Sustainability report 2009

Balfour Beatty’s sustainability and corporate responsibility agenda and strategy have matured considerably since we began reporting in 2000.

Our sustainability vision and roadmap defined in 2008 with support from Forum for the Future, and rolled-out in 2009, has provided the Group with a clear direction of travel and ultimate vision of how we wish to be seen as an industry leader in sustainability. This year’s Sustainability report has therefore been structured to reflect our vision, and aims to effectively communicate to all our stakeholders where we are heading.

One of our key goals for this year’s reporting is to give more emphasis to the issues that have the most potential to affect our business significantly.

To help us to prioritise, we held workshops with members of the executive team and other senior managers. The aim of these sessions was to identify which sustainability issues are most material to the business from a number of issues that had already been identified through the work done on the sustainability vision.

By analysing issues relative to their potential impact on our ability to deliver on strategic aims, and their significance to stakeholders, we wanted to gain a clearer idea of which issues have most potential to materially affect the success of the organisation. This helped to give us a better idea of the issues we should give most weight to in this year’s report.

The stakeholders considered were investors, employees, customers, government, NGOs, local communities, media and suppliers. Firstly, participants considered to what degree are stakeholders interested in how we manage each issue, secondly the issues were ranked by relevance to stakeholders, and finally issues ranked against ability to deliver our business strategy.

The issues prioritised were then grouped into a structure for our report, highlighting nine topics as being particularly material for our business:

• Leadership and governance
• Ethics and values
• Meeting customer needs
• Influencing for sustainability
• Safety
• Talent and training
• Energy and carbon
• Waste
• Materials

We hope this helps us to focus our communications and to be more transparent on the issues of concern to stakeholders that matter most to our business.

Additional issues considered

These issues are covered within our full online report, and made reference to in our summary report.

• Supplier relationships
• Employee engagement
• Community engagement
• Community investment
• Protecting ecological resources
• Pensions
• Materials lifecycle management
• Water management
• Employee health and well-being
• Incentives for non financial performance
• Diversity
• Turnover and absence
• Local employment
• Migrant workers

Issues not explicitly covered in sustainability reporting

• Senior level remuneration
• Innovation (though this is evidenced throughout)

*Output from materiality workshop 02.02.10

Attendees

• Andrew McNaughton, Chief Operating Officer
• Andy Rose, Group Managing Director (Engineering and Safety)
• Mike Peasland, Group Managing Director
• Paul Willis, Head of HR
• Paul Stead, Group Safety, Health and Environment Manager
• Andrew Hayward, Head of Compliance
• Duncan Murray, Director of Corporate Communications
• Jonathan Garrett, Group Head of Environment
• Hannah James, Senior Corporate Communications Executive

This is our full report online and addition to this, we also produce a summary document, available here. Again this year’s report has been aligned to relevant sections of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Framework.

This is Balfour Beatty’s ninth report and covers our worldwide operations for the 12 months ending 31 December 2009 (unless stated otherwise).

Our approach and management systems cover our global activities and we report on incidents and penalties on a global basis.

We collate safety data for all of our wholly-owned activities and for those joint ventures where we have management control. Sub-contractor safety performance is included for all activities apart from the US, where it is not common practice.

Our environmental data is reported for all wholly-owned UK and European operating companies and for those joint ventures where we have management control. This year, our US construction and communities businesses and our joint venture businesses in Dubai (BK Gulf and Dutco Balfour Beatty) have progressed towards reporting environmental performance to the same standards. We report data in both absolute numbers (e.g. tonnes of waste) and normalised against £m revenue (tonnes of waste / £m revenue). The turnover figure used differs therefore from the total revenues for the Group as it excludes environmental data from minority interests where we do not have management control.

We report on employee data for all our wholly-owned businesses worldwide. Where possible we refer to the people that work directly for Balfour Beatty or our joint venture businesses as employees throughout the report. Our HR data is reported in terms of ‘staff’ (people who are primarily office-based) and ‘operatives.’ (people who are primarily site-based).

In October 2009, Balfour Beatty acquired Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB). This acquisition has led to a number of structural changes across the Group, meaning we are better placed to meet our customers’ needs. Our 2009 report includes PB safety data from time of acquisition, and HR data for the full year.

There were no significant divestments during the year. We continue to restructure the business to meet market needs and opportunities. During 2009, our UK rail businesses were brought together into a single operating company and our two UK mechanical and electrical businesses merged to form Balfour Beatty Engineering Services.

Some of our businesses publish their own reports aimed at their stakeholders:

• Mansell
• Gammon Construction
• Balfour Beatty Capital
• Parsons Brinckerhoff