Sustainability
IHP Group Sustainability Update – July 2023
IHP are engaged in a number of initiatives, which include the following:
Charitable initiatives
- We continued our tradition of an annual Christmas donation, with each employee being provided with £10 to donate to one of five selected charities.
- We have continued to focus on providing our employees with opportunities to engage with our charitable activities. We ran internal giving campaigns for the Turkey/Syria earthquake and the MIND charity during Mental Health Week, in each case matching employee contributions.
Environmental initiatives
- To help increase our use of sustainable energy sources, our software development company, IAD, based in Melbourne, have installed solar panels on the roof of their office.
- All new client portfolios opened on the platform are now paperless by default.
Environmental sustainability strategy
- The board and the Group Non-Executive Director for Environmental and Social Sustainability, Victoria Cochrane, are working with external consultants to develop an environmental sustainability plans.
Employee well-being
- During Mental Health Awareness Week 2023, we opened a new well-being suite at our Clement’s Lane office, including a medical room, multi-faith room and well-being room. We also ran a series of workshops and webinars to engage employees on a range of mental health issues.
- We initiated our quarterly employee fora to enable employees to offer their feedback to the board and senior management team directly. This involved Rita Dhut, Non-Executive Director for employee engagement, acting as a conduit between our employees and the board.
Our approach to sustainability
Environmental
We are mindful of the UK government’s overall ambition to reach a net zero position by 2050 and we are committed to meeting this goal. Our strategy and aspirations will be set accordingly, however, every opportunity will be sought out and taken to allow us to meet a carbon net zero position across our group earlier within the decade leading up to 2050 and to playing our part in tackling climate change.
Our next step is to carry out a full assessment and to set out a concrete action plan to deliver carbon net zero by that date or before. We have decided to use 2019 as our baseline year and we will measure the performance of our metrics and targets against this position.
We are conscious that we have a lot of work to do to create detailed targets, building on the work done so far to measure our GHG emissions, and to understand the implications of those on our current ways of working as they bed down following the pandemic.
More information can be found in our Annual Report on pages 24-25.
We report against the four pillars recommended by the TCFD below:
| TCFD Pillar | TCFD Recommended Disclosure | Our Current Progress |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Governance | Disclose the organisation’s governance around climate-related risks and opportunities. | Climate is a standing agenda item at IHP board meetings. Updates on activities undertaken are given by the Executive and open to challenge by the Non-Executive Directors. Future actions are noted and reported against. |
| 2. Strategy | Disclose the actual and potential impacts of climate-related risks and opportunities on the organisation’s businesses, strategy, and financial planning where such information is material. | We have set out our current understanding of the risks impacting the business based upon the primary climate change drivers. We have established with external consultancy support our strategy and identified areas of opportunity for our business. |
| 3. Risk Management | Disclose how the organisation identifies, assesses, and manages climate related risks. | We have a well-established risk management framework which assists in our understanding of the likelihood and impact of risks to our business. We facilitate regular cross functional discussions and these will help us to understand the physical and transitional related climate risks and opportunities impacting the business directly and indirectly. |
| 4. Metrics and targets | Disclose the metrics and targets used to assess and manage relevant climate related risks and opportunities where such information is material. | We continue to refine our metrics as we aim to include all relevant emissions, hence we have restated some prior years. We will measure the performance of our targets against our chosen baseline year of 2019. |
Responsible Business
Reducing our operational carbon emissions
The Group has adopted the reporting requirements of the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) policy, as implemented by the UK Government in 2019. We have been collating greenhouse gas emission data covering several financial years and this has allowed us to establish further insight into the areas of our scope 1, 2 emissions and estimates regarding scope 3 covering our operational activities.
The general waste statistics are included in our Annual Report (see pages 34-35) and the movement this year, is attributable to the full reporting year being worked from the office, where as the comparative was a full year working from home due to the COVID pandemic.
Over the course of the year we saved 99 trees (FY21: 80) through recycling confidential waste; we recycled 53% of total waste (FY21: 41%).
We have maintained a similar ratio of waste recycled versus not recycled in the year, however, the volume of waste produced this year has significantly increased due to returning to working from the office.
People
Delivering the best client experience and going above and beyond, our people are fundamental to our success. We continue to evolve our collaborative and supportive culture through our people strategy, aiming to recognise, motivate and develop our talent by:
- Reinforcing our purpose, strategy and values;
- Enabling our employees to develop and grow through training, development and career opportunities;
- Providing our employees with a ‘voice’ through engagement activities;
- Ensuring our practices support inclusivity and employee wellbeing.
FY23 priorities:
- Continue to enhance employee engagement and motivation
- Embed our new performance management framework to underpin our performance related variable pay structure
- Further develop our D&I strategy and track the progress of the diversity of our people
- Introduce employee engagement forums
- Evolve the training and development strategy
More information can be found in our Annual Report on pages 37-41.
Community
Each year we pro-actively source opportunities to support charitable causes that our employees care about. To this end, at the end of 2021, we donated over £3,000 to a range of charities: Great Ormond Street Hospital, The Trussell Trust, Age UK, Crisis UK and The Book Trust Appeal.
We also provided employees with the opportunity to partake in an appeal to support war-torn Ukraine. The Company committed to matching the employee donations and we raised a total of £24,500 for the Ukraine Humanitarian appeal.
Over the next year we will continue to explore ways in which we can enhance our community support and the evolution of our ESG strategy.