Vision and Strategy for Sustainability

Our vision is to be a construction to services company renowned for working in a spirit of openness, collaboration and mutual dependency, and to deliver solutions that ensure our customers’ success becomes our success.

To achieve this we believe that we have to demonstrate the business case for sustainable development. This means we have to quantify the costs and benefits to our business of incorporating the principles of sustainable development into our everyday decisions.

To be successful in this vision we have to engage our clients and suppliers and encourage them to work with us to provide ‘sustainable solutions for the way we live’. This principle is the core of our sustainability policy, our core values and is the driving force for our sustainability programme, which started as an environmental programme in 1994.

To enable us to focus our attention on appropriate activities we have based our vision and strategy on the UK Governments 4 objectives for sustainable development. Using these 4 objectives we have identified the key sustainability issues for our businesses in our sun diagram. This has enabled us to present to our clients, suppliers and staff the way in which, by recognising and responding to each of our individual impacts, we can have a positive impact on a seemingly large and complex issue. For example, by incorporating sustainability into design we are able to make prudent use of use natural resources. This is one of the 4 Government objectives for sustainable development.

Our sustainability strategy and journey towards becoming more sustainable is described in more detail in the paper “A strategy for sustainability” published by The Institution of Civil Engineers in the first issue of their new journal Engineering Sustainability.

Communication within the Group

Effective communication is crucial to the success of our sustainability strategy. Over 2002 and into 2003 we have clarified the communication of sustainability information within the group. This is demonstrated diagrammatically below.

Communication of our strategy can be a challenging task, as many of our staff are transient. Therefore, we utilise different ways of communicating with our staff. For example, we have;

Top-level accountability for sustainability issues is shared between plc executive director Roger Robinson (Health & Safety and Environment) and Chief Executive John McDonough (Community and Human Rights).

Our Future and the Challenge Ahead

‘Be the change you want to see in the world’. This quotation was taken from Ghandi and we use it in our sustainability awareness video as it represents a key message we want to give to our staff and clients - by making small changes we can have big impacts.

We have progressed in the development of our management tools and our understanding of our sustainability impacts (both positive and negative) and have continued to strive towards becoming a sustainable organisation. We recognised that now is an appropriate time to stop and take stock of the advances we have made to ensure that we fully embed the lessons we have learnt and the innovative solutions we have developed into the very core of our businesses.

A challenge in achieving this is the need to demonstrate the true business case for sustainable development. During 2002 we linked the implementation of our sustainability strategy with our core business strategy and have been able to demonstrate to our senior management team that the achievement of successes in implementing sustainable development will result in a more successful business. We shall continue to implement sustainable accounting systems and develop innovative ways of demonstrating to our project staff, their clients and suppliers that there is real benefit in making sustainable development part of our every day business activities.

In summary, our sustainability programme in 2003 will focus on consolidating the activities, successes, lessons learned and innovations to date. We will develop systems to ensure that the innovations and successes are repeated throughout the business as part of our core activities. In addition, we shall seek to learn from the areas where we have been less successful and find new and innovative ways to solve the sustainability issues that we encounter in our every day activities.

Jonathon Porritt and David Cowans our two external advisors outline their view of the future challenges facing Carillion.