About Us

Our main contribution to CO2 emissions is through our buildings, in particular the energy we use to power them, as well as the travel of our people.
To minimise this impact our branches and head office at Leek are not only powered by renewable electricity but as we refurbish and modernise our branch and office buildings, we are progressively introducing:

• the most efficient heating and lighting available
• light motion sensors
• branch based building monitoring systems so we can monitor and control heating and lighting from our Leek Customer Support Centre (CSC).

In addition we are currently undertaking a major refurbishment project at our Leek CSC, and reducing our environmental impact is a high priority, for example:

• the atrium roof design was altered to ensure a more environmentally friendly roof structure; air conditioning is not included, as natural cooling can be achieved. The materials and design are the same as used by the Eden project in Cornwall!
• we have installed meters to help monitor and control the energy consumption from our Leek CSC data centre.

Green Transport

As part of our plans to reduce business mileage, we developed a green transport plan for the Group. We've already introduced:

• a car-share scheme, with reserved parking for car sharers
• a ‘free emergency ride home’ scheme, and
• communicating the benefits of cycling and walking to work.

We have invested in video conferencing to reduce business travel and have launched a cycle equipment purchase/loan scheme.

Our performance

Our target for 2007 was a 30% improvement in efficiency in Group electricity usage, Group business mileage and Group CO2 emissions. This very stretching target took into account the anticipated positive impact of our switch to renewable electricity for the branch network and our Leek Customer Support Centre.

On a like-for-like basis we have actually achieved an overall efficiency improvement of 15%. In 2006 we opened a new Customer Support Centre at Bristol - as we only have comprehensive information for this site from 2007, it has been excluded from the comparison.

The reason we have not achieved our 30% target is an increase in business travel. With an increased branch network and a fully operational Bristol CSC office following the Bristol and West acquisition, business has increased significantly. For example business travel from 2006 to 2007 has increased by 32% alone.

On the other hand we have made significant improvements in other areas:

• our electricity usage has decreased by 4.5% reflecting our increased business focus on reducing our environmental impact and the efforts of our green team;
• our overall attributable CO2 emissions have reduced by 68% as a result of our move to renewable energy for our Customer Support Centre and branches.

Performance against these targets was assessed in terms of the electricity used and miles travelled in delivering our key business targets of customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and total Group assets. These measures form part of our balanced scorecard.

In 2007 we emitted 3,076 tonnes from our energy consuption and business travel (after deducting renewable energy). This includes our Bristol CSC office.

Looking forward

Our long-term commitment is to reduce our environmental impact by 20% by the end of 2020. This is in line with the government's proposed climate change bill and equates to an average annual reduction of around 2% per annum. We are moving to absolute targets as we recognise the need to reduce our impact, despite our growth as a business. Our target for 2007 is a reduction of 2.5% in:

• energy usage
• business mileage
• paper usage
• CO2 emissions

Work is also underway to offset our remaining carbon emissions. This is as well as, not instead of, our efforts to reduce our direct environmental impact.

We are also looking into how we can change our fleet car policy to reduce the amount of CO2 produced as a result of business travel. We have already agreed for example to have an all diesel fleet for employees who have a car for essential business travel. This decision will affect all new cars purchased on behalf of our essential drivers from February 2008.