill-payers and that no full impact assessment was carried out.
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