Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)

I thank noble Lords for their questions and comments. We have never had a blackout in this country in the lifetime of the national grid. We are very proud of the resilience of the grid. We had this incident at Heathrow, but the number of problems like that is very small, and we are going to learn from those mistakes. The noble Earl asked whether anybody will be punished for this. It is the responsibility of Ofgem, the independent energy regulator, to determine whether the national grid was in breach of any of its licence conditions and to take appropriate action. Based on NESO’s findings, Ofgem is opening an official enforcement investigation into the grid to consider any possible licence breaches relating to the development and maintenance of the electricity system at North Hyde. We are on to that and will report back once we know where we are. I do not have the figures on the maintenance backlog, but I will write to the noble Earl with whatever information we have. There will be an audit of the other substations as part of this review, especially those that date back to 1968, to see whether they are still suitable for the task they have to do. There were questions about long-term resilience. I mentioned that a resilience statement on critical infra-structure was made today. We take this very seriously. I think this country is a world leader in delivering the development of the critical national infrastructure knowledge base and the UK Government have a world-leading tool that creates an interactive map of all CNI in the UK. This helps the UK Government understand vulnerabilities over the 13 CNI sectors, which include energy, water, nuclear, the chemical industry, et cetera. We are taking this very seriously, not just as a Government but across the nations and across every department. We need to get this right. Whenever anything like what happened at Heathrow happens, we need to learn from it. There were a couple of general points about net zero, energy security and China. On China, I understand the noble Earl’s comments, but foreign involvement in critical national infrastructure undergoes the highest levels of scrutiny. My department works across government to monitor and guard against any potential security risks in the energy sector and its supply chain. The integrated review refresh talked about having a positive trading relationship between the UK and China and we continue to recognise the importance of trade and investment with China. We are investing £300 million into the supply chain on solar panels, which the noble Earl mentioned, and the turbines we use in this country are manufactured in the West, not in China. As a general point on energy security, I would have thought that the best way to achieve it is surely to have home-grown energy. That is why it is important that we go ahead and achieve net zero and try to achieve clean energy by 2030, to make sure that we are not reliant on international markets and fluctuating oil and gas prices but can rely on something home-grown that we know will be there for the country.