Michael Shanks

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his remarks and for the way he made them. He is absolutely right to recognise the heroic role that our emergency services played on the night—I am sorry that I did not say that at the start of my statement—as well as the engineers, who worked in incredibly hard in difficult circumstances in the hours that followed the fire to try to get services reconnected as quickly as possible. There are very serious questions to answer, and I hope that came through in my statement—it certainly came through in the conversation I had with National Grid earlier. We are seeking urgent assurances that the work that should have been done is being done, and that there are no other similar situations. Ofgem is taking the matter seriously, with two reviews, one into National Grid and the other into the wider energy system, to see if there are any further lessons to learn. However, the right hon. Gentleman is right and I completely agree with his point that the Government need to be front-footed and take a leadership role in driving the work forward: we cannot leave it to individual companies to mark their own homework. We are doing that partly by bringing together our resilience work across Government, and I will soon be chairing a new group that brings together everyone who has responsibility for critical national infrastructure in our energy system, to ensure that energy security, cyber-security and other threats to our infrastructure are taken seriously, so that action is taken at the highest level of Government to ensure that we do not have a repeat of the incident in future.