We are actively committed to reducing our carbon emissions 

Our main CO2 emissions come from the energy we use in our buildings, and by employees on business travel. We are committed to addressing both of these areas.

Energy Management

We established an energy reduction programme in 2006 which continues to achieve year-on-year savings. In 2009 we saved a further 11.9% compared with 2008 adding up to a saving of 28% or 4,400 tonnes of CO2 since the programme began.

In 2009 we continued increasing the energy efficiency of our operations, expanding our energy reduction plan across a further 80 sites. Now 35% of Group businesses measure and monitor their energy use.

'Smart metering’ for electricity and gas is being expanded to all our sites and will be complete by 2011. This will allow facility managers, site managers and energy champions to monitor their consumption much more easily and accurately and to assess the results of any energy saving initiatives.

Our facilities managers took on the role of ‘energy champions’, working hard to improve the energy performance of our buildings and monitoring the progress of our energy saving projects. We also extended our climate change activity to buildings not under our direct control, working with landlords to achieve increased energy efficiency.

Business travel management 

Business travel is the second biggest factor contributing to our carbon emissions. Despite a greater focus on controlling business travel, related emissions grew by 10% in line with the growth of the business compared to the previous year. Car emmisions and rail travel emissions have gone up, although our air travel has decreased.

Video and teleconferencing provide effective ways to reduce travel. We increased the number of conference calls made by 67% to 116,000 in 2009 (2008: 76,000), reducing transport time and costs, increasing work efficiency and giving our employees a better work life balance. Where travel is necessary we also encourage our employees to use different modes of travel and introduced the 'Cycle to Work' scheme last year. Over the next year we will engage our employees in a targeted campaign to continue to reduce business travel.

All company cars run on diesel and are subjected to our emissions criteria which is set at a maximum of 175gm CO 2 /km. Last year the average CO2 emissions’ rating of our vehicles in 2009 was 147gm CO2 /km (over a fleet of 1,896). In 2010 we set a new cap of 160gmCO 2 /km.

We will be rolling out a vehicle tracking system, which monitors fuel consumption, speed and driving style where appropriate across the Group. We will also be working with The Energy Savings Trust to validate and improve the carbon footprint of our fleet vehicles, and work towards getting full accreditation from Motorvate.

Setting the standard

Our work has been recognised by the achievement of the Carbon Trust Standard in November 2009 for two of our divisions.  The Carbon Trust Standard focuses not only on sustained emissions reduction but also on our overall carbon management governance. We were also recognised as a Brand Emissions leader. These endorsements demonstrate to our employees, clients and shareholders that we are committed to measuring, managing and reducing our carbon footprint.

Through the work we have completed already we are now in a better position to respond to the introduction of the new Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) regulations, operational from April 2010. Our achievement of the Carbon Trust Standard assures us a good ranking in the league table in the first phase of the CRC. We are also installing automatic meter reading (AMR) over the next 2 years to perform well against the AMR metric of CRC.