Jonathon Porritt

Another good year for Carillion on the sustainability front.

Their Community Engagement Strategy (which was very much "work in progress" last year) has moved steadily forward, and is now beginning to influence the behaviour of project managers all over the country.

As ever, Carillion is very clear that there has to be a demonstrable business case for undertaking new measures on its social and environmental challenges, and has therefore decided to test out two particular aspects of its business case to see just how robust the data will prove to be:

• first, the impact of its sustainable development work on recruiting new staff (how much of a difference does Carillion's leadership role really make?); and
• secondly, the impact of its sustainable development work on winning new business - just how significant is it?

Hard data on business benefits like these are important, not least because that's the sort of incentive that managers need to go the extra mile on community engagement, environmental management, health and safety and so on.

And that will be the next challenge for Carillion's Sustainability Committee: to drive this agenda more effectively into the respective businesses to ensure it really is properly "mainstreamed".

Back to “Our next steps”