Young Innovators Council (YIC) is the voice of young people at Northern Gas Networks. It’s 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.
In 2024, we heard from young people just how much they appreciated having Session 1 face-to-face, for building relationships and developing skills. With that in mind, we agreed to conduct Session 1 in person at Northern Gas Networks’ Leeds offices.
The core purpose of Session 1 was to bring the YIC together, to encourage them to connect with one another and members of the NGN team, and to think about how we might co-create future sessions.
It is important for the YIC to feel comfortable with one another, and for us all to establish agreed ways of working together over the coming year.
As part of our Stakeholder Engagement process, we wanted to understand the priorities of our YIC. Therefore, the second part of Session 1 was dedicated to exploring which areas of the business are most important to the panel.
Your priorities
There were 5 priorities you felt were most important: Low Bills, Safe Service, Help for those who need, Fair Transition, and Reliable and Resilient.
There is also a desire for us to consider environmental factors in our work.
We will use this information, alongside our customer research, to help us prioritise issues and areas of the business to engage and invest in.
Being a responsible business
You said that we need to ensure our policies are inclusive, along with our workplace culture, and you mentioned the need to focus on closing existing inequalities such as the gender pay gap.
We will use this insight to shape our new Inclusion strategy and action plan. We will also have a session with YIC on this in April.
Being a sustainable business
You said:
We will now review of our sustainability commitments, and feed these suggestions into our engagement plans to set new targets for 2040.
NGN Values
You said that accountability for delivering against commitments is paramount for customers to trust NGN. Inclusion and ensuring no one was left behind in the energy transition was also a key aspect for NGN to focus on.
We will continue to use this format, along with our annual report and conference to share impacts of engagement.
We will also prioritise a fair transition in our NGN engagement programme this year.