I hope you all enjoyed the festive season and are refreshed as we come into a new year.
2022 looks likely to be challenging with the geopolitical situation keeping energy prices volatile, a rising cost of living, and the uncertainty of COVID-19 which affects us all.
These challenges threaten our businesses and raise concerns for the welfare of our colleagues, friends and families. My hope though, is that as the mornings lighten, the clouds clear and the temperature warms, 2022 will be much better than we all could have hoped.
At RECCo, engaging with our stakeholders remains a key priority so we can work collectively on developing the Retail Energy Code and REC services to meet the needs of industry and consumers.
It has already been a busy start to the year for our team. The RECCo Board published its draft strategy and forward work plan for 2022-2025 and associated financial projection on 10th January for stakeholder comment.
This consultation is the results of months of work and engagements with stakeholders to understand what the priority focus should be for us over the next year and beyond. The six core workstreams for next year include:
These workstreams will help us facilitate improvements in the retail energy market with our continued focus of making retail market governance and services more efficient and effective for the benefit of stakeholders and to drive positive consumer outcomes.
The consultation is open for all comments until 31st January 2022. Following this deadline, the RECCo Board will consider all comments received before publishing its updated Budget for 2022-2025 on 4th February 2022.
We are holding a webinar to walk stakeholders through the Budget and to answer any questions on 10th February 2022 and will provide more details shortly.
In other news, the REC Portal's next scheduled release takes place on 31st January and the Code Manager is running drop-in sessions on Friday 21st January to answer any of your questions, you can register for the event here.
The Post Implementation Project put in place to implement further service enhancements to the Code Manager Service following operational go-live last year, is also on schedule. Monthly releases to the REC Portal are currently underway until the end of February to implement further functionality based on feedback.
The Code Manager will also be holding a user experience workshop with stakeholders on 27th January to understand how the Portal can be further improved over coming months to meet your needs and details of the workshop will be shared shortly.
The Code Manager is also working with the REC Technical User Group to prioritise the changes required to EMAR to make it more intuitive and user friendly, ahead of a release at the end of February.
We are now in the lead up to Switching Programme go-live in summer of this year. This is the next major step in the evolution the Retail Energy Code and we are working closely with the programme to agree the transitional arrangements of governance from Ofgem to RECCo in the Early Life Support period of the programme, including the development of a RECCo Acceptance Criteria aligned to the Programme Exit criteria.
We are also working closely with all our Service Providers to ensure their readiness for go-live and feeding this directly into the switching programme.
The Code Manager is currently developing its stakeholder engagement plan for the run up to the switching programme. Do get in touch with the Code Manager on any suggestions for support in understanding what the implementation of REC V3.0 means for you and your organisation by emailing enquires@recmanager.co.uk.
I hope you enjoy this month's edition of the RECCo newsletter. In here you’ll find essential reading including important updates and key deadlines, as well as a chance to get to know members of our team.
As always, if you have any comments or suggestions on how we can better engage with you as our stakeholders, please get in touch with us at info@retailenergycode.co.uk.