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:
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