Our work continues apace, and as part of our meeting in March, we visited NGN’s Washington Depot and met a number of the team based there. Among other things, we observed how the company has applied a ‘cluster’ model to its operations and we were shown the following departments:
- Replacement, E&R, Connections, Maintenance
- Workshop and warehouse for the North;
- Chemists and gas sampling.
At the formal meeting, we had a discussion with NGN CEO Mark Horsley, who gave us an update on the relationship with OFGEM and how he feels the business plan is progressing. We also gave feedback on our activities and the engagement and information we’d received thus far.
We then concentrated on the draft structure of NGN’s business plan, looking carefully at all aspects, and asking several questions, including around the ‘golden thread’ of customer engagement.
We considered a number of planning assumptions and regional issues, focussing on developments since October 2018 and NGN’s plans in response, and then moved to focus on outcome and output commitments in two specific areas as follows:
- Proposed outputs for GD2 in comparison to GD1; and
- The environment.
We spent some time looking at both aspects critically and raised a number of action points and challenges.
The evaluation criteria for NGN’s business plan is clearly of central importance to us as a Group and we are creating several ‘tests’ and issues against which to measure what emerges. We spent some time considering how this will sit against the work being brought forward from the company and agreed a rating system to help us navigate the progress that is being made.
Finally, we reviewed the stakeholder events a number of us had attended and looked also at future events, agreeing that continuing to feedback to each other on each event attended as it happened was a useful way to ensure we all got a feel for the effectiveness of the process.