Edited by Martin Lodge and featuring the work of Sharon Darcy, Roger Darlington, Sebastian Eyre, Cosmo Graham, Eva Heims, Stephen Littlechild, Martin Lodge, Trisha McAuley and Richard Moriarty, this discussion paper considers customer engagement as a means to an end, namely, one that seeks to reduce, if not eliminate the role of regulatory agencies. For others, customer-engagement processes offer the promise of a genuine entrenchment of citizen interests in the regulated process.

Growing customer engagement is a topic whose time seems to have come. Across regulated industries, regulators are proposing different forms of customer engagement. Of course, ideas about customer engagement are hardly novel – what is novel, at least in the case of the UK, is the encouragement for regulated firms to directly engage with their (various) customers.

This discussion paper brings together a number of approaches and experiences in customer engagement, with a special focus on experiences across the UK and different regulated sectors. It draws together a number of key participants to customer engagement processes. It builds on wider debates about the evolving nature of the British regulatory state and, more generally, debates about the future shape of regulation and the role of citizens.