Stakeholders

In line with the UK Corporate Governance Code 2018, we have this year further built on the Code’s recommendations by increasing our focus on stakeholder engagement. Constructive engagement with stakeholders enables us to better understand stakeholder needs and better meet them, creating value for the business and the community in the process.

Our stakeholders are people or organisations with an interest in our Purpose, Vision, our operations, and our actions, or who may be aff ected by them. As the sole supplier of electricity in Jersey, our stakeholders are broad and varied and go well beyond our shareholders. We see stakeholders as our customers, suppliers, partners, NGOs, Government, parishes, regulatory bodies, lenders and investors – as well as of course our employees. We continue to regularly engage with organisations such as Age Concern, Citizen’s Advice Bureau and the Consumer Council on issues around vulnerable customers, prices and energy effi ciency. Our Chairman, CEO and Financial Director also have regular meetings with both Government and independent shareholder representatives. How we engage with our people and our customers are detailed elsewhere in this report. In addition to these groups, we have this year identifi ed a further 17 stakeholder groups with an interest in the Company and have reached out to engage at a deeper level. This has helped them fi rstly to understand what we stand for as a company and where we are going in the future and secondly, to gain insights and perspectives from these groups to better guide our own strategy and product or service development and associated decision making.

Method of engagement

In order to engage with each of these groups in the most relevant way, and to prioritise our approach, we classifi ed each cluster by the perceived urgency of their needs, their levels of interest and depth of relationship with us.

At year end, our Executive Leadership Team had conducted 93 such stakeholder engagements, helping those aff ected by our business to better understand Jersey Electricity. We have further measures planned in the coming year.

We initially focused on Government, the parishes and our top 30 commercial customers in terms of consumption. We compiled a team made up of our Executive Leadership Team members supplemented by other business-specific Senior Managers when appropriate, to meet with and present to these groups.

Our engagements with the Government included topics such as the Island’s current and future energy mix, supply security, the role of electricity in support of the Government’s carbon neutrality ambitions and our ability to support the transition to net-zero. Engagements with commercial customers included discussions on: carbon reduction, green tariffs, embedded generation and the value of lost load.

Outcomes

We have strengthened our relationships with the parishes by launching our Parish Earth Partnership. This is a joint environmental initiative between Jersey Electricity and the 12 parishes and is designed to make a positive difference for sustainability in Jersey by planting trees and shrubs to absorb carbon, increase biodiversity, and trigger community environmental action. We have also been able to expand our public EV charger network into all but one parish at year end. We are now also helping most parishes reduce their carbon footprint by advising on fuel switching community buildings and housing stock.

At year end, our Executive Leadership Team had conducted 93 such stakeholder engagements, helping those affected by our business to better understand Jersey Electricity. We have further measures planned in the coming year.