68 DEBATE
Zoe Hooton
Scott Chapman
Anthony Mayall
Michael Barker
Not wasting stuff, not causing a
negative impact on the environment and looking after your people just makes sense, doesn’t it?
Ian Steel Brian Devlin
James Harper Continued from page 67
ESG is a brilliant framework for looking at your risk analysis. It’s not just that you want your employees to be happy or you want to be able to report good green credentials. You want to be aware of what the risks to the business are.
To give an example, if you were heavily reliant on gas and had the foresight to look what was happening eight months ago in Ukraine you might have been thinking ‘let’s take steps now’ and asking what you could do with solar power.
So, it should be part of your risk analysis to develop a strategy which gives you long term competitive advantage.
JH: A lot of what we do is putting product on the ground. We’ve diverted in the last ten years more than 60,000 tonnes of carpet waste from landfill.
Looking at the circular economy, we have solutions in place, so when we provide a surface, we can recycle it back into a product. That is a very big step. Also, every sales person has an electric car, everything is electric powered. We’ve been on the journey since 2017.
ZH: It’s about people, planet, profit, place; a combination of all those factors. We sit with the client and look at their objectives, their cultures. There is governance, the building regs have changed again to be far more environmental and there are more sustainable technologies.
We are excited that clients are now asking us questions. There is a more open conversation about sustainability. More people are looking at buildings and how they can improve efficiency. There are some small great gains that can be had, such as LED lighting.
Zowi Whittaker
Warren Bennett
There’s also an awful lot of support that’s being provided across Lancashire that helps SMEs make these sort of decisions, because it is a minefield at first and you’ve got to have an environmental strategy applicable to your business.
AM: We help a lot of customers move to green energy. That may be generating their own. There’s a lot of activity on power purchase agreements now, where a consumer signs a long-term contract with a large-scale generation project.
It may be a big solar farm and the developer needs that long-term agreement from a consumer to make the project bankable. We are facilitating a lot of projects like that.
RG: We have to be very careful that ESG just doesn’t become another acronym, like CSR. I take it back to basics. We can make such a difference to this planet.
ESG focuses businesses on delivering back to society, delivering back to the environment and looking at themselves inwardly. How do we manage our business, how do we manage our people, what are we giving back to our internal customers, which is our staff, and what are we giving back to society?
There is a financial incentive now to be ethical, but it is more because you want to engrain that good practice and culture, not just within your business but within the people in your business. That is where you can make the difference.
WB: We employ nearly 500 people and an awful lot are under 30 with a slightly different outlook to people of my age and above. We look more inside the business than we used to. It was very much looking at how customers would view us,
Ram Gupta
now we’re looking to get our staff believing in what we do, and then the public will follow.
Recruitment and retention are enormously important. We’ve done a lot of work around mental health support. When it comes to governance, you don’t get investor offers if they don’t believe in the management team and they are more likely to do so if that team is looking at the longer term and the sustainable future. If you are doing the right things as a business, good finance follows.
IS: For me, it’s not about winning tenders, it’s about the way the company thinks and the company culture. We are busy filling in our B Corp Impact Assessment form at the moment and I’d like to throw in another three-letter acronym, SDGs. These are Sustainability Development Goals, of which the UN has 17.
You can focus on certain ones. Basically, it gives you a fantastic toolkit to do this self-analysis and measure what your impact is and then manage it.
It makes it so much more interesting to come to work in the morning if you have a business with a purpose, and that’s how I feel about it. You must get people to follow and have some sense of belief in it that holds us all together.
SC:We’ve really invested in the social aspect, with a lot of mental health support, private health insurance and staff schemes. On the environmental side we are making sure our waste is recycled and we’re trying to get as much of the fleet electric or hybrid as we can.
We’re learning what the bigger corporations are putting in place and we will follow suit, slowly and surely getting to where we want to go. We like to have integrity and we like to do the right thing
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