Jim Armitage: Yet again, a watchdog which prefers to lick not bite

Ofgem has done an Ofcom. Ordered by MPs on the energy committee to break up National Grid, it has — as Ofcom did with BT and Openreach — taken the soft option. Heaven forbid it should upset a FTSE 100 monopoly.

The problem is this: National Grid has two roles — running and owning the country’s wires, pylons and interconnectors with the Continent while controlling and balancing supply and demand across the network. The supply arm procures the power and the infrastructure arm provides it.

Now, if you were National Grid and you had a choice of sourcing leccy from a new generator in the UK or importing it via your own rather lucrative interconnector, which would you choose?

This might inform your answer: last year, the Grid made £123 million from its interconnector with France. Little wonder investors are wary of sinking money into new energy sources here.

But Ofgem rowed back from an outright separation of the Grid’s two arms, saying they should merely be ringfenced into legally separate entities.

It’s a start, but, like BT and Openreach, Grid shareholders will still be the owners of both. It’s hard to see how the compromise will tackle the temptations for one side to profit unfairly from the other.

National Grid welcomed the plan and its shares rose. ’Nuff said.

Good to see the lack of column inches Debenhams’ Christmas statement devotes to online growth.

Exotic new chief Sergio Rodriguez Bucher spent the last three years running Amazon fashion, so the City inevitably predicted he’d be all about boosting Debs digital.

Any regular visitor to the stores in recent years would have been worried if that was his only priority.

For it is those, not the web, that need to be sorted out most urgently. Brands you’ve never heard of, ageing designers, jumbled displays. The only departments booming were cosmetics and undies.

Early signs are that Bucher gets it. New food deals with jazzy James Martin and Franco Manca show an awareness that an urgent update of the brands is needed.