NEON Annual Report 2018

Former NEON President Lewis Shand Smith (right) with current President Janusz Gwiazdowski (left) and NEON Secretary General Annette Jantzen (centre).

The year 2018 marked new beginnings for NEON, with some changes that will influence our association in the years to come. In March, Annette Jantzen took over from Marine Cornelis as the Secretary General of NEON. In June, NEON members adopted a renewed strategy that redefined the associations’ mission and vision. This lead to the NEON articles of association being reviewed at the end of the year to clarify its membership structure.

NEON got a new and important member: Poland joined NEON in September, and took over its presidency in 2019 after NEON’s first and long-time president, Mr Lewis Shand Smith, left Ombudsman Services.

NEON was born in 2015 out of the informal cooperation of the Belgian, French, UK and Catalan energy ombuds and was registered as an association under Belgian law at the end of 2016. It is thus still a very young association, albeit with a strong potential for growth. The changes that were introduced in 2018 consolidated the fast progress made in the last years and laid the foundations for our association to pursue its growth.

This annual report aims at providing a succinct summary of the recent developments and activities of our network. It is also the first “stand-alone” annual report of NEON. Members’ complaints data –traditionally published together with the annual report– will be published (as previously) at the end of the year.