Going for gold in our stakeholder-led approach

A blog by Christianna Logan, Director of Customers and Stakeholders at SSEN Transmission

 Being a stakeholder-led business with a stakeholder-led strategy is something we’re really proud of. Advocating for and meeting the needs of our customers, and others with an interest in our network, is vital to our work in delivering the UK’s legally binding climate targets. To achieve all that, we need to make sure that our engagement with stakeholders is delivered to the highest standards.

To make sure we remain accountable on this, we are committed to undertaking regular independent and externally accredited assessment of our stakeholder engagement processes and practices, to understand what we are doing well and consider areas for improvement based on stakeholder feedback.

So that we “walk the walk” when it comes to stakeholder engagement best practice, we’ve recently undertaken our annual external stakeholder engagement “health-check” with AccountAbility, a global consulting and standards firm that works with organisations to adopt responsible business practices and transform long-term performance. This comprehensive review was undertaken voluntarily by us, in direct response to stakeholder feedback, and helps us to ensure we are delivering to the very highest standards in professional stakeholder engagement.

AccountAbility’s AA1000 Series of Standards represent a principles-based framework, used globally by businesses to demonstrate leadership and performance in accountability, responsibility, and sustainability. It’s a highly respected framework that is renowned and trusted internationally and in our stakeholder engagement strategy we’ve set an ambition to be at the forefront of engagement practice. It therefore makes sense for us to measure our stakeholder engagement performance against a set of standards followed by leaders in this field.

The AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard is considered the gold standard in stakeholder engagement accreditation. Our AA1000 Standard in Stakeholder Engagement score for this year is 73% and a rating of “Accomplished" in the AccountAbility Stakeholder Engagement Maturity Ladder.

This is a fantastic result, increasing our score by 11% from 2019/20 while maintaining our accreditation. Achievements like this are particularly meaningful in what has been an incredibly challenging year for industry and society as a whole. Our AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard health-check, and the actions we’ve taken to improve our standards and engagement practice, ensure that our stakeholders are experiencing more inclusive, material and valuable engagement from us and that we are responsive to their views.

We’d like to thank those stakeholders who participated in the assessment process, and all our stakeholders that have been sharing open and honest feedback on how we are doing. We’re already working on further improvements based on this year’s feedback. We look forward to continuing positive engagement in the year ahead and beyond, as we work together to deliver a network for net zero.