Vulnerability Team and Business updates

How NGN will spend our money

New VCMA Collaborative Projects

  • AR CO project – All 4 GDN’s – NGN Leading
  • Parsley Box – All 4 GDN’s
  • Think CO App – All 4 GDN’s
  • Eleven Miles – Winter & Summer CO & PSR awareness campaigns – all 4 GDN’s

New VMCA NGN Projects

  • CA Northumberland
  • CA Bradford
  • Noah’s Ark
  • Cafs
  • Yorkshire Coast Sight Support
  • Fuel Bank Foundation
  • Cleveland Fire Authority
  • Northern Cancer Voices

Continue to target support to greatest need using data/research

NEA Vulnerable Customers and Community Resilience project: A Cross-Utility Study

Utility networks are responsible for ensuring that communities have access to safe and efficient utility (gas, electricity, water and communications) supplies. They recognise that supporting the most vulnerable members of society in times of adversity is a necessity.

However, how we understand vulnerability, the range of vulnerabilities in existence, and how different vulnerabilities interact or emerge in the context of different types of utility is complex. There is an equally complex and diverse range of non-utility stakeholders that provide support services to vulnerable utility customers. As the utility networks prepare for a challenging energy systems transition, a comprehensive and consistent approach to ensuring community resilience will be required to safeguard vulnerable individuals and communities.

To respond to this challenge, NEA worked Northern Gas Networks to undertake a cross-utility review that considers the range of support currently being provided, who those providers are, and what good practice means for community resilience and consumer safeguarding, both in the current energy landscape and during the future energy transition.

This project aims are as follows:

  • Identify how we currently understand vulnerability
  • Forecast short-term and short-term risks to community and customer resilience, including the energy justice implications associated with the low carbon transition
  • Identify current network activity to support customers and communities
  • Make recommendations to ensure that networks are equipped to provide the most appropriate support for vulnerable members of society during the energy systems transition
  • Strengthen existing partnership work between GDNs, DNOs and water utilities and highlight potential cost efficiencies on the delivery of respective social obligations
  • Highlight opportunities for relevant parties, and their partners to innovate, collaborate and coordinate so that assistance is better targeted to customers most in need
  • Develop best or innovating practice recommendations to support customers in vulnerable situations and frontline workers in a cross-utility network

Findings: Guideline 3: Debt and Affordability:

For companies with direct billing and charging relationships with customers

DEBT
1. Follow ability to pay principles when discussing and agreeing payments and debt-repayments with customers
DEBT
2. Take customer vulnerability into account when considering use of High Court Enforcement Officers for debt recovery
DEBT
3. UK Government should introduce and implement a ‘Help to Repay’ debt repayment scheme to provide debt relief and offer repayment matching to customers facing insurmountable levels of debt. Until such a scheme is in place, suppliers should demonstrate compliance with best practice by putting in place their own debt matching/repayment schemes.
DEBT
4. Build ‘breathing space’ into debt repayment policies
AFFORDABILITY
1. UK government should examine how deeper price protection for low-income, vulnerable, and fuel-poor households can be introduced. This could take the form of a mandatory social tariff to provide an affordable price of energy for low-income and vulnerable households. The focus of this should be to ensure that the targeting of such a scheme goes beyond just those households that receive means-tested benefits. Until such mandatory protections are in place, suppliers should demonstrate compliance with best practice by ensuring customers are offered appropriate social tariffs, not limited only to customers in the social security system
AFFORDABILITY
2. Implement mechanisms to limit disproportionately detrimental impacts of standing charges for customers with PPMs
AFFORDABILITY
3. Ofgem, Ofwat and Ofcom to work together to ensure all utility-related companies have in place affordability procedures and policies that will mean current best practice is consistently and reliably implemented across all utility sectors and by all utility actors
CUSTOMER SERVICE
1. Never knowingly disconnect a vulnerable customer from supply at any time of year
CUSTOMER SERVICE
2. Offer packages of support to customers who are switched to a PPM for debt reasons
CUSTOMER SERVICE
3. Issue alerts for PPM customers at risk of standing charge build-up
CUSTOMER SERVICE
4. As far as possible provide customers (and/or their support intermediaries) with a designated relevant customer service contact for their case (who has received appropriate vulnerability training)

For all utility-related organisations (with billing and/or non-billing relationships with customers)

DEBT
1. Enable customers to access professional debt advice and support via signposting, referrals and, where possible, provide funding or in-kind support to partners who are able to provide such services
DEBT
2. Proactively identify/contact customers in or at risk of debt/arrears through the use of appropriate data sharing with external partners, internal data-matching, monitoring and mapping activities
DEBT
3. Expedite meter installations where possible and ensure they are appropriate to customer circumstances
AFFORDABILITY
1. Enable customers to access professional income maximisation support via signposting, referrals and, where possible, provide funding or in-kind support to partners who are able to provide such services
AFFORDABILITY
2. Ofgem, Ofwat and Ofcom to work with Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) to clearly and explicitly set out to utility-related companies and their strategic partners what customer data they are allowed to share, when, how and with whom in order to support customers in vulnerable situations
AFFORDABILITY
3. GDPR teams and professionals within utility-related companies to work with relevant internal teams and external partners to put in place and develop long-term data-sharing relationships which are demonstrably GDPR compliant and which can ensure customers in vulnerable circumstances can be identified and supported
AFFORDABILITY
4. Make crisis/trust funds available to customers
CUSTOMER SERVICE
1. Take a holistic, whole-person approach to debt and affordability support by signposting/referring customers to wider forms of support such as mental health-related services, local wellbeing initiatives including links to social prescribing, food and fuel banks
CUSTOMER SERVICE
2. Offer vulnerable customers a bespoke/tailored service package at no extra cost
CUSTOMER SERVICE
3. Consider applicability of new tools currently being used in other sectors (e.g. the Morgan Ash Resilience System Tool, developed for the financial sector) to assess customer characteristics, potential vulnerabilities/harms and identify steps to mitigate detriment
CUSTOMER SERVICE
4. Develop long-term data-sharing relationships with partners to ensure consistent recognition and awareness of customer vulnerability across organisations and sectors

Bespoke vulnerability mapping research carried out September 2023

NGN commissioned bespoke vulnerability mapping research in September 2023. It focused on our hard to reach customers and who NGN should be engaging with first. The below chart shows NGN hard-to-reach mapping – category level:

NGN have developed 5 broad categories which support our colleagues to recognise and embed our strategy, these are:

1. Financial hardship

2. Physical challenges, inclusive of communication issues, physical space.

3. Mental wellbeing

4. Rural vulnerability

5. Temporary vulnerability

Through the research carried out on the following slide the findings show that the 5 main categories have now evolved to 10 categories. These are:

  1. Physical challenges, inclusive of communication issues, physical space.
  2. Mental wellbeing
  3. Financial hardship
  4. Temporary vulnerability
  5. Socio Demographic
  1. Household composition
  2. Rural Vulnerability
  3. Accessibility Including language
  4. Medical Dependant on Energy
  5. Cultural

NGN are therefore looking to align projects with the findings of the research and look at the hard to reach as identified below:

The top right-hand box on the next slide shows the main areas NGN should be focusing on. These themes will also help us with our GD3 planning.

Business updates

Any questions on our general business updates, please just get in touch with Eileen – ebrown@northerngas.co.uk

GD3 – 2026 to 2031

  • Work has started on our next business plan, which will run from April 2026 to March 2031. Ofgem have indicated that they do not expect to see significant change between our current and future business plans. However, they will be looking in depth at our commitments on vulnerability, how the VCMA is set up, and how our impact should be measured.

Decarbonisation of heat

  • There has been lots of energy-related topics covered by the news – many of them focussing on the hydrogen v heat pumps debate for decarbonising heat. Our approach at NGN is to make sure that customers have choice through the energy transition, and that due consideration is given for those customers for whom a heat pump isn't appropriate. We are still awaiting a government decision on Redcar – installing either hydrogen or all electric solutions to c 2000 homes and businesses.

Spotlight - Noah's Ark

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