Engaging for impact: Listening, learning and leading

Customer and stakeholder engagement sits at the heart of our work at Northern Gas Networks (NGN), shaping both our everyday decisions and our long-term strategy. Over the past year, we’ve continued to build on our strong foundations of meaningful, inclusive, and honest engagement, ensuring that voices from across our communities actively shape both day-to-day decisions and long-term strategic planning.

Affordability remains the top priority for household customers, with reliability and safety also highly valued. At the same time, customers are increasingly seeking trustworthy guidance on how they can exercise individual and collective agency to take practical steps toward net zero. They also expect language and messaging that’s inclusive and accessible focused on benefits they care about, like clean air, economic growth, jobs, skills, and opportunities.

Local authorities are also calling for faster, more decisive action on decarbonisation. In response, we’ve strengthened bilateral engagement with councils and collaborated with Northern Powergrid and Electricity North West to co-design strategies. These shared, scalable solutions address affordability, carbon reduction, and place-based needs in tandem.

Balancing these competing and overlapping priorities has only reinforced the importance of listening carefully and engaging continuously with a wide range of stakeholders. This year we've refined our engagement approach to be more inclusive and representative, embedding our bespoke mapping tool to better understand and respond to vulnerability, whether it stems from financial hardship, rural isolation, or other factors. Improved measurement tools have also helped us ensure engagement is timely, targeted, and meaningful.

In developing our 2026–2031 business plan, we engaged more than 13,000 stakeholders through surveys, workshops, bilateral meetings, and panel discussions, our most ambitious consultation yet.

We’ve also continued to listen closely to the voices of our communities to shape day to day decisions. Through forums like our Citizens Panel and Young Innovators Council, as well as our Independent Stakeholder Group, we’ve gained deeper insight into what our customers value today as well as what they will value tomorrow.

Our future customers are now playing an active role in shaping our strategy, with several Young Innovators Council members recently joining our Citizens Panel and Independent Stakeholder Group, amplifying the voice of future customers across all levels of decision-making.

In a climate of declining trust across the utilities industry as a whole, we also prioritise transparency and accountability.Independent assurance and benchmarking remain crucial to maintaining credibility. The challenge and scrutiny across our engagement and delivery provided by our Independent Stakeholder Group continues to ensure insight into our stakeholders’ values, preferences and ideas, which positively drives our business delivery, planning and change. ​

As we prepare our 2026–2031 business plan, we’re enhancing our engagement framework by adding honesty and proportionality to our core values of meaningful, inclusive, and iterative engagement.

• Honesty means open communication about costs, trade-offs, and outcomes, so customers can make well-informed decisions. This transparency builds credibility and strengthens long term loyalty through trust
• Proportionality ensures our engagement, services, and investments are tailored to genuine customer needs, avoiding unnecessary features, preserving value and demonstrating fair stewardship of customer funds

We’re also deepening cross-utility collaboration and creating more opportunities, such as strategic workshops and our annual stakeholder conference, for open dialogue and shared problem-solving.

This report reflects how our engagement approach has matured, driving fairness, innovation, and resilience in a year marked by economic challenges, rising energy costs, and growing climate awareness.

Thank you to our entire stakeholder community for your unwavering support, your time and insights have made this possible.