Our projects can be summarised under four key themes
Our 4 key themes:
1. Fuel poverty and energy affordability:
In the past year, the landscape in which we are supporting our vulnerable customers has changed dramatically.
Off the back of the pandemic, vulnerable households faced new hardships brought on by the energy crisis and cost-of-living crisis. Up and down the country, household budgets were being stretched to unsustainable levels, while many people were being pushed into fuel poverty for the first time.
Acutely aware of the increasing scale of need across the communities we serve, we engaged our stakeholders to help us shape our collaborative and individual programmes to ensure we’re able to provide meaningful impact at a time when our vulnerable customers need our help the most.
2. Supporting priority customer groups:
Some of our customers need more help than others to stay safe and warm at home.
By registering eligible households on the Priority Services Register (PSR), we’re able to make sure the most vulnerable members of our community are known to their utility companies and proactively offer support.
3. Services beyond the meter:
As a gas network, we’re committed to keeping our customers safe and warm.
We recognise that for some customers, it’s not possible to maintain a safe and warm home without extra help from us.
With direct support, we’re able to help vulnerable households as we go about our operational work.
If our engineers identify a safety issue with appliances or internal pipework beyond the meter while they’re attending a gas emergency or upgrading our networks, we may have to condemn the appliance or isolate the gas supply.
Vulnerable households may not be able to afford the unexpected expense of a Gas Safe registered engineer to visit their home or replace their appliance, meaning they can go for long periods without adequate heating, hot water or cooking facilities.
While we ensure all households are left with temporary electric cooking and heating appliances, these can be extremely costly for households to run and are not solving the long-term need to stay safe and warm at home.
If a vulnerable customer cannot afford the repair or replacement of pipework or an essential gas appliance, we arrange for a Gas Safe registered engineer to visit and carry out the required repair, replacement or service. Sometimes this will be one of our own upskilled engineers and sometimes we use a partner organisation to carry out this work. Gas Safe registered engineers can also carry out enhanced CMDD1A checks to identify the source of a carbon monoxide leak.
4. CO awareness:
We have a long-established GDN and stakeholder CO working group that has been focused for many years on gathering data and insight that enables us to design effective awareness campaigns.
More recently, we’ve targeted our campaigns at key groups within our communities with the lowest awareness of carbon monoxide.
A Slido vote was then used to capture stakeholder’s opinions on how we should split our allowance over the 4 key themes
Question:
If you had £10, how would you split this between the 4 themes? Fuel poverty and energy affordability, Supporting priority customer groups, Services beyond the meter and CO awareness
Answers:
- Fuel poverty 6. Services beyond the meter 2. CO 1. Priority service 1
- 25% on each
- £4 for fuel poverty and £2 each for the rest
- £4 FOEA, £3 SPCGs, £2 SBTM, £1 COAW
- £4 energy affordability £4 priority groups £1 carbon monoxide and £1 services beyond the meter
- £4 - Fuel poverty, £3 - Priority customers, £1.50 Services beyond the meter, £1.50 CO awareness
- 4 x £2.5
Answers continued:
- 25% to each. Each theme overlaps with the others so giving more to one above the others is counter productive
- 25% on each
- 25% split equal
- £5, £3, £1.50, £0.50
- Priority customers
- 30% to the first two and 20% each to the others
- £4 fuel pov and energy affordability £2 support priority customer groups £3 services beyond the meter £1 CO awareness
Feedback summary:
This feedback shows that stakeholders want us to prioritise on fuel poverty and energy affordability, then priority customer, services beyond the meter and finally the lowest on CO awareness. This is in line with our VCMA strategy on how NGN will be allocating the VCMA funds throughout the remainder of GD2.
