Our Policies

Our Environmental Policy, which is reviewed on an annual basis states:

The Group recognises that its business activities, which consist principally of investing in and developing property in the United Kingdom, have both direct and indirect environmental impacts. The Group's aim is to reduce these to a minimum by good management and sound working practices and improve its environmental performance. In doing so, the Group will seek the active co-operation of designers, contractors, occupiers and other interested parties. The Group will implement this policy by identifying a set of key environmental objectives relevant to its activities, setting appropriate targets and conducting regular reviews of progress.

Julian Barwick has overall responsibility for implementing the policy which is formally reported to Board annually.

In conjunction with our consultants, Faber Maunsell, significant work has been undertaken during 2001 to review and refine our key environmental objectives, which are:

• To seek assurance from our principal consultants and contractors support and will aid delivery of our environmental programme.
• To ensure our key staff have the necessary skills, through appropriate training, to deliver our environmental targets.
• To take environmental issues into account in the construction and design of our buildings, which include:
  • addressing emissions associated with operational energy use, whilst maintaining good working conditions.
  • seeking to reduce the use of raw materials and generation of waste.
• To address emissions associated with travel to work.
• To undertake development, having regard to local biodiversity.

We remain members of the Property Environmental Group, who annually audit our performance against the environmental targets set.

The review has demonstrated that we have made solid progress during the year and our overall performance now exceeds the average score for our peer group.

The challenge for 2002 is to consolidate the performance of last year by embedding the process into our day to day property activities.