70 DEBATE
Continued from page 69
IJ: I’ve spent the past 30 years representing the commercial road transport industry, hauliers, bus companies, coach companies.
My clients are responsible for 95 per cent of all the distribution of everything in this country and it’s incumbent on me to learn because commercial road transport is responsible for one percent of all the traffic on our roads but emit 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases.
It’s fanciful to say that we can do away with lorries, but if you can convert just 18 percent of HGVs onto liquid natural gas, that is the equivalent of taking 527,000 diesel cars off the road.
To help with that, my clients need to have subsidies from the government to assist, like America’s done with the Inflation Reduction Act, to give them the ability to invest for the benefit of our children.
If government could get its act together and actually took the shot here, we could become self-sufficient using our water and wind. We can kick start the third industrial revolution.
PG: The third revolution is definitely this new industry of green energy, low carbon manufacturing. We have the nuclear arc in the northwest, we have this fantastic wind farm that’s going to get bigger, investment into hydrogen, nuclear fission and fusion coming into play on the west coast. All of these things are happening here.
The attitude of the aerospace sector is hugely
positive.
It’s also quite nervous, because it’s
the unknown. Everybody’s trying to look for the right help and advice. It’s about cultural change, it’s about awareness. It has to start somewhere and it has to start at the top, so at the moment we are working with primary businesses to work out what their drivers are, what changes they’re going through, and we’re getting very deeply involved in those ESG projects.
If those primary businesses set their ESG agendas in a certain way and their reporting structure in a certain way that are particular to them, the supply chain has different reporting and attitudes to appease. We’re trying to align the primary businesses to standardise.
AM: We are banging a drum for business to lead this agenda because waiting for government is pointless because, arguably, so little has been done. We work with organisations large and small at different stages of their journey, but 30 years in the game, my view is government has not scratched the surface.
This is quite good news in the near term, because it means that the things that we can do as businesses make commercial sense as well as environmental sense. Ultimately, if we get towards net zero as the UK and as a planet, it’s going to get more and more expensive to eke out that last tonne of carbon, but right here, right now, there’s loads of money to be saved, and lots of carbon to be saved.
We rebranded a year ago to Sustainable Energy First because sustainability is intrinsic to what we do. We spent five years investing and getting some momentum in the world of sustainability because we did not want to rebrand without
it being authentic. We’ve set ourselves an audacious target of saving 327,000 tonnes of carbon, and we’re going to go and drive that through our customer base. Our customer base consumes about 3.5 per cent of UK business energy, it’s big.
What role does an ESG strategy play in recruitment and retention?
PR: I started with Sustainable Energy First nearly three years ago and my role was in account management, but my background is in sustainability and advising customers in terms of environmental and engineering practices. I’m now head of ESG, and what I found is that the business has, by nature, wanted to learn more in this space.
Our own staff are crying out for training in this area which I’ve provided and we’re seeing new recruits asking for our ESG policy. They want to see what we do as a business as well as how we offer consulting to our customers.
RG: If I’m honest, I think most on shop floor roles have little insight into it as part of their day-to-day role, but we use the word sustainability as I think it’s all about existential sustainability if you don’t develop your agenda.
Amongst the management team, of course, it’s a much more serious topic. I’m an entrepreneur in residence at UCLan and a recent discussion was looking at informing executives with more insight on exactly how to go about constructing and executing an adequate ESG agenda, and so it’s right on the radar to provide more insight for people who are helping to the steer the direction of travel in business.
Anthony Mayall
Celia Gaze The pitfall is the
danger of over-reliance. AI isn’t 100 percent
Ian Jones
accurate, it will get it wrong sometimes
John Paul Toher
Debbie Salmon
Paula Gill
Philip Richards
Rupert Gatty
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