Position: Chief Operating Officer
Organisation: Cadent Gas
Bio: Howard is the Chief Operating Officer at Cadent Gas Limited (Cadent), a position he has held since joining the company in March 2019. As COO, he has operational responsibility for all of Cadent’s networks, including London, the East of England, the West Midlands, and the North West. He also leads all asset investment and construction programmes, oversees the new connections business, and heads Cadent’s engineering and asset management functions. In this role, Howard has end-to-end operational oversight for all of Cadent’s field activities—from planning works and dispatching emergency engineers to maintaining network supply and balance, and delivering investment programmes across the 135,000 kilometres of infrastructure serving 11 million homes and businesses. Prior to joining Cadent, Howard was Operations Director at Northern Gas Networks (NGN) for over eight years, having joined the company in 2010. He played a key role in the regulatory engagement process for Ofgem’s RIIO-GD1 framework. Before NGN, he was a partner at EC Harris (now part of Arcadis) for more than a decade, where he led the power distribution sector. His work focused on construction project management and controls for major investment programmes, and he also supported several utility company acquisitions across the globe.
