Community Involvement

National Grid’s role as a good corporate citizen supports our strategic ambitions and is delivered through a sustained and consistent approach. In all our community investment, we aim to develop our business, support our employees, support communities and enhance our reputation.

Our approach is based on two principles: ‘Investment in our Communities, Investment in our People’, and continues to be centred on three key themes: energy and environment; education and skills; and community development.

Sharing of best practice across our business and working collaboratively with key partners and stakeholders enables us to maximise how communities benefit from our activities.

Our policy on community investment provides a framework for ensuring that investment delivers benefits for our business and the communities we serve. During the year, we reviewed our social policy to ensure our approach to community investment remains relevant to, and supports, society’s wider social and environmental priorities. This review has included analysis of existing activities and best practice, both across National Grid and externally.

We have also continued to lead on the ‘Young Offender Into Work Programme’-  there are now 80 companies involved alongside us. The programme has continued to develop this year, providing stable employment opportunities to offenders. This contributes to a significant reduction in the national re-offending rate from over 70% to about 7% for offenders participating in the National Grid programme. Collectively, we aim to have placed 1,000 young people into training and jobs, through the programme, by the end of this calendar year.

Charitable donations

Direct donations to charitable organisations amounted to £2.9 million (2005/06: £2.7 million).

In addition to our charitable donations, substantial support was provided for our Affordable Warmth Programme, education programme, university research and our Young Offenders Into Work Programme.

We continue to use the model developed by  The London Benchmarking Group to provide a framework for measuring and reporting our community investment contributions, by capturing, in accordance with the model, spend against our key themes. On this basis, we invested some £9 million in support of community initiatives and relationships across our operations in 2006/07.