An ethical approach to managing our business

Governance within sustainability is fundamental to achieving the longer-term shared value creation aims of our Environmental and Social pillars. It is also an essential part of steering our business in the right way, allowing appropriate decision making and control of risk.

Our governance strategy is brought to life through two pillars:

Governance, management & compliance

Focus areas:

  • Keep robust governance, management, compliance and stakeholder relationships core to business operations
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Fair & ethical conduct

Focus areas:

  • Maintain high standards of professional conduct, legal and regulatory compliance
  • Set high ethical standards for ourselves and across our stakeholder relationships
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Governance, management & compliance

Focus areas:

Keep robust governance, management, compliance and stakeholder relationships core to business operations

Read more →

Fair & ethical conduct

Focus areas:

Maintain high standards of professional conduct, legal and regulatory compliance

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Set high ethical standards for ourselves and across our stakeholder relationships

Read more →

Contents

Our Sustainability Journey

Environment


Achieving our low-carbon commitments

Providing the STEM skills to build a low carbon future

Social


Promoting the health, wellbeing & development of our colleagues

Creating equitable & inclusive workplaces for our colleagues & customers

Positively impacting our communities & philanthropic partnerships

Governance


Governance, management & compliance

Fair & ethical conduct

Appendices

The role of governance in ESG

Governance creates the mechanisms to not only keep us honest on progress against our aims, but to also run our business in a way that creates:

  • Fairness and inherently ethical conduct
  • Empowerment and accountability through appropriate governance, management and compliance approaches
  • The ability to maintain an effective strategy
  • A culture that is able to avoid risks, but exploit opportunities

In recognising the importance of Governance to the credibility of our Environmental and Social goals, Appendix A details the metrics and methodologies that we currently use to apply rigour to these goals. We are constantly working to improve our governance approach and have also documented in Appendix B areas where we intend to either develop our current metrics, or begin quantifying and measuring progress within FY24. We have also begun to develop our climate-related disclosures in our Annual Report – see Appendix F for our FY23 disclosure.

Our Governance structure

In order to provide robust governance around our approach to sustainability and to ensure it is fully embedded in the business, we have formulated the below structure in FY23:

Targets

  • Transparent, simple & trusted approach to Governance that benefits our people & our business

FY23 Highlights

  • Established Sustainability Committee, which forms part of the wider Board Governance structure
  • Improved our delegation of authority approach, making decision making & commitments more appropriately owned
  • Implemented new risk management software to enhance the day-to-day management of our risk profile
  • Defined a new risk to manage sustainability