Environment

We operate from a network of eight offices across the world, with the majority of our employees 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. 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 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; we choose the CDP and the S&P Dow Jones Sustainability Index.

During the year to 31 March 2020, our measured Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse gas (‘GHG’) emissions (location-based) totalled 604.5 tCO2e. This is equivalent to 2.5 tCO2e per full time equivalent employee, based on an average of 242 employees (2019: 2.6 tCO2e; 240 employees). Overall our Scope 1 and 2 emissions decreased by 3.4% in the year.

We have also chosen to report voluntarily on our Scope 3 indirect emissions, which totalled 6,045 tCO2e in FY2020. The FY2020 calculation is significantly larger than FY2019 as we have chosen to include the emissions related to purchased goods and services and is therefore not comparable with last year’s disclosure.

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

Our emissions have been verified to a reasonable level of assurance by Carbon Intelligence according to the ISO 14064-3 standard.