Our approach to sustainability

Being truly sustainable and leading the sector on sustainability means more than just protecting the environment. It means doing the right thing for people, for the planet and for our own performance, both now and into the future. We need to make sure that what we do today is right for tomorrow and that we don't disadvantage future generations or store up problems for the future in the process.

Much of this Corporate Responsibility Report sets out our approach to sustainability. It highlights some of the environmental, social, economic, ethical and business performance issues that are critical to us and to our customers. Importantly, it also states where we could be doing better. This is very important to us – with long-term challenges including climate change, population growth and increasing pressure on limited natural resources, we need to continually evolve our approach to environmental management and ensure that sustainability is at the heart of our business.

Since the publication of our last Corporate Responsibility Report, we have continued to develop our approach to sustainability and look at how we can better embed sustainability into how we do business. This section gives more background on some of our key achievements and our next steps.

In 2009/10, we reviewed the sustainability and climate change commitments and practice of all of the contractors bidding to manage the engineering projects that make up our capital programme for 2010 – 15.

In particular, we wrote a contract specification that set out our approach to sustainability, climate change and carbon. This stated our related expectations of the contractors looking to work with us. We asked all of these contractors to demonstrate their understanding and experience in sustainability and climate change issues. We also reviewed the backgrounds of the people being proposed as contractor leads on sustainability and climate change. All of the potential contractors were then scored on their level of experience and understanding in sustainability, climate change and carbon, with results feeding into the overall assessment and award of contracts.

To further raise awareness of sustainability in the delivery of our capital programme, we set out a requirement for contractors to use our new sustainability checklist to assess proposed engineering projects against our own sustainability principles. This means that future projects will now be scored against a range of environmental, social, ethical and economic issues as part of the design process. Scores from these assessments will feed in to a set of Key Performance Indicators in 2010/11. They will be used to review where we could improve our sustainability performance when designing and building new water and wastewater assets, like pipelines and treatment sites.