PAST EVENTS

2021 Forums

19 January Save paradise – can new financing arrangements for nature-based solutions defeat the parking lot and the pink hotel

Chair: Richard Nourse, Founder and Managing Partner, Greencoat Capital

Speaker:s David Black, Chief Regulation Officer, Ofwat

David Young, Senior Fellow, Broadway Initiative

16 February Groundhog Day: how can we create policy credibility to engender public support for paying for net zero

Chair: Laura Sandys CBE, CEO, Challenging Ideas

Speaker:s Sul Alli, Director of Strategy and Customer Services, UK Power Networks

Tony Ballance, Chief Strategy & Regulation Officer, Cadent Gas

Dermot Nolan, Director, Fingleton and former CEO, Ofgem

16 March Life in lockdown – has Covid taught us anything about evidence, uncertainty and communication?

Chair: Ann Bishop, Founder of Indepen and the Indepen Forum, Chair: of the Customer Engagement Group (CEG) for UK Power Networks and NonExecutive Director of Affinity Water

Speaker:s Martin Blaxall, Director, Corporate Brand and Communications, AstraZeneca

Ali Chegini, Director of Systems Safety and Health, RSSB

Ed Humpherson, Director General for Regulation, Office for Statistics Regulation

Ben Page, Chief Executive Officer, Ipsos MORI

20 April How ‘appealing’ is the utilities sector? What should the CMA and Ofwat learn from PR19 and what might this mean for RIIO-2?

Chair: John Penrose, MP for Weston, Worle & The Villages

Speaker:s Maxine Frerk, Chair:, SGN Customer Engagement Group

Ceri Jones, Chair:, WaterSafe

Stephen Littlechild, Emeritus Professor at the University of Birmingham, and Fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School

Angela Love, Director of Future Markets and Engagement, Elexon and Independent Chair:, ScottishPower RIIO2 Transmission User Group

18 May Who should pay to transform our environment?

Chair: Jonson Cox CBE, Chairman, Ofwat

Speaker:s The Rt. Hon John Gummer, Lord Deben, Chairman, Committee on Climate Change

22 June Up, down, round and round – rising up to the challenge of levelling up

Chair: Bridget Rosewell CBE, Commissioner, National Infrastructure Commission

Speaker:s The Rt Hon. Lord Blunkett

Susan Davy, Chief Executive Officer, Pennon Group

Martin McIvor, Research Officer, Prospect

20 July Déjà-vu: why do megaprojects go wrong? How can we fix them?

Chair: David Elliott, Director, Indepen

Speaker:s Howard Ashcraft, Partner, Hanson Bridgett law firm & Adjunct Professor Civil & Environmental Engineering, Stanford University

Billy Glennon, Chief Executive Officer, VISION Consulting

Nicola Medalova, Managing Director, National Grid Interconnectors

Colin Nicol, Senior Advisor & former Managing Director of Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks

21 September We want it all and we want it now. Infra companies should invest more, but economic regulators worry they will make out like bandits. Discuss!

Chair: Dr Tim Stone CBE, Chairman, Nuclear Industry Association

Speaker:s Filipp Gaddo, Head of Energy Economics and Regulation, Arup

Steve McMahon, Deputy Director, Electricity Distribution and Cross Sector Policy, Ofgem

Cathryn Ross, Strategy and Regulatory Affairs Director, Thames Water

19 October Nothing learned and nothing gained? All together now – collaborating across the infrastructure sectors and beyond to achieve Net Zero

Chair: Dr Jeff Hardy, Senior Research Fellow at the Grantham InstituteClimate Change and the Environment, Imperial College London

Speaker:s Alex Plant, Strategy and Regulation Director, Anglian Water Bridget Rosewell CBE, Commissioner, National Infrastructure Commission

Dipesh Shah OBE, Chair:, National Highways

7 December Well, it’s a marvellous night for a moondance! Solving problems to get to net zero

Chair: Rachel Fletcher, Director of Regulation and Economics at Octopus Energy

Speaker: Neil Harris, Sustainability Strategy and Innovation Lead at Amazon Web Services

The notes of these discussions are available on the indepen website: www.indepen.uk.com/questions

Introduction

Since 2018, Indepen and The Water Report have partnered to host the Social Contract Summit, a forum for decision makers to explore how companies providing essential services infrastructure – water, energy, transport and communications – could provide more value to citizens, society and the environment.

2018 – Defining the social contract

At the Summit’s inception in 2018, social contracting – and the wider idea that essential service companies should deliver more for society and the environment than demanded by their formal obligations or gifted by their charitable contributions –was not the mainstream conversation it is today.

Against a backdrop of perceived failings in the delivery of essential public services, the 2018 Summit brought industry leaders together with regulators, politicians, investors and those representing social and environmental interests to address the fundamental question: how can private companies providing essential public services deliver better outcomes for society?

We also specifically explored and attempted to define the contribution a social contract between essential service companies and their investors on one hand, and customers through government and regulators on the other, could make to rebuilding trust in the industries that underpin our lives.

2019 – Value for all

By 2019, the concept of social value had been enthusiastically adopted, particularly by the water sector where there was considerable progress to report.

Our 2019 Summit therefore focused on issues relating to public value delivery in the water sector, such as how megatrends like climate change, demographics and technology might impact future service provision, the role of regulation in public value delivery, governance considerations to embed public purpose within companies, the need for greater and more effective collaboration, and the role and nature of engagement with consumers and communities.

2020 – Public purpose in a pandemic

In 2020, the Summit convened virtually to explore how water companies were demonstrating ‘public purpose in a pandemic’.

As anchor institutions in their regions and with the privilege of providing an essential monopoly service, we looked at how water companies were supporting their communities, and contributing to strengthening the economy, enhancing the environment, as well as exploring how the experience of Covid-19 had affected the attitudes and behaviours of those they serve.

We considered what companies could do alone and what they needed agreement, support and partners for. Importantly, we discussed what lessons we might learn from this unique chance to break the mould and do things differently for future models of operation, regulation and policy.

2022: Whole systems go!

Against this backdrop, our Social Contract Summit considered whether a whole systems approach to collaborating on shared challenges across sectors and actors could offer a key to the deadlock of rising expectations and constrained resources.

Further information on the themes and issues we have explored is available at www. indepen.uk.com/ the-summit.

The event was held in RSA, London on Thursday 19 January.