Environment

We operate from a network of seven offices across the world, with approximately two-thirds of our employees based in our London office. All our offices are leased.

We are committed to minimising our environmental impact and to improving our environmental performance wherever possible. We have an Environmental Management System that is proportionate to the operational scale and environmental risk profile of our business. We use the precautionary principle to manage environmental risk for our business and our portfolio proactively.

Our strategy is to:

• meet the requirements of applicable environmental legislation;
• minimise our own waste and maximise recycling;
• work with our landlords to ensure the energy efficiency of our offices;
• include environmental considerations in our procurement processes;
• measure our carbon footprint annually, and publish the results in our Annual and Sustainability reports;
• include environmental considerations in our investment process and seek to minimise the environmental impact of our portfolio companies;
• measure the carbon footprint of our portfolio companies; and
• report to two external publicly disclosed benchmarking indices and use our performance in these benchmarking indices to assess and improve future performance; we choose the CDP and the S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment.

During the year to 31 March 2022, our measured Scope 1 and 2 emissions (market-based) totalled 269.9 tCO₂e. This comprised:

This is equivalent to 1.2 tCO₂e per full-time equivalent employee, based on an average of 234 employees (2021: 1.1 tCO₂e; 229 employees). Overall, our Scope 1 and 2 (market-based) emissions increased by only 3.8% year-on-year, despite a material increase in office working compared to FY2021, as a result of the increased use of renewable energy tariffs in our offices.

During the year to 31 March 2022, our measured Scope 3 emissions totalled 3,010.3 tCO₂e. This represented an increase of 12.9% compared to the previous year. This can be attributed to the easing of Covid-19 restrictions globally, causing Scope 3 categories such as waste, business travel and employee commuting to increase. As we did last year, we chose to include emissions related to home working in our Scope 3 calculation. These were calculated by estimating the energy consumed by employees on using office equipment, lighting and heating while working from home, using national benchmarks where available. The decrease of home working Scope 3 emissions due to the reduced Covid-19 restrictions only partly offset the increase in emissions associated with waste, business travel and employee commuting.

Our total fuel and electricity consumption was 1,972.0 MWh in FY2022, 80% of which was consumed in the UK. The split between fuel and electricity consumption is shown in the table below.

1. Natural gas and transportation fuels (petrol and diesel).

Our emissions have been verified to a limited level of assurance by an external third party according to the ISO 14064-3 standard.