We wanted to discuss in detail the impact of COVID 19 on our customers and communities and gain valuable feedback and insight about how we now prioritise our commitments to support customers in vulnerable situations as well as discuss our approach to working towards greener energy solutions for our vulnerable customers.
To provide an update on our cold related ill health research project – Connecting Homes for Health and introduce stakeholders to our dedicated research site InTEGRel, specifically our Customer Energy Village (CEV) and explore potential research projects/ideas.
We also wanted to understand any emerging issues, specifically around Social Mobility and COVID-19, to help us revisit our focus areas and further develop our future engagement plan.
We were delighted with the level of engagement and discussions around the impact of the pandemic on hidden vulnerability and how the pandemic has impacted demand for essential services to support customers in vulnerable situations and you provided some invaluable feedback in relation to the emerging issues.
We are now working hard together as a team, to make sure that we have another session booked in prior to October, to revisit the feedback you gave at this workshop and also, to have further discussion around the third area we were unable to cover at the workshop: How can we better reach customers in vulnerable situations, impacted directly or indirectly by the pandemic? which we will use as the foundations for our next steps.
You provided us with 8 key focus areas we should look to develop as part of our research programme at the customer energy village (CEV) including behaviour change. The ability of other organisations to influence customers, involvement of customers (including vulnerable) in research, education around energy transition and impacts on different ages and groups in communities.
We will take these ideas back to our working group discussion and connect those interested stakeholders with our CEV team, so that they can build on these ideas and input into the development of ideas and research.
During discussions around social mobility and COVID-19 you identified gambling and food poverty as emerging issue that are becoming more prevalent.