The shockwaves following Utilitywise’s closure earlier this year still reverberate and this Newcastle Chronicle report is sobering.

The news will have caused concern within the business energy market. We took on 50 of Utilitywise’s redundant staff and continue to wish others every success finding work.

We are the UK’s leading energy management consultancy, but are far from complacent. Measures we have in place help to protect against any possible outcome like the above.

We enjoy our work and have fun, but we take our business seriously. To give you a feel – we contracted almost 12,000 meters in 2018 alone, equating to over 5.1 TWhs! That’s a lot of businesses relying on us for energy. Each one of them gets the highest attention to detail – from the small shop owner to the international stadium.

Our people are the bedrock of our business and it is their professional integrity that keeps our customers happy and business growing. Sure they like a laugh – balance between work and play is vital. We were voted Best place to work in the UK 2017 by Glassdoor and Best Places to Work 2018 by Newcastle Chronicle. But the business is built on firm foundations.

Our recruitment and selection process is very comprehensive and we invest in our people with our on-going, industry-leading training and development programme.

In line with our key principles of honesty, integrity and transparency, we provide our suppliers with unrestricted access to our internal systems, including the ability to access compliance calls. When it comes to supplier audits, our systems are so robust many suppliers simply extract the information they require, with little to no input from us directly.

We have a 100-point checklist, monitoring our sales process, end-to-end. That’s right – 100-point checklist – which involves cross referencing contract validity, cost-comparison checks, termination agreements and bill validation; right through to extensive call-listening to ensure full compliance with protocols. Energy consumption checks are undertaken via customer invoices to ensure the offers we provide are as accurate as possible. References to these checks are all attached to our system and are immediately available to the suppliers.

This is what makes NGP what it is. It’s what makes us different: a fun place to work, built on firm foundations!

By David Bootle, Global Head of Corporate Marketing, Northern Gas and Power

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