Sustainability is a driver of value
Sustainability is part of our everyday approach. We improve sustainability in its broadest sense, by helping businesses to flourish, create employment and boost the economy in their local areas. This, in turn, creates opportunities and growth for us. We embarked on our sustainability journey a decade ago, well before most companies and we have found that understanding our environmental impact and managing it effectively is of great importance to our customers.
We believe that the whole lifecycle of a building is important in judging its sustainability. By reusing old premises we save all of the significant carbon emissions involved in new construction which offsets the fact that older buildings are generally less energy efficient in operation than brand-new properties. We also choose sites convenient for public transport and many customers cycle or walk, reducing the carbon footprint of travel to and from the office.
While our recycled buildings are inherently sustainable, we can do more to minimise the environmental impact of our business, by implementing green management procedures, engaging with our 4,000 customers and working with them to reduce energy usage and waste from their operations. By doing so, we help both our customers and Workspace realise the benefits of sustainability.
Our priorities
We have four core sustainability priorities:
- Carbon management. We look to understand our energy use and identify improvements, so we reduce our costs and carbon dioxide emissions, and perform well in the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme.
- Waste management. We work to improve our recycling rates and reduce waste sent to landfill, so that we cut our landfill tax costs.
- Customer satisfaction. We aim to meet our customers’ needs and help them improve their sustainability, so that we retain our customers and maintain our rental income.
- Customer safety and security. We look to protect our customers and improve our health and safety policy, so that we retain and attract customers and safeguard our reputation.
How we manage sustainability
Our sustainability governance structure drives the implementation of our initiatives, empowers our people and helps develop key decisions about future initiatives.
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Responsibility |
Harry Platt
Chief Executive |
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Oversight of our sustainability programme. |
Sustainability Committee
The Committee is made up of our target owners and is chaired by Angus Boag, Development Director. |
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Discussing the implementation of our strategy and identifying opportunities.
Reporting to the Board on our progress. |
Target owners
Targets are allocated to individuals at the beginning of each year. |
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Implementing our sustainability targets. |
Performance in 2010/11
- Carbon management. We looked to improve our CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme performance by implementing energy efficiency measures on key sites, including automatic meters, new building management systems, voltage optimisation and low energy lighting. We are also working with customers to introduce green leases and establishing joint action plans with them to decrease their energy use. We successfully completed and planned several major energy efficiency capital projects and are rolling out the installation of automatic meters across our portfolio which will assist us in identifying and targeting properties where we can reduce energy consumption. The low and no-cost management measures, including green lease and joint action plans with tenants, were more challenging with our highly diverse tenant mix and large number of unique buildings. We will focus more of our efforts on training and supporting centre managers to manage buildings more efficiently in 2011/12, including adding clauses to performance agreements where appropriate.
- Waste management. Our centre managers have continued to engage with our customers to increase recycling rates. We avoided over £216,000 in landfill costs in 2010/11 across our portfolio, by diverting 4,513 tonnes of waste through recycling programmes and converting our waste to energy.
- Customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction and loyalty are key to the sustainability of our income stream and we targeted a customer experience score of 80% on our annual survey. We once again outperformed this benchmark by achieving an 84% approval rating with our customers in 2010/11.
- Customer safety and security. During the year, we provided an improved remote monitoring service on 28 estates, 15 estates are now supported by mobile patrol personnel, and we increased and improved remote fire alarm systems on 26 estates. We aim to improve customer confidence in security on site from 74% in 2010/11 by rolling out similar security measures across additional sites in the coming year.
We fully achieved eight of our ten targets for 2010/11 and partially achieved one. This high level of achievement reflects a focus on core business essentials in our target setting process. Details of our performance against these targets can be found on our sustainability website, www.workspacegroup.co.uk/sustainability/
Achievement of the target to reduce energy use could not be evaluated at the time of this Report, as suppliers provide final energy statements for the year in July. We will publish a full evaluation on our sustainability website by 15 August 2011, along with our 2010/11 total carbon emissions.
Initiatives for 2011/12
Building on our success in 2010/11, we will continue to focus on how sustainability can enhance our business performance in 2011/12. Our Sustainability Committee, supported by our strategic advisors Upstream Sustainability Services, identified 16 potential initiatives, rooted in our core customer-facing business for this financial year. These include:
- Creating an economic sustainability barometer that can be applied to all business centre types and conveys our sustainability message to stakeholders (customers, planning and neighbourhood groups, investors and government).
- Commissioning embodied carbon research, to establish the business and environmental benefits and value of preserving current building stock rather than developing new stock.
- Providing sustainable procurement training for our staff.
- Introducing sustainability related targets into the performance agreements for key staff, aligned with the 2011/12 sustainability programme and linked to bonuses.
- Improving the recycling rate average across all centres to 55% and working towards zero waste to landfill by 2013.
- Installing a system to obtain real-time, digital energy monitoring for all sites. Actively using consumption information to improve site management and communicate with tenants.
- Increasing the percentage of customers who receive e-billing to 50% (currently 25%) by making this the default choice for centre managers and tenants.
- Establishing a central community fund for our centres to support local initiatives.
We will carefully review the business value, sustainability impact and resources required for each initiative to ensure we deliver value to all of our stakeholders. Success in delivering these initiatives forms part of the annual performance and remuneration assessment for each initiative leader.
Details of our performance against our targets can be found online:
www.workspacegroup.co.uk/sustainability/
