Over the past year the Utility Regulator has taken forward a project analysing electricity, gas and water customers’ views of the Guaranteed Standards Schemes (GSS standards of service in relation to utility services). The fieldwork of the project has been developed by the Perceptive Insight Market Research and delivered in the form of a GSS Report May (PDF 2.1 MB).
NISRA and the Consumer Council have kindly participated in the initial and final stages of the project, providing us with helpful advice.
The fieldwork for this study covered both domestic, and industrial and commercial consumers. In terms of domestic utility consumers, the qualitative phase comprised nine group discussions with a range of consumer types across Northern Ireland including older people, young families and people with disabilities, while the qualitative phase involved a face-to-face household survey of 1,503 domestic customers. For non-domestic utility consumers (including not only commercial customers but public service organisations such as hospitals and schools), the qualitative phase consisted of 10 in-depth interviews, while the quantitative phase comprised a telephone survey of 411 organisations. In addition, four semi-structured interviews with representatives of leading utility companies across all three sectors were conducted in order to gain an industry perspective on the proposed updating or implementation of GSS.
The results of this fieldwork will be used by our sectoral directorates to inform their future work in relation to developing and/or improving GSS in each of the three regulated sectors.