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Tackling the Lp Gas Industry’s Issues and Opportunities on UKLPG’s First Anniversary

By David Asquith, chairman, UKLPG

UKLPG, the lp gas industry’s new trade association, celebrates its first birthday on January 1 2009. David Asquith of Countrywide Energy Ltd, the association’s first chairman, looks back at the last year and forward to the issues that UKLPG will be tackling in the year to come.

It’s great for the lp gas industry that we now have one association and a single view to present to the wider community, and we should pay tribute to those who put a lot of time and effort into getting us to where we are today.

UKLPG is very well set up to meet the demands that will be made of it over the next few years. We’ve got an excellent chief executive in Rob Shuttleworth, who has a wealth of energy industry experience, and the team he has working for him have all the right skills we need. We benefit from continuity with our long-standing experts, technical manager Jeff Watson and autogas manager Mike Chapman, whilst communications manager Lisa Thomson brings new skills and experience.

You can’t sit back on your laurels in the commercial world these days, and we’ve still got a lot of work to do in a variety of areas. It’s refreshing to see how UKLPG is so firmly focused on the future and the issues and opportunities that the lpg industry faces.

I see UKLPG as having two basic roles, and the first of those is to protect the lp gas industry. There are interested parties, including government, HSE and other regulators, that would like to influence the way we do business, and that usually means adding cost.

The job of UKLPG is to review all of these challenges to ensure that the lpg gas industry doesn’t face inappropriate legislation or costs and, at the same time, make certain that we continue to offer an extremely safe supply chain for our customers.

The second major role for UKLPG is the need to focus on helping the lp gas market expand. UKLPG recently attended the British International Motor Show and received an overwhelming response from people interested in lpg autogas, an alternative to paying £1.26 per litre, as it was then, for petrol. Presented in the right way and in the right circumstances, activities such as these can, I believe, be more powerful than those from an individual member company alone.

My job as chairman of UKLPG is to encourage all members to get involved in these processes. There are circumstances where UKLPG better represents every individual company, be they a major lpg supplier or a smaller independent, but we have to be careful to make sure that we send the right message, in the right place, at the right cost.

UKLPG has a new working group set up called the Off Gas Grid group, and one of its tasks is to look at presenting the relevant cost benefits of lpg over other fuels. For years, other industries have been telling us how expensive lpg is, but we should now be fighting back.
The group is gathering information to present the facts as they are.

I’m sure that heating engineers still hold the view that oil is cheaper than lpg, whereas the reality, certainly in the past year, is very different. We will find out the facts and present them in an audited and verifiable form for members to use, and look into ways of getting them into the public domain at a reasonable cost.

UKLPG needs to let its members know where it needs help and support with committees. There is a huge amount of work to be done by UKLPG, and its staff can’t do it all, so we need to keep encouraging members to participate in working groups. It was really encouraging that, when volunteers were called for at the autumn meeting, people did step forward, but we need more to do so if we are to meet all of the challenges ahead.

The recent UKLPG board meeting was one of the best I’ve attended for many years because we were finally addressing some of the major issues that the lp gas industry needs to tackle. There was a real willingness for everyone to move these important challenges forward.

For instance, there’s a working group now set up for cylinder handling and retrieval, because that issue is potentially a huge problem for the lpg gas industry. If we don’t get our cylinders back into our own sites and depots, there’s the potential for them to be treated by the environmental lobby as waste, and that would be disastrous.

BIG ISSUES FOR LP GAS INDUSTRY

Our industry is facing some big issues at the moment, including the Competition Commission Domestic and Metered Estates Orders, the creation of the Department of Energy & Climate Change and focus on the Climate Change Bill, the role of lpg autogas in contributing to the UK’s carbon reduction target, and the ICL inquiry and the need for the lp gas industry to act proactively and speedily.

It’s clear that the Competition Commission order is going to mean change for the lpg industry. However, whilst change can be difficult, we’ve got to be able to manage it. But I see this change as an opportunity. If it makes our businesses more competitive, that will mean that, ultimately, we can all offer better value to our customers. That can only be to the long-term good.

For every one lpg customer, there’s probably at least 20 non-mains households using another form of heat. At the moment, we’re not getting our fair share of that market, so clearly there is plenty of opportunity. It might be harder at first for some businesses to adjust to this new way of working, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the long-term benefits it could well bring.

It costs money to run a trade association. Rob Shuttleworth has been charged by UKLPG’s board with the task of producing a three-year plan by January 2009, which will review the future activities of UKLPG, as well as our revenue opportunities. The board believes that there are a number of opportunities to generate additional revenue and so place less financial burden on member companies.

One option will be to extend the sale of UKLPG’s first class range of Codes of Practice. There’s also a group looking at training opportunities for heating engineers as a result of the HSE moving the registered gas installer scheme from CORGI to Capita. We hope this will not only bring more qualified engineers into the industry, but also provide an income stream for UKLPG.

We also want to expand out membership, perhaps to include companies that are not directly associated with the lp gas industry. We need to identify associated industries and organisations that could benefit from becoming members. Any organisation that touches our industry, in whatever form, is likely to benefit from membership and UKLPG will gain from having a larger and more diverse membership base.

Finally, I would just like to thank everyone involved in 2008’s conference, which most visitors found to be refreshingly different. The group discussions seemed to go down very well, rather than having a full day of presentations, as it enabled everyone to actively involve themselves in a range of topics. The next UKLPG conference is planned for May 20-21 2009 in Leeds, so if anyone’s got any ideas or thoughts on what they would like to see at that event, UKLPG would be happy to hear from you.

Pictures: Top – David Asquith, Middles – L–R: Jeff Watson, Rob Shuttleworth, Mike Chapman, Lisa Thomson and Sam Tolley-Debruyne.

Contact UKLPG on 02476 711601 www.uklpg.org