Utility Week

UTILITY WEEK | 12TH - 18TH JANUARY 2018 | 9 Website relaunch Make it personal Subscribers to the website can comprehensively personalise their expe- rience to get exactly the information they need, when they need it. Edit categories and topics. myUtilityWeek personalises your whole site experience – refine and add categories and topics, to take you straight to your key information. Bespoke. With myUtilityWeek the user experience is totally bespoke, based on your preferences and account settings. Tailor the site to match your industry intelligence and knowledge needs. Follow. Track companies or specific individuals: stay in-the-loop when- ever your partners, clients, competitors or peers are featured in a news story, article or report. Essential premium content. Utility Week's special reports and premium analysis are made available to subscribers and trialists only. Focusing on a key industry trend or forthcoming regulatory change, each report analyses the very latest regulatory and market data, bringing Utility Week's award-winning journalistic approach to a granular level. View your news alerts. myUtilityWeek allows you to set daily news alerts at a time and day of your choosing, based on your categories and topics: keeping your inbox clear of clutter and unnecessary newsletters and alerts. Exclusive report: PR19's leaders and laggards The countdown to final determinations for PR19 has begun. With less than a year to go before companies must submit their plans for review, Utility Week assembled a select panel of industry experts to seek their opinion on how they thought individual companies would fare. With their anonymity guaranteed, this group of six experts drawn from the worlds of consultancy, regulation and City finance were able to make candid and open pre- dictions based on their working knowledge of companies' strengths and weaknesses and of Ofwat's PR19 methodology. So, who did our panellists tip as teacher's pets and naughty step occupants in PR19, and why? Premium subscribers get the full low down on the WASCs (water and sewerage companies) and WOCs (water-only companies). By contrast, the companies do seem to be thinking more about the implications of an uptake in electric vehi- cles and the shi to a DSO model. And, in general, they appear to be thinking about it in a focused way in terms of the implications for connections or enquiries. These companies are expecting a significant transformation in their businesses over the next decade. But probably the real challenge for them in terms of the BMCS is to not take their eye off the ball around the basics, as manage- ment focus shis to some of the more strategic issues. Northern Powergrid makes a point in this report about the need to think about the implications of energy sys- tem transformation for more vulnerable customers, and this is certainly an issue for companies to explore openly with stakeholders as they move forward. In the same way that the top performing companies have used customer feedback and expert panels to help shape their opera- tions and processes, DNOs need to use these groups to explore rising challenges. One forward-looking factor I was surprised to see omitted in DNO thoughts about future service chal- lenges/opportunities was the issue of climate change and the potential impact of more frequent extreme weather events on customer experience. Thinking about such scenarios, and learning from past events such as the Lancaster floods following storm Desmond in 2015, is critically important and will increas- ingly form a key part of the basics of getting customer satisfaction right. The future of the BMCS Turning to the question of what all of this implies for the future of the BMCS, the first point must surely be that Ofgem has to keep some sort of incentive regime in this space in RIIO2. The ambition of RIIO to get companies focused on consumers is still valid. But what aspects of service customers value most and what they are willing to pay are questions that need to be explored through proper consumer engagement as Ofgem develops the next RIIO framework and the companies develop their business plans. It is critical that Ofgem is confident, as it sets its incentives, that customers are getting value for money. The incentive for stakeholder engagement within the BMCS has been criticised by some for being too subjec- tive. And it has also been pointed out that companies ought to feel adequately incentivised to engage closely with stakeholders due to the clear benefits this brings to any company seeking to navigate a complex energy transition while maintaining customer satisfaction – an additional financial incentive from the regulator is there- fore arguably superfluous. However, the vulnerability element of the reports that companies submit is important and, without a specific incentive, companies would not do as much as they do now. This element clearly needs retaining in RIIO2. So, there's scope for the BMCS to evolve but, in the meantime, there are still over five years le of ED-1 and plenty of time for companies to improve further on what they do in this space. As things stand, I can't see any DNO knocking WPD off its top spot in the BMCS ranking, but as well as pro- viding financial incentives the BMCS has also prompted healthy rivalry between companies, so perhaps one of them will reach that number one position soon. Hope- fully this report will encourage them to go for it. Maxine Frerk, director, Grid Edge Policy and former senior director for distribution at Ofgem

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