Utility Week

Policy & Regulation UTILITY WEEK | 7TH - 13TH FEBRUARY 2020 | 13 Speaking with a Northern accent H enri Murison is a busy man – I can hear him rush- ing about in the background, trying to grab some lunch as he takes our midday phone call. Because the chief executive of the Northern Power- house Partnership (NPP) – a high-profile consortium representing the voice of business leaders across the North – increasingly finds himself in demand. National focus on the region has intensified following December's general election result, with the landslide Conservative victory sparking a redrawing of the policy map by a government determined to protect its new "blue wall" in Labour's former northern heartlands. It seems the North of England now lies at the heart of a radical political agenda, aimed at levelling-up the UK and creating a fairer deal for its businesses and com- munities. Consequently, those organisations committed to enabling that economic rebalancing – not least the region's energy and water companies – are right in the mix as well. "A lot of the businesses we want to grow, that are going to drive economic rebalancing, are customers of stakeholders – of organisations that are in the utility sec- tor," says Murison. "From an NPP perspective, we're particularly inter- ested in where we've got leading capability and where we, specifically, can leverage some of the big infrastruc- ture organisations that exist within the utility sector that can support economic rebalancing. I think there defi- nitely is a value in that and there are opportunities for that to happen more." Speaking up for utilities Yet with transport hogging the spotlight in this huge regional growth story (including the east to west "North- ern Crossrail" and HS2), it feels the key role of utilities, particularly energy businesses, has fallen under the radar, I point out. Is that all about to change? "They [energy companies] have always had an impor- tant role in the economy because, clearly, the energy sector is relatively economically more important to the North of England than it is to the South," says Murison. But he accepts that this message "does get lost a bit", even though the North has been a quiet, stoic leader in the energy space. "For decades we've provided baseload for the whole country. And you look at economic assets like Drax [the biomass and coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire run by Andy Koss, a founder board member of the NPP], that was providing one in ten of every gigawatt on the grid for years." Many of Drax's neighbours in that corridor of coal- fired power stations have gone, and key nuclear assets like Sellafield are coming towards the end of their natu- ral life and will need replacing. Yet this all points to how energy has been central to the North's economic story and one of its major successes, says Murison, who adds: "Energy is a key part of our past, but it's also a key part of our future." It's the reason why energy is cited as one of the four drivers for the Northern economy in the NPP's Independ- ent Economic Review – the seminal economic work used by government to drive thinking and planning. Meanwhile, some further work commissioned by the partnership from economic development consultants, Steer, reveals that by 2050 the North could potentially generate an extra trillion of economic value to the UK. continued overleaf

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