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Independent Corporate Responsibility Report

Independent Accountants’ Report on Corporate Responsibility to National Grid plc

We have been engaged to perform limited assurance procedures on selected corporate responsibility information contained in the Operating and Financial Review (OFR) included in the Company’s Annual Report and Accounts for the year ended 31 March 2008.

The selected corporate responsibility information for the purpose of this report consists only of the information reported under the following headings in the OFR (the ‘Corporate Responsibility Information’):

• Operating performance: Safety (including Health);
• Talent: Talent and skills, Engagement and performance, and Inclusion and diversity;
• Relationships: Suppliers and Community involvement; and
• Environment: Climate change, Historically contaminated land, and Protecting the environment.

Our work comprised performing procedures to provide limited assurance with respect to:

• The design of processes for reporting by operational management to the Directors on material safety, health and environmental issues for the National Grid group;
• The collation of the 2007/08 greenhouse gas emissions data (Scope 1 and 2) reported under the heading ‘Climate change’ in the OFR; and
• The Company’s verification procedures over the Corporate Responsibility Information.

We have not performed procedures with respect to information on KeySpan, which was acquired during the financial year.

Respective responsibilities of the Directors and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

The Directors of the Company are responsible for preparing the Corporate Responsibility Information based on the Company’s corporate responsibility reporting principles (the ‘Principles’), which includes their carbon reporting guidance based on the World Resources Institute Greenhouse Gas Protocol: A Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard (March 2004, revised edition). These Principles are available on the Company’s website. Our responsibility is to express a conclusion on the Corporate Responsibility Information based on our limited assurance procedures.

This report, including the conclusion, has been prepared for the Company to assist the Directors in reporting the Company’s Corporate Responsibility performance and activities. We permit the disclosure of this report within the Annual Report and Accounts, to enable the Company’s members to verify that the Directors have discharged their governance responsibilities by commissioning an independent limited assurance report in connection with the Corporate Responsibility Information and without assuming or accepting any responsibility or liability to the members on our part. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we do not accept or assume responsibility to anyone other than the Directors as a body and the Company for our work or this report save where terms are expressly agreed and with our prior consent in writing.

Inherent limitations

Non-financial performance information is subject to more inherent limitations than financial information, given the characteristics of the subject matter and the methods adopted for the definition and gathering of information. There are no generally accepted reporting standards applicable for corporate responsibility information. Qualitative interpretations of relevance, materiality and the accuracy of data are subject to individual assumptions and judgements. It is important to read the data and statements in the context of the Principles. Furthermore, our work is based on historical information and the projection of any information or conclusions in this report to any future periods would be inappropriate.

Assurance work performed

We conducted our limited assurance engagement in accordance with International Standard on Assurance Engagements 3000 (Revised) – ‘Assurance Engagements other than Audits and Reviews of Historical Financial Information’ issued by the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (ISAE 3000). Our limited assurance procedures primarily comprised:

• Making enquiries of relevant management of the Company;
• Evaluating the design and implementation of processes for collating and reporting material safety, health and environmental information;
• Testing, on a selective basis, the collation of the greenhouse gas emission data by the Company;
• Reviewing a sample of relevant information including Board reports, reports to the Executive Committee and risk and compliance reports prepared and used within the Company; and
• Testing that management’s internal verification processes with respect to the Corporate Responsibility Information have been completed.

A limited assurance engagement is substantially less in scope than a reasonable assurance engagement under ISAE 3000. A limited assurance engagement excludes reasonable assurance procedures such as testing the operating effectiveness of controls and verifying assets, liabilities and transactions in respect of the Corporate Responsibility Information. Our limited assurance procedures did not include work to verify the original source data including, for example, pipeline asset records or emission factor research.

Conclusion

On the basis of our limited assurance procedures, nothing has come to our attention which causes us to believe, for the year ended 31 March 2008, that:

• the Company’s processes are not designed to report material safety, health and environmental issues for National Grid group, as identified by operational management, to the Directors;
• the greenhouse gas emissions data (Scope 1 and 2) reported under the heading ‘Climate change’ in the OFR has not been prepared in accordance with the Company’s Principles; and
• the Corporate Responsibility Information is materially inconsistent with the Company’s underlying records.

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP,
Chartered Accountants, London
14 May 2008

Note:

The maintenance and integrity of the National Grid plc website is the responsibility of the Directors; the work carried out by the assurance providers does not involve consideration of these matters and, accordingly, the assurance providers accept no responsibility for any changes that may have occurred to the information since they were initially presented on the website.