I am delighted to present National Grid's 2010/11 corporate responsibility (CR) report. This report represents an important reporting milestone for us – it is our tenth global online report.
Our job is to connect people to the energy they use. It’s impossible to imagine life today without energy at our finger tips: our society is built on it. National Grid owns and manages the grids to which many different energy sources are connected. In Britain we run systems that deliver gas and electricity across the entire country. In the northeast US, we provide power directly to millions of customers. We hold a vital position at the centre of the energy system. We join everything up.
That puts National Grid at the heart of one of the greatest challenges facing our society; the creation of new sustainable energy solutions for the future - and the development of an energy system that can underpin our economic prosperity in the 21st century. So it’s an incredibly exciting time to be doing what we do.
Our reputation as a responsible company is critically important to us and depends on our stakeholders being able to trust us and be confident in us. We can only retain our right to operate by working to the highest standards, by trusting our employees to do the right thing and by running our company sustainably.
Our Framework for Responsible Business, revised in June 2010, provides a clear line of sight from our vision to how we manage our business and our day-to-day dealings with our stakeholders.
The Framework is based on seven values – as last year, I have focused on three in my introduction, but much more information on these plus our other four values can be found in our report.
Making safety and well-being central to the way we work
We continue to challenge ourselves hard to improve our safety performance, and we remain extremely focused on this, having reduced our lost time injury frequency rate by 36% over the last five years.
Following a large reduction in our lost time injury frequency rate from 0.25 in 2008/09 to 0.15 in 2009/10, most of these gains have been maintained this year. At the end of 2010/11, our lost time injury frequency rate was at 0.18 and the number of lost time injuries was 96 compared with 86 in 2009/10.
At the same time, we have seen a significant improvement in the lost time injury performance of our contract partners’ workforce. In 2010/11, there were 51 contractor lost time injuries compared with 85 in 2009/10.
Safeguarding the environment for future generations
We have continued with our climate change strategy and energy efficiency programmes and remain committed to our 45% by 2020 and 80% by 2050 greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets for our Scope 1 and 2 emissions.
During 2010/11, each line of business worked to deliver their targets under year one of our first five year plan for greenhouse gas reduction. The plan established a trajectory to 2015 as the half way point to our 2020 target. Performance against the plan is linked to the executive compensation scheme.
Our total Scope 1 and 2 emissions for 2010/11 were 9.7 million tonnes carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), compared with 8.8 million tonnes in 2009/10. Our 2010/11 performance equates to a 51% reduction against our 1990 baseline, but is an increase of 4% with respect to our 1990 baseline compared with 2009/10. A more detailed breakdown of our emissions and, together with the reasons for the increase over the past year, can be found in this report.
We are now starting to challenge ourselves on how we move away from the ‘take, make and dispose’ model for business to one where we operate as far as possible within closed loops (i.e. cradle to cradle), conserving and enhancing natural resources and reducing environmental impacts. An early example of our thinking is our Metering Assessment and Recycling Centre. I will update you on our progress in next year’s report.
Valuing an inclusive, diverse and talented workforce
One of my personal priorities is to ensure National Grid is a place where our employees are able to perform and grow to the best of their abilities. During the past year, we completed the development of our leadership transitions strategy. In 2008, ‘Developing Future Leaders’ was created for senior leaders, in 2009, ‘Foundations of Leadership’ was created for front line or first time leaders and in 2010, we launched two programmes targeted at middle level leaders focused on their leadership style and business acumen. Middle managers also have access to a suite of solutions that can be used to customise a curriculum for their unique needs.
In 2010/11, over 97,000 learning hours were delivered in professional and leadership development and nearly one million learning hours of technical development.
We continued our focus on safeguarding our future talent. In the US, 21 highly energetic and skilled graduates have taken on a variety of roles as the first class to graduate from the graduate development programme. Across the US, 51 high school students participated in a one week ‘introduction to engineering’ academy as part of the US launch of Engineering our Future.
In the UK, 164 new early career learners were inducted into various strategic technical programmes. The UK apprenticeship training programmes enjoy Ofsted outstanding ratings on all criteria and we were awarded the East Midlands National Training Award for our advanced apprenticeship model.
These are just a few of the highlights from 2010/11. I am proud of the progress we have made this year, although we are never satisfied and always seek to do more. I would like to invite you to explore this online report to find out more.
I would welcome your feedback on our commitment, actions and performance – do please write to me or contact us at csrinfo@ngrid.com .
Steve Holliday
Chief Executive