YOUR NGN NEWS UPDATE

August 2023

Sharing our Engagement Activities and Achievements from 2022/23

We're really excited to be able to publish our annual stakeholder report, a reflection on our activity over 12 months from 1st April 2022 to 31st March 2023.

We’re continually talking to our customers and stakeholders to find out what they expect from their gas distributor, and this report is an opportunity for us to share how stakeholder views have influenced and informed our decisions over the year.

We also share our achievements, challenges, and performance against some key regulatory targets.

We're really proud of what we've achieved this year driven by guidance from you, our stakeholder community. Over the coming years we will continue to engage and challenge ourselves and the energy sector to achieve more.

We hope you find the report interesting and informative.

How we've supported vulnerable customers and communities in 22/23

The Vulnerability and Carbon Monoxide Allowance (VCMA) was a newly created fund for the Gas Distribution Networks (GDN’s) funding period April 2021 to March 2026.

For Northern Gas Networks, the amount available to spend is approximately £1.3 million per annum. With strict rules and guidance from Ofgem about how the fund can be spent

Our annual VCMA report   provides an update on how we’ve invested that money to support vulnerable customers nad communities across our network, how stakeholders have helped steer our decisions, an overview of all projects that we’ve funded so far, and a look ahead to the next year and beyond.

Innovation to tackle the challenges of a changing world.

As the RIIO-GD2 regulatory period continues, innovation remains more important than ever in supporting delivery of our overarching objectives: provide a safe, reliable gas service; support the transition to net zero; continue to modernise our operations and provide help to our vulnerable customers.

NGN receives funding from our regulator, Ofgem, which allows us to take forward innovation projects that will help address these challenges.

We have continued to grow our innovation culture and embed this into our way of working

across the business. We innovate through a wide range of funding methods, but mainly with the help of two vital funding streams, from Ofgem.

Our annual innovation report provides an update of how we’ve used this funding over the last year and some of the exciting projects we’ve undertaken over the last regulatory year. We hope you find this year’s report inspiring. Please do contact our innovation team if you’d like to find out more or if you have a suggestion for how we can work together.

Our CEG Report

This report provides an overview of the work undertaken by the Customer Engagement Group (CEG) for Northern Gas Network (NGN) for the year ending March 2023, which is the second year of the current GD2 price control period (2021- 2026).

This year, the CEG have focussed their scrutiny more narrowly on specific areas of activity, particularly those where they felt there needed to be significant engagement with customers and stakeholders.

Over the past year, the CEG has focussed on how NGN is playing its role in supporting customers in vulnerable situations, challenging whether we are really doing enough to help households through the cost of living crisis. In this report the CEG consider how well NGN responded by building capacity internally, and within delivery partners to support more customers through this period of high inflation and extra demand for services.

In this report, the CEG highlight key issues and challenges that they raised, and the responses that they received.

Get involved! 

NGN Annual Stakeholder Conference

The purpose of our 2023 online stakeholder conference, will be to seek feedback from key stakeholders such as yourself on a range of topics to meaningfully shape our business activities in the coming years, looking at energy as a whole, rather than focusing solely on gas.

Our annual conference gives stakeholders the opportunity to scrutinise the business, and to allow them to see the impact of their engagement and the progress on commitments we’ve made. It also creates an opportunity for challenge, allowing us to recheck our direction and focus and give us confidence that our focus is in the right areas, which in turn provides an opportunity for our whole stakeholder community to inform our business planning and activities for the coming year. 

This year, we want the agenda for the event to be shaped by our stakeholders, and so we are asking you to choose which topics you would like to discuss when registering.

The conference will comprise a series of interactive discussion sessions with senior personnel, followed by an opportunity to ask questions directly, along with other industry representatives, in a dedicated Q&A session at the end of the conference.

Get in touch...
If you have any feedback about this e-bulletin or any questions about our work, we'd love to hear from you. Just email stakeholder@northerngas.co.uk   

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Join our Vulnerability and Carbon Monoxide Allowance (VCMA) Annual Showcase