Carillion also recognises that one of the key elements for enhancing quality of life is to ensure that the business makes its contribution towards preserving human rights of our staff, suppliers and the communities in which we operate.

Understanding how Carillion can contribute to sustainable development will enable us, as a business, to capitalise on opportunities that will arise as the UK and the world moves toward more sustainable patterns of consumption.

Carillion recognises it has many impacts on the community, through its employment of staff, the provision of infrastructure and services, its impact on environmental quality and how it invests in the community. This section sets out our management approach. Our community investment and local communities liaison is reported separately.

Local community liaison is undertaken at a project level, on a site by site basis, and is supported by Carillion business group stakeholder engagement plans.

In 2000 Carillion has committed to participate as a pilot member in the Business in the Community (BITC) ‘Winning with Integrity’ initiative. As part of this initiative Carillion has committed to reporting a number of indicators which will help us to measure our impact on our workforce, the marketplace, the environment, the community and human rights. Carillion, along with a number of other leading UK companies, will begin to measure and report against these key indicators over the next two years to measure and report the improvement of our social impacts. Many of these indicators are already in use and some it will be looking to put in place.

Carillion is also a member of the BITC PerCent Club which measures Global Corporate Community Investment in 2000 as a percentage of pre-tax profits. Corporate Community Investment includes Cash Support, Staff, Gifts and Management costs in kind. However, it is difficult to accurately report Carillion’s total contribution to communities, due to the lack of systems in place to measure some criteria such as staff time and management costs. It is likely that Carillion’s contribution has been considerably understated.

Carillion’s direct impact on the community is enhanced near major projects where we support local initiatives and by business group activities. At a corporate level Carillion supports in kind contributions, payroll giving to charities and also has a Charities Policy that governs how our Appeals Budget is spent.

The government has assisted charities through the promotion of Payroll Giving. In 2000 Carillion implemented the facility to enable all employees to contribute to a specific charity of their choice, if they wished to do so. The scheme is administered by Carillion's Charity Agency - Charities Aid Foundation. Donations made through payroll giving not only gain tax relief, but the government adds a 10% supplement on all donations until April 2003.