Northern Powergrid rebuked for delaying storm response

Durham MPs have slammed Northern Powergrid for slowing down the emergency response in the wake of Storm Arwen.

During a snap debate, held on Monday, Kevan Jones told the House of Commons that the distribution network operator had triggered an internal emergency for County Durham on the evening of 26 November.

However, the Labour MP for North Durham said this information was not transmitted until the following Wednesday to Durham’s local resilience forum (LRF), which declared a major incident on the following day.

He said: “There is something seriously wrong with Northern Powergrid—not with the engineers and individuals who are out restoring power but with the management and senior management of that company.”

“Constituents have had to experience sub-zero temperatures in terrible conditions. That has been made worse by Northern Powergrid.”

“What has made the situation worse is Northern Powergrid’s communications, which raised people’s expectations that power was coming on, so people have stayed in homes when they should not have done.

“The communication has been appalling and made things worse.”

Jones’s concerns were echoed by Dehenna Davison.

The Conservative MP for Bishop Auckland said she had been shocked to learn about the five-day delay at a briefing with Durham County Council last week.

She said: “The communications from Northern Powergrid had meant that the response from the local resilience forum was slowed by about five days. That meant we could not get boots on the ground or house-to-house support for the people who needed it.

“Five days wasted—that is an absolute disgrace. We really need to ensure that we hold Northern Powergrid’s heels to the flame for that one.”

Richard Holden, Conservative MP for North West Durham, said: “We need to know from ministers what assessment they have made of the communications from Northern Powergrid.”

However, Grahame Morris, Labour MP for Easington, said it was “too easy to put all the blame on Northern Powergrid and poor comms”.

He said: “At every level, be it the minister’s department, local government, the resilience forum or Northern Powergrid, questions must be asked, and I believe that a public inquiry is the only independent and fair way to assess the whole scandal and hold all those involved accountable.”

Ed Miliband, shadow secretary of state for energy and climate change, said lessons should have been learnt after 2013’s storms.

He said: “Multiple reports were produced that identified problems of communication, the vulnerability of the network and the complacency of the companies. After that event, during which 16,000 people were cut off for 48 hours, customers were told that they could expect to see significant improvement. This time, however, the performance has been far worse.”

Energy minister Greg Hands said the army had been deployed “very quickly” once it was called in by LRFs in Aberdeenshire and Durham.

He also said the nature of the storm, with winds coming in from the north-east rather than the prevailing south-westerlies, had exacerbated the damage.

Northern Powergrid announced on Tuesday that it had reconnected the last customers still without power as a result of Storm Arwen.

Responding to the criticism from MPs, a spokesperson for the company said: “This storm showed that there are areas where we need to improve, in particular, in the way we use our systems to communicate with our customers when there are major power cuts. We’ve already made some changes and will learn more lessons from the reviews that will follow. Now the power is back on, we are focused on proactively organising compensation for our customers in line with industry guaranteed standards.

“As part of our protocols we issued a statement on Thursday 25 November publicly and to our multi-agency partners to indicate we were prepared for the forecast weather.

“As the storm started to impact our region from Friday evening onwards, in line with our major incident management plan followed during all weather-related events, we issued a statement publicly and to our stakeholders, including multi-agency partners, that the storm was having a significant impact on our network.

“Throughout the event, we attended local resilience forum meetings to keep our multi-agency partners informed of the scale, impact and extensive amount of work needed for us to restore power to customers. These regular updates were provided to help multi-agency partners coordinate support for the most vulnerable communities affected as a result of the storm.”