Dave Doogan

The Minister has left himself exposed to the climate deniers in this Chamber because he has come of his own volition to make a statement in the absence of any understanding of what has actually happened in Spain and Portugal, thereby denying Parliament an ability to discuss any kind of strategic comparative assessment between the resilience of the GB grid and that of the Iberian grid. If he had delayed until he had the answer, we might be having a more valuable discussion. The Minister has been forced to say that his Department is ready for all eventualities; well, tell that to the tens of thousands of radio teleswitch service customers who will be left high and dry by his Department. He says that he has every confidence in the National Energy System Operator. I did not have a lot of confidence in it on 7 January when, but for the reinstatement of the Viking interconnector, we would have had a very difficult situation on the GB link. I know that that is distribution and not transmission. There is also the matter of trying to instil confidence in GB among electricity consumers after an episode on 21 March at Heathrow, which saw global consequences for a relatively localised disaster in the UK energy market. How does the Minister have confidence after those two events?