I am also especially pleased to report that Carillion’s environment, community and social report 1999-2000 entitled ‘We Are Making Choices’ won the 'Best First Time Reporter' award from the Association of Chartered and Certified Accountants (ACCA) for environmental reporting.

At any moment in time Carillion’s businesses are working to enhance the quality of the built environment, whether it be road and rail transport, social housing, commercial premises or leisure facilities, as well as managing key support services in hospitals, for the Metropolitan Police, BT and many other clients.

Our strategic focus towards increasing our facilities management and services activities is in line with our commitment to sustainability, which requires us to consider methods of product and service delivery which use fewer resources.

Carillion’s sustainability programme has been developed from our award winning environment programme and retains a good balance between Board level direction, external comment, support from expert professionals and ideas from our employees.

Our sustainability programme supports our goal of increasing shareholder value whilst conducting our activities in an environmentally and socially responsible manner. A key focus of the programme continues to be improving our understanding of the relationships between the economic, environmental and social aspects of sustainability so that Carillion can most effectively contribute to an improved quality of life for us all. To help in this task, I am pleased to report that Carillion is working with Business in the Community on a pilot scheme over the next two years to produce a series of key performance indicators that will be used to assess a company’s impact on society and which will influence our reporting in the future.

In Carillion’s first environment, community and social report last year, we set out Carillion’s 2000-01 sustainability objectives. The targets, which integrated environmental, financial, supply chain, stakeholder communications and management targets have delivered good progress towards achieving our objectives by the end of 2001. I am pleased to report that 79% of our targets for 2000 were either achieved or substantially achieved as outlined in detail later in this report which also details the targets we have for 2001 to deliver our sustainability objectives.

Much of the success of our sustainability programme is due to the creativity and enthusiasm of our employees. This report is a tribute to their commitment and achievements for which I thank them.

Finally, as stated at the time of Carillion’s de-merger from Tarmac and in line with Combined Code Corporate Governance Guidelines, John McDonough, previously Vice President of Johnson Controls Inc., was appointed Group Chief Executive on January 1^st 2001.  I will retain the role of Chairman.