Each month we will be hearing what is keeping them busy and what is in the pipeline for REC Parties. This month we spoke to Rebecca Mottram and Anton Moden from the REC Code Manager’s Performance Assurance team:
NAME: Rebecca Mottram
ROLE UNDER SERVICE: Industry Stakeholder & Governance Lead (also PAB Secretary)
NAME: Anton Moden
ROLE UNDER SERVICE: Performance Assurance Lead
Rebecca: My primary role is PAB Secretary and I’m the single point of contact for PAB related matters. I’m also responsible for leading PAB processes and interactions, such as the Change Process, appeals and escalations, and Derogation and Sandbox applications. Finally, I’m the performance assurance lead for industry stakeholder training and guidance, so you will be hearing lots more from me on future training events!
Anton: I’m the single point of contact for performance assurance, bringing the work of our different workstreams together so they focus on resolving industry issues. This includes directing our analytics, entry, and qualification, change management, service provider and party assurance workstreams. I do this working with the industry and particularly the PAB.
Rebecca: We are progressing a number of market entry and metering accreditation applications, which transitioned across from previous code bodies. We are also focusing on collecting industry data and developing our performance assurance dashboards, which form the foundations of how we plan to monitor party performance against identified retail risks and issues.
Anton: There are several areas of the industry where there are persistent issues which aren’t really down to the action or inaction of a single organisation. These can affect consumers or other organisations. The way we are thinking about our assurance is less about ‘auditing’ specific organisations and more about understanding the overall market. This means we will be able to spend time exploring whether poor performance is about the individual organisation, issues with a service provider, or perhaps with the REC itself. This allows us to focus on the root cause and work to improve the market overall.
Rebecca: The PAB held its first meeting on 28th September. A key focus on this meeting was to introduce the Performance Assurance Framework (PAF) to members and discuss our approach to working together going forward. For example, we demonstrated the performance assurance and peer comparison dashboards we have developed. We also got stuck into some initial PAB business, such as discussing planned projects related to the introduction of performance charges under the REC and updating our PAF products in preparation for REC V3.0.
Rebecca: The PAB section on the REC Portal will host meeting agendas, public papers and meeting headline reports for each meeting. This will be a great opportunity for industry members to keep up-to speed with PAB discussions and outcomes. You can sign-up to the Performance Assurance distribution list where we will provide regular updates on PAB meetings and discussions.
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Anton: Lots! We are taking a long term, data driven approach so I’m looking forward to seeing and understanding our first few data analytics outputs. On top of that, over the next three months we are working on CSS readiness, supporting work to make the REC Portal slicker and smoother, and helping Parties understand how different our new service is to the assurance arrangements that have come before.
Anton: I think that the opportunity to address some of the retail issues out there and drive real improvements right across the market is a rare and exciting one. I really like engaging with different types of people right across the industry to understand and work together on the issues they are facing.