nah, just “market forces”.

We have a bizzare system whereby an artificial market has been created for a regional monopoly – namely the electricity supply infrastructure.

The only way it can be made profitable for such anomalies to occur like a company in Nottingham selling electricity to consumers in Basildon (which comes from the same cables and poles that the public paid for from their taxes many years ago) is to downsize engineering and maintenance staff whilst replacing them with call centres (often in different regions and countries).

There was a time when the Electricity Board would recruit young people from high school as apprentices and train them by getting them to check over the infrastucture every so often as a planned maintenance programme.

Whilst it still happens to an extent ( a chap I spoke to at a recent party is a trainee engineer with EDF) its less common nowadays as the companies which own the infrastructure make use of a lot of short-term contractors to save costs and stuff is only fixed when it breaks or is actually dangerous rather than looking out for problems before they happened.

many of the cables and poles and substations are older than any of us on this forum and are reaching the end of their useful lives, but the network operators will only fix them when they are going to go bang (which they can do very spectacularly) or the lights are out…