Sustainability report 2009
Community and supplier engagement
We regard corporate citizenship as an integral part of our business and wish to contribute positively to communities wherever we work – not simply through the lasting infrastructure we leave for the public, but in our wider contribution to those communities.
We recognise the legitimate interests that local communities have in the way we do business. By engaging with them early and consistently we benefit from their positive reaction to our work.
Our customers wish to see our demonstrable involvement with local communities within bid documentation. By harnessing the power of our different businesses, we can share best practice across the Group. This allows us to play a positive role in all the societies and communities in which we operate and, through the delivery of better projects and services, helps us to secure future work.
Our approach
To help us to manage our community engagement programmes, our Code of Conduct explicitly outlines to employees our commitments to respecting the community around us. The second phase of online training accompanying the Code, due for launch across the Group before the end of 2010, works to embed these commitments.
Consultation with local people often involves leaflet drops, project websites and community discussions or exhibitions. To ensure we listen to our stakeholders as well as inform them, our larger sites have permanent community relations staff, ensuring that we liaise with key stakeholders on a regular basis. They aim to create a sense of community ownership throughout our projects in our relationships with local authorities, schools, community organisations, residents and local charity partners.
Increasingly, communities and customers care about the impact of our work on the diversity and habitats of local flora and fauna. By engaging local people in our projects early through the methods described above we are able to learn from their knowledge.
Supplier engagement
Engaging with our suppliers effectively helps us to strengthen our presence on a local level, while also enhancing those relationships that can help us to win repeat business.
Our suppliers are entitled to expect the same standards of conduct that we expect of our employees and others, and we work to ensure that our suppliers’ values and behaviour matches our own.
We work in partnership with those suppliers who adopt our values and endeavour to align their objectives with those of Balfour Beatty. Many of our businesses hold regular “Meet the buyer” days and supply chain conferences.
UK Supply Chain Management Programme
In the UK, we have over 27,000 suppliers. Supply chain management has traditionally been focused on at an operating company level. We recognise that as a Group we need to deliver industry-leading procurement and supply chain management solutions that contribute to superior performance and profitability for Balfour Beatty, our shareholders and our customers. With this in mind, we have acknowledged that we can make the biggest savings by bringing our businesses together to make better use of their purchasing power. We want bigger, stronger relationships with a more select group of suppliers who can work with us on continuous improvement.
Waste management has been identified as one of the priority categories for our supply chain management programme in the UK. Work commences in 2010 on this category which will involve engagement our supply chain. Such an approach will not only yield cost savings but will help us develop more robust data for our 2010 baseline and encourage our supply chain partners to work with us to implement innovative waste solutions as we work to avoiding waste disposal to landfill.
Engaging our supply chain to align their thinking with ours on the responsible sourcing of materials will be a key element in delivering a more sustainable Balfour Beatty. Our suppliers can help us to improve our understanding of our indirect (Scope 3) emissions through the materials and services we procure in delivering our projects. This knowledge will help us to identify areas on which to focus our reduction efforts and to identify targets for the future.
We will continue to engage our suppliers in our mission to create a Zero Harm culture and create sustainability within our supply chain. Incorporating Zero Harm, sustainability, ethics and values up-front in our UK supply chain management project will help us to deliver against these programmes in a co-ordinated way.
Our 2012 sustainability expectations demand that our businesses will:
- Carry out sustainability reviews of their supply chain as part of their supplier assessment process, to identify and respond to risk and opportunities
- Ensure that key suppliers are aware of with our 2020 sustainability vision