Our Young Innovators Council (YIC) brings together a wider range of voices and perspectives into our decision making and for the YIC to be the voice of young people at Northern Gas Networks.
The aim is to provide young people’s perspectives and help ensure young people’s thoughts and opinions are put at the heart of our decision making through meaningful and relevant engagement with our future customers.
NGN published its annual Stakeholder Report on June 30th, a reflection of its stakeholder engagement activity over the 12 months from 1st April 21 to 31st March 2022. This report shares how stakeholder views have influenced and informed NGN’s decisions over the year and shares achievements, challenges, and performance against some key regulatory targets. Alongside this report, NGN’s Community Engagement Group (CEG) also published its independent report reflecting on how NGN has delivered the commitments made to customers and stakeholders during the first year of the RIIO-GD2 five-year price control period.
In this session, we wanted to gauge the YICs satisfaction and acceptability of NGN’s performance and direction of travel from both annual reports.
We also wanted to identify what the Young Innovators Council (YIC) think NGN’s future focus should be.
89%
found our NGN Stakeholder Report useful
Our Stakeholder Report
You said that our 2022 Stakeholder Report was very interesting, and that you could clearly see our concerns and ideas, but also what our aims were, and how we reached them. You said that you would like to see a little more detail about future plans and how we were going reach targets.
Our 2022 stakeholder report reflecting on the year past and reporting on how we’ve responded to stakeholders but recognise that there is a desire to understand how that will inform our future work programmes as well so we will take that into consideration for next year’s report and look at ways we can make it easier to direct readers to other reports and plans which do provide more detail about our plans.
Partnerships
You said you were supportive of our plans to work with communicates, customers vulnerabilities sustainability and people in the business but that we should be looking to create and establish more sustainable partnerships and help the YIC and other stakeholders understand how they can work with us to spread more awareness and advocacy to help achieve NGNs goals.
This group, and others like them are a powerful force for positive change and we need to help them understand and get involved and by giving them more information and more detail we can bring them with us and they will advocate for us and with us to be part of the solution.
Net Zero Urgency
It was clear that the YIC were frustrated by lack of progress and speed, particularly around net zero and that there was a sense of urgency from the group for us to speed up the drive to Net Zero.
We recognise this and are encouraged by the positive response, and support that our future customers and colleagues show around this agenda. We plan to invite the YIC to our conference and encourage them to share their views around this agenda, which will ensure their voices are heard. We will continue to develop our whole systems strategy and be ambitious in driving this agenda forward where we can, whilst conveying this urgency to our partners across the sector too.
Communication
You said that we should share more about what our future plans are, in response to stakeholder needs and how we will deliver those plans (particularly around hydrogen and a net zero future).
While the stakeholder report might not be the right report to provide that level of detail, there are lots of other reports, strategies, research and detail that we have created, and published that do provide that information. However, this shows that the wider story isn’t getting through to our stakeholders, and therefore we need to make it easier to help people navigate through this complex area, make it easier to find information and be better at telling the bigger picture/the full story in order to help them see where we can play our part.