Our vision and strategy

In 2000, reflecting the growing understanding of sustainability in industry, Carillion began to look at the way in which it could become a more sustainable company. It was at this time that our environmental programme, commenced in 1994, was developed into a sustainability programme. See the diagram summarising our development and ‘Progress towards Sustainability’.

We have taken a number of key steps in our journey towards sustainability and continue to review our activities and are working hard to demonstrate the business benefits of becoming more sustainable in the way we work and in the construction and services we deliver.

In 2005 following publication of the UK Government’s strategy for sustainable development Securing the Future, we took the decision to align our programme with the new UK strategy and in particular, with the new Guiding Principles and Shared Priorities. This was a similar approach to the one we took with our initial development in 2000 when we developed our original impacts (Sun) diagram that aligned our impacts with the key objectives for delivering sustainable development identified by the Government in 1999 (A Better Quality of Life).

Step 1: Creating our vision

Making tomorrow a better place It is our intent to demonstrate our policy by delivering more sustainable solutions for our people, our customers and the wider community and environment in which we work and live. We will lead industry by promoting best sustainable practice and exceeding guidance set out by government and regulatory bodies.

Step 2: Establishing our Sustainability Policy

Our sustainability policy reflects our commitment to ensuring that sustainability is paramount to our business. Developed through consultation and collaboration with senior management the policy recognises that Carillion’s work has a impact on all its stakeholders from clients, our suppliers, our staff and the communities in which we work and live.

Step 3: Identifying our impacts, the “Sun Diagram”

We undertook a review of our impacts and the new UK strategy and developed a ‘‘new sun diagram’’ that recognises and aligns with the Government’s Shared Priority areas for sustainable development. The Sun diagram allows us to show the linkage between our policy, the Shared Priorities and our key sustainability impacts. The diagram can be used at strategic, business group and contract levels to help understand the issues we need to address and when, for example, considering the impacts of specific project or contract. It has become our Carillion definition of sustainability and we recognise that to become more sustainable, we must consider the full basket of issues and put plans in place to reduce all our impacts on society and the environment. The Ashridge Business School have recognised our original “sun diagram” as an example of good practice in their report ‘Making Corporate Responsibility Work: Lessons from Real Business’.

Step 4: Embedding in our business strategy

In 2001 we published a strategy model that links our business objectives to our sustainability objectives. The model was developed with senior team involvement, including our Chief Executive, as a tool to understand how KPI’s could be used to improve sustainability performance whilst demonstrating how they deliver business benefit and contribute to the achievement of business objectives. The Mayor of London has held up our strategy model as an example of good practice in his publication "Making your plans sustainable: A London Guide". This was further developed in 2003 to identify our major challenges, for details click here. In 2004 we reviewed our strategy model and objectives to ensure they were based on tangible outcomes to be delivered by 2010. This resulted in the Business Plan for 2004 and demonstrated that it was as important to deliver the intangible issues, as it is to deliver hard-nosed cash backed business objectives. In fact it was seen that community and environmental objectives both enabled and legitimised the success of our business objectives in a process of continual improvement. In 2005 we mapped our activities against the new UK strategy, Securing the Future, resulting in the creation of a new impacts (“sun”) diagram. We also defined the Shared Priorities in Carillion terms and established definitions for the twelve impact areas. These definitions and aspirations then formed the basis of a new sustainability policy. The next step was to identify clearly the link between our impacts and realising the business benefits of attracting and developing our people, winning work, managing risk and improving our business margin. Finally, a number of KPI’s were established to enable us to measure these business benefits. This extensive consultation and development was then summarised in a framework model to enable the philosophy and thinking to be communicated to all key business managers in Carillion. Note that is an internal document, but a framework that could be modified and applied to other organisations. For more detail on our approach to sustainability see the attached link and the paper published in 2003 describing our sustainability strategy and our journey towards becoming more sustainable organisation entitled “A strategy for sustainability” published by The Institution of Civil Engineers in the first issue of the journal Engineering Sustainability.

Step 5: Sustainability Excellence Model

Our next step in 2006 is to develop and trial a Sustainability Excellence Model that will enable us to identify where we are against a common baseline right across the business and provide clear guidance (and “stretch”!) for our teams to understand and deliver the improvement that will enable us to realise our vision. The model is currently under development by the sustainability champions in our business in collaboration with operations staff and senior managers. The Natural Step, a leading “systems thinking” and sustainability charity are helping us with this development.

To see how our sustainability programme is managed see the managing sustainability section and for how it is developing see our next steps section.