Our Customer Engagement Group (CEG) has further strengthened our governance approach. The CEG, our independent scrutiny panel chaired by Justin McCracken, has played a crucial role in ensuring that stakeholder and customer needs have been considered and reflected within the business plan. The CEG will publish its final report on our plan in January 2022.

Our Customer Engagement Group (CEG) is a group of 10 independent experts led by Chair, Justin McCracken, charged with scrutinising our RIIO-ED2 business plan and the quality of engagement undertaken to inform it.

The CEG held both full group meetings and additional sub-group sessions each month to ensure sufficient focus and scrutiny on each plan area aligned to the expertise of the different group members. All CEG members assessed the planning and execution of engagement by directly observing activities and reporting back to the full group.

In support of the CEG’s scrutiny roles, our subject matter experts and members of our leadership team joined the CEG to discuss emerging plans at every stage of the development process. We shared plans at the outline stage to facilitate early challenges through to full plan development. To ensure a robust process, subject matter experts took the CEG through the underpinning justification, supporting data, engagement feedback and benchmarking materials and responded directly to CEG challenges. Supporting information was provided in an agreed format and at appropriate time frames before discussion to enable the CEG to prepare for plan section reviews.

The CEG has reviewed, observed and raised over 130 issues and six challenges during the development of our business plan. We have amended our final business plan proposals in light of these issues and challenges. The group observed the broadest range of engagement activities across our four waves of engagement, feeding back its experience of 110 events, highlighting areas of good practice and areas for improvement. This included scaling up our engagement with future consumers, challenging how we ensured propositions were understandable for stakeholders and clearly describing how bills would be impacted and over what time period. The group held us to account against the stakeholder charter and the scope and scale of engagement necessary to develop a considered business plan that reflects customers’ needs and preferences.

The CEG has published and reported monthly updates throughout the course of the process and will publish its final report on our plan in January 2022. You can find out more here.