Governance, management & compliance
Focus area:
- Keep robust governance, management, compliance and stakeholder relationships core to business operations
Targets
- A transparent, simple and trusted approach to governance that benefits our people and 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 and 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
FY24 Next Steps
- Improve data collection on social and environmental commitments
- Increase internal audit activity
- Develop a Group-wide policy framework to ensure logical structure for Group documentation and all procedural documents are in place for the business to follow
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
Targets
- Drive and execute continuously relevant expectations internally and externally, that support our Mission on a daily basis
FY23 Highlights
- Invested in a systems driven tool to better manage the robustness of third party screening
- Introduced and embedded a balanced scorecard for performance management, incorporating the assessment of values and behaviours, as well as achievements and skills
- Enhanced leadership accountability through incorporating relevant scores from our employee engagement platform (Peakon) into their bonus
- FY23 LTIP share scheme included retention as a measurement hurdle to drive accountability at leadership level for retaining our talent
FY24 Next Steps
- Improve experience and efficiency when executing the contractor onboarding process, whilst maintaining legislative compliance
- Focus on supplier engagement at an onboarding level, as well as a periodic review
- Create a Supplier Code of Conduct to share our sustainability standards and expectations with all suppliers
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