Share prices told the story before the speeches finished. National Grid and SSE each dipped 0.5% — in line with the broader market, not in response to any threat. Great British Grid (GBG) is not a nationalisation vehicle. It is, at most, a state-backed bidder for future transmission projects, funded from the rapidly shrinking pot of Great British Energy (GBE) money. The numbers make the scale plain. GBE's parliamentary budget was £8.3bn, a chunk already committed to small modular nuclear reactors. Roughly £4bn remains. If GBG gets half, it enters a £70bn investment cycle for 2026-31 with about £2bn of capital — less than 3% of the total programme. The incumbents — National Grid, SSE, and SP Energy Networks — will continue to own and operate the vast majority of transmission infrastructure. The government's own announcement said it explicitly: existing network operators' roles remain unchanged. So what is GBG actually for? The sharpest read comes from Adam Bell of Stonehaven consultancy and a former energy department official: "For the first time since the 1990s, the state will have perfect information about network costs that it can use to drive performance across privately held networks." This is the operational core. The grid monopolies have long held an information advantage over Ofgem, the regulator that sets their financial returns. They know more about real construction costs than the body supposed to police those costs. A state-backed competitor running its own projects would close that gap. The competitive tendering concept itself is not new. The Cato (Competitively Appointed Transmission Owner) regime was established in a 2023 energy act under the Conservatives. GBG adds a public sector entrant to that regime — meaningful but incremental. The genuinely novel policy is the parallel reform allowing companies to build their own grid connections rather than waiting for network operators. Ireland has seen results from this approach, and it could accelerate AI datacentre and industrial project timelines. As a reprioritisation of GBE, this is defensible. The body's current work — solar panels on school roofs — makes for good photo opportunities but does not address the behind-schedule grid programme and the connections logjam that the National Audit Office has flagged as a serious cost risk. Grid infrastructure is where the bottleneck sits. The critical risk is institutional. Bell's warning deserves weight: if GBG operates under standard public sector procurement rules, it becomes a bureaucratic appendage rather than a competitive pressure. The value of a state competitor lies entirely in its ability to move at commercial speed with commercial information. Bind it in civil service procedures and it delivers nothing except overhead. Burnham and energy secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh are selling this as "public control" of the grid. That framing is generous to the point of misleading. GBG may co-own a few projects. The regulatory architecture remains unchanged. The triumvirate keeps its assets. What the government is actually building is an intelligence function — a state entity that can see inside the cost structures of monopoly operators. That is worth doing. It is not what the branding implies.
