Burnham to Launch Great British Grid in Bid to Cut Energy Costs and Speed Up Connections

Andy Burnham is set to use his first party conference speech as Labour leader to announce the creation of a new publicly owned company tasked with investing in Britain's electricity grid. The body, to be branded Great British Grid, will be unveiled on Tuesday afternoon in Liverpool, where the prime minister will address party activists at the culmination of the four-day gathering.

According to plans outlined ahead of the speech, the new company will invest in and compete for transmission connection projects alongside the three private firms that currently own and operate the grid across Britain. Labour believes that injecting public money into the connection process will drive up competition, which in turn should reduce costs and accelerate the pace at which projects are hooked up to the network. The party hopes the move will help resolve a growing backlog of schemes waiting for grid access.

Burnham is expected to frame the creation of GB Grid as the first significant step in his broader ambition to extend greater public control over utilities. That theme formed a central plank of his pitch for power during the summer, and the prime minister is understood to view the energy sector as the most immediate test case for his interventionist approach. He will argue that faster grid connections can help address a "cost crisis" in energy that has proven "crippling for businesses" across the country.

The full details of how the new body will operate have yet to be published, but Labour has said it will also make it easier for firms waiting to be connected to finance connection infrastructure themselves. Under the proposals, GB Grid would support such projects and could potentially co-invest alongside private companies. This dual role — as both a competitor and an enabler — represents a notable shift in how the state interacts with the energy market, according to party figures.

Funding for the new body will 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 arrangement means the prime minister will not need to find fresh money from the Treasury to get GB Grid off the ground, an important consideration given the tight fiscal backdrop against which the conference is taking place.

The announcement comes amid mounting concern over the state of Britain's transmission infrastructure. The transition of electricity generation away from large fossil fuel stations and towards more remote renewable sources, such as offshore wind farms, will require extensive rewiring of the country's ageing grid in the coming years. Energy regulator Ofgem has estimated that £70bn of investment is needed between 2025 and 2031 — quadrupling the current rate of spending on the network.

In a report earlier this month, the National Audit Office warned that the number of projects waiting to connect to the grid had grown "significantly", while delays to those projects were also increasing. The NAO's findings have intensified pressure on the government to act, with industry bodies warning that slow connections are holding back investment in renewable generation and undermining the UK's progress towards its climate targets.

In his speech 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 prime minister is also expected to put the proposals at the heart of a new goal to bring UK energy costs in line with other European nations within ten years.

Beyond energy, Burnham's address will see him promise an "honest conversation" with voters about difficult subjects, alongside the overall message of "hope" that he has made the theme of the conference. He is expected to say that he initially wanted to "give the usual tub-thumping conference speech" but that "the patriot in me tells me something very different is needed". The tone is likely to reflect the challenging circumstances facing the government.

The speech comes ahead of a tricky Budget at the end of next month, where the room for manoeuvre available to the prime minister has been narrowed by recent rises in the cost of UK borrowing. Against that backdrop, Burnham has promised to reveal details of how he intends to fund his plans to provide free social care services to everyone in England — a system he announced over the weekend and has described as NHS-style in its scope.

The prime minister has said he wants to put his social care plans before voters at the next general election, which legally must be held by August 2029 at the latest, before aiming to roll out the new system from 2030. There has been speculation that, in an effort to free up future funding for those plans, he could signal a willingness to review the "triple lock" uprating policy for the state pension.

The triple lock guarantees that pension payments rise annually by the highest of 2.5%, inflation, or average wage growth. Because of the UK's ageing population, the policy is expected to add billions to the cost of pensions in future years. On Monday, Chancellor John Healey declined to guarantee that the commitment — which has featured in every Labour manifesto since 2015 — would appear in the party's blueprint for voters at the next election, telling BBC Radio 5 Live: "The manifesto will be the manifesto at the time, I'm not going to do that now."

The creation of GB Grid therefore serves a dual political purpose. On one level, it offers a concrete example of the public control agenda Burnham has championed, giving activists something to cheer at the end of a conference that has otherwise been dominated by difficult fiscal choices. On another, it allows the prime minister to present a growth-oriented narrative that focuses on cutting costs for business, rather than simply cutting spending — a framing likely to be welcomed by industry groups that have long complained about grid delays.

Whether the new body can deliver on its promise remains an open question. Competing for connection projects alongside established private owners will require GB Grid to build technical capacity and commercial expertise quickly, and funding it from within GB Energy's existing budget may limit the scale of its initial investments. Nevertheless, the announcement marks a significant moment in the debate over how Britain's energy infrastructure should be financed and managed as it undergoes the largest overhaul in decades.