Insight
A publicly owned grid company is a good headline. Delivering one is a programme, and the programmes that look most like it have lessons the new company would do well to borrow.
By Christopher Fagan, Managing Partner, PEF Consulting Partners
On 29 September 2026 the Prime Minister used his conference speech to announce Great British Grid, a publicly owned grid company set up as a new branch of Great British Energy. Its job is to speed up electricity grid connections and bring down the cost of the network upgrades the country needs, by investing alongside the existing network operators in tendered transmission projects rather than replacing them. It starts with £4bn from Great British Energy’s existing budgets, with the wider remit to be settled at a future spending review. Ofgem and NESO keep their roles, and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero is publishing the detailed plans. It is not a retail supplier and it will not be sending anyone a bill.
The nearest precedent is the separation of the Electricity System Operator out of National Grid into NESO, the publicly owned operator that now runs the system. I was Project Director for that separation. The headline was constitutional. The work was over 22 million assets that had to be identified, contracted and moved, every software provider procured and taken through to implementation, and a cutover where the lights could not be allowed to go out. Great British Grid faces a version of the same problem in reverse. It has no estate yet, so its first year is about building the asset data, finance, project controls and contracting machinery that a company investing billions needs before it can safely invest the first one.
The Energy Bills Support Scheme put £9bn through the energy suppliers to households in a matter of months. I was accountable to Ofgem, BEIS and HMRC for that money reaching the right people and not being lost on the way. The lesson was not the scale. It was that funds control, audit trails and ministerial reporting are design decisions, not paperwork added afterwards. A company spending £4bn of public money alongside private operators will be judged by the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee on exactly those things, and a programme that is not built for that from the start spends its second year retrofitting it.
Robin Hood Energy and Bristol Energy were both publicly owned, both well intentioned, and both ended up costing their councils tens of millions of pounds. Neither failed because public ownership is a bad idea. They failed because commercial control, systems and delivery discipline were weaker than the ambition. Great British Grid is a different kind of company, investing in infrastructure rather than selling energy to households, but the lesson travels: the ambition is the easy part.
Four things, in order. A mandate clear enough that the operators and investors it will work alongside can plan around it. A governance and funds control framework that satisfies the Treasury before the first tender is jointly funded. Procurement that moves at the pace of the connections queue without cutting the corners public money cannot cut. And systems and data, meaning asset registers, finance and project controls, built for a company that will be audited rather than improvised for one that is in a hurry. None of this is glamorous. All of it decides whether the company is still trusted in three years.
The network companies and the investors who bid for tendered transmission projects now have a public partner on the other side of the table. That changes the evidence they will need: a delivery plan that an independent reviewer has tested, programme set up that is ready on award rather than assembled afterwards, and the regulatory and public reporting a state backed partner will expect. The firms that treat that as a bid advantage rather than an overhead will win more of the work.
We are independent, with no software to sell and no stake in any operator. How we help the bodies standing these companies up, and the operators responding to them, is on our grid reform page; the public money side is covered under scheme assurance and funds control.
No. Great British Energy is the publicly owned clean power company. Great British Grid is a new branch of it, announced in September 2026, focused on transmission infrastructure and grid connections.
The government says it will work alongside them, investing in tendered transmission projects and connection improvements. The transmission and distribution companies, Ofgem and NESO keep their current roles.
£4bn initially, from Great British Energy’s existing budgets. Funding for the wider remit depends on a future spending review.
Get the delivery evidence behind future bids tested independently, and set programmes up for public partnership from the start rather than retrofitting it after award.