DEBATE ESG


IN ASSOCIATION WITH:


PRESENT: Richard Slater


Lancashire Business View (chair) Michael Barker


WNJ Chartered Accountants


Warren Bennett James Places


Scott Chapman Scope Fire and Security


Brian Devlin Natwest


Ram Gupta Nybble


James Harper


Equestrian Surfaces Zoe Hooton


HPA Chartered Architects


Anthony Mayall BiU


Ian Steel Atkinsons Coffee Roasters


Zowi Whittaker The Fox Group


DOING THE RIGHT THING


We brought our expert panel to energy and utility management expert BiU’s offices in St Annes to discuss the rising importance of Environmental Social Governance (ESG) to businesses of all types and sizes


What do you understand Environmental Social Governance to mean?


AM: It is something that investors are expecting businesses to conform to. It’s a set of good practice and measurement. Measuring what businesses are doing, their impact on the environment, their social impact.


Environmentally it is straightforward. How much are you wasting, how much plastic are you spewing out there, how much energy are you burning and is it dirty brown power or green power?


The social aspect is about social equity, so how you are investing in people, protecting human rights, developing and working with the community.


In terms of governance, it’s how you are going to report all this stuff. It’s all right talking about it but more and more transparency and reporting is becoming key.


Not wasting stuff, not causing a negative impact on the environment and looking after your people just makes sense, doesn’t it?


BD: The terminology around ESG is relatively new, but a lot of the practices are things that really good businesses have been doing for a long time. A lot of this is just common sense.


Why would you waste resources, why would you use more energy than you need, why would you buy something in if you can make it yourself more cheaply?


A lot of large corporates have ESG linked facilities, where potentially they will pay a lower interest rate on borrowings if they achieve ESG goals or perhaps, in some cases, they might pay a higher interest rate and that’s re-invested to help them meet those goals in future.


Successful businesses in Lancashire have been doing this stuff for years as part of their DNA


If businesses can be more sustainable and more energy efficient, in a lot of cases that makes them a better risk. Because if a business is thinking sustainably, it’s thinking long term.


ZW: We are the first business in our industry in the UK to implement EV tippers and crushers.


It is a real gamble by our senior leadership because we don’t know what these trucks can do yet. We don’t know how they’re going to perform once we’ve got them fully loaded day after day.


We work in an un-green, dirty environment. We need to start taking those steps, the same as everybody else does, and there must be a starting point.


The governance side is something which we are still relatively new to, as we’ve grown exponentially over the last two years. We’ve gone national so our reporting is now more stringent.


We need to think about the longer game and what we can do, what we can take advantage of. We’re currently looking into alternative fuels.


MB: Lancashire has a big manufacturing base and big construction businesses which, with better technologies, give us a bigger opportunity to make some easier wins. Technologies are being advanced at faster and faster rates.


All businesses should look at ESG, and not just from a PR perspective. There are also pitfalls in ignoring the subject, particularly within supply chains.


Continued on page 68 LANCASHIREBUSINESSVIEW.CO.UK


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