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Energy policy and regulation

Great Britain’s independent energy regulator

We protect energy consumers, especially vulnerable people, by ensuring they are treated fairly and benefit from a cleaner, greener environment.

Our policy and regulatory work is designed to support this underlying objective. This section of our website contains comprehensive information about the programmes we run, the licences we administer and the decisions we take regarding the companies and sectors we regulate.

Industry licensing, codes, compliance and enforcement

In our industry licensing section you can find information about the licences we administer, how you can become a licensed company, and the conditions that apply to each licence. You can also access lists of all currently licensed gas and electricity companies in Great Britain.

The industry codes and standards section explains our approach to matters such as code governance and the Code Administrators Code of Practice (CACoP).

If you are interested in how we monitor and enforce our regulatory requirements, the compliance and enforcement section explains our approach and lists details of decisions taken against individual companies.

Engagement - get involved

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Consultations

Consultations cut across all of our policy and regulatory activity and pass through a number of formal stages. This includes statutory consultations, such as proposals to modify licence conditions.

You can sign up to be notified when any consultation closes, and when we publish the responses and decision.

Visit our consultation page
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Calls for input

Our calls for input offer a variety of ways for you to provide information and views to us. These range from calls for evidence to workshops and online feedback forms.

Calls for input do not pass through the same formal stages as consultations and may not result in any formal regulatory decision.

Visit our calls for input page
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Forums and working groups

This section provides a list of all of the working groups and forums that we run as part of our engagement with industry and with other stakeholders. You can find agendas, minutes and other relevant publications.

For reference purposes we have retained a full historical record, including publications from groups that are now inactive.

Visit our forums and working groups page

Policy and regulatory programmes

We carry out much of our work under named programmes that focus on a particular regulatory issue or sector. You can see details of these programmes and the publications that arise from their work, on a programme by programme basis, in our list of active programmes.

These are just some examples of programmes currently available in our policy and regulatory programmes section:

We have also retained a list of historical, inactive programmes and their publications for reference purposes.

Policy and regulatory publications

Following user feedback we are working hard to present new views of our policy and regulatory publications based on categories that users find most helpful.

In this section you can see our progress and give your feedback on the following new publications libraries:

  • Company publications (BETA) - a view of publications that relate to individually named companies, filterable by categories such as company name and the licence they hold (where applicable)
  • Licence and sector publications (BETA) - a view of publications that relate to one or more licences or sectors, relevant to all licence holders or those with an interest in the sector in question. These publications are also filterable according to the licence or sector of interest.
  • Industry code publications - a view of publications covering code governance matters, as well as code modification decisions filterable by each named code.

Many of these publications arise from named programmes of work, such as our RIIO network price controls or our Default Tariff Cap for consumers. If you wish to see these publications based on their programme, please see our list of active programmes and our list of forums and working groups.