Nicole Benford is a Community Relations leader with over 15 years’ experience in strategic communications, consultation and stakeholder engagement across the UK’s built environment, infrastructure and energy sectors.

Nicole heads up Community Relations at National Gas and leads engagement across a wide portfolio of projects, from nationally significant infrastructure schemes to smaller, community-level initiatives that can be just as impactful locally. Nicole is currently leading on stakeholder engagement across several major pipeline diversion projects.

Having worked both in-house and agency-side, Nicole brings a grounded, practical perspective to consultation. She is passionate about getting engagement right, combining the value of traditional, face-to-face approaches with innovative methods, including digital tools and emerging technologies to improve reach and insight.

Nicole has a strong focus on inclusivity and is passionate about making sure underserved and often overlooked communities are part of the conversation. She is particularly interested in how the sector can evolve towards more transparent, accessible and genuinely collaborative engagement, as the pace and scale of infrastructure development continues to grow.