Environment

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

We are, nevertheless, committed to minimising our environmental impact and to improving our environmental performance wherever possible.

Our strategy is to:

• meet the requirements of applicable environmental legislation;
• minimise 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 and on our website; and
• report to two external publicly disclosed benchmarking indices and use our performance in these benchmarking indices to assess and improve future performance; this year we have chosen the CDP and the RobecoSam Dow Jones Sustainability Index.

During the year to 31 March 2019, our measured Scope 1 and 2 emissions (location-based) totalled 625.8 tCO2e. This comprised:

1. Emissions from the consumption of electricity outside the UK and emissions from purchased electricity calculated using the market-based approach using supplier-specific emission factors are reported in tCO2 rather than tCO2e due to the availability of emission factors.

This is equivalent to 2.6 tCO2e per full-time equivalent employee, based on an average of 240 employees during the year (2018: 3.1 tCO2e; 241 employees). Overall our Scope 1 and 2 emissions decreased by 16.6% in the year due to the full impact of the closure of our Madrid office and a 19.5% decrease in the UK grid emission factor.

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