Sustainability
Anglian Water Group believes that sustainability is about supporting and actively encouraging strategies and behaviours that demonstrate our commitment to the long-term viability of the business.
We were pleased to receive a score of 100% for purpose and values in the BITC Responsible Business Tracker .
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Our Purpose
Anglian Water Group believes that our business can be part of the solution against the challenges we are facing, such as climate change and biodiversity decline alongside our growing population. We take a long-term approach to facing into these challenges, and put sustainability at the heart of our plans.
As a group of businesses that fundamentally work within the natural environment and alongside communities, it is particularly important for us, our customers, clients and the ecosystems we are a part of.
Whether it is our regulated water business or our client-focused companies, we believe that we can deliver outcomes in a way that will support the ultimate wellbeing of the environment and the communities that rely on it, in the most innovative, cost efficient and effective way. We have a deep understanding of what is required to meet the challenges we face, a commitment to achieve positive outcomes, employees that are passionate about our purpose and a track record of innovation and success.
You can find out more about how we are achieving this within Anglian Water or the AVH companies Alpheus CAW.
Delivering our Purpose
We were the first water company in the UK to change our Articles of Association in 2019. This move reflects our commitment to deliver long-term value to our customers, the region and the communities we serve, seeking positive outcomes for the environment and society.
To help us deliver on our Purpose, our Strategic Direction Statement contains four, long-term ambitions:
1. Make the East of England resilient to the risks of drought andflooding
2. A carbon neutral business
3. Enable sustainable economic and housing growth
4. Work with others to achieve significant improvement in ecological quality across our catchments
Our ambitions are underpinned by Environmental, Social and Governance(ESG) principles.
The ESG framework is aligned to our Purpose and has been implemented Company-wide.
It is closely tied to all our remuneration policies, which centre on customer delivery and environmental performance, when awarding performance-related pay.
Holding ourselves to account
Our position, as a supplier of an essential public service, presents us with both the opportunity and the responsibility, to do more for the region and communities we serve. It’s essential that we run our business in a responsible and transparent way, in line with our Purpose. We are conscious of the weight of responsibility we bear to deliver safe, clean water and recycle it effectively and to protect and enhance our environment and enrich our communities. That responsibility drove us in 2019 to become the first utility to embed our purpose into our Articles of Association, locking public interest into the fabric of our business and the decisions we make each day.
We are committed to:
• acting in the public interest. We recognise our wider role, in thecommunities we serve, beyond providing fresh clean drinking water andprotecting the natural environment we operate in;
• making sure customer bills are fair, affordable and that they offer value for money. And demonstrating we are responsible with customer money;
• ensuring our profits are fair, not excessive and that we pay our fair share of tax.
These principles are woven through our business, through our defined Purpose, which is underpinned by our company values and our six capitals model for decision making.
Our Group Chief Sustainability Officer works with and challenges our Board, ensuring decisions are guided by our Purpose framework. Purpose-relatedcriteria are embedded across all of our bonus structures.
Externally validating our Purpose and ESG work
Along with the British Standards Institution (BSI), we led the development of a new Publicly Available Specification (PAS) in 2022, for embedding purpose in organisations (PAS 808:2022 Purpose-Driven Organisations, Worldviews, Principles and Behaviours).
The new PAS has been sponsored by the UK Government. One year on, we were the first company to be assessed against PAS 808 by BSI.
As part of the initial pilot, BSI are taking forward our assessment andusing it to develop a framework that can be used by other companies. In 2023,BSI ran a nine-day (non-certified), organisational-wide assessment of AnglianWater to the PAS.
The assessment explored the extent to which the worldviews, principles and behaviours on purpose are embedded in the organisation. The full results of this assessment will be published on our website.
In addition to PAS 808 and the BITC Responsible Business Tracker®, weare assessed on our ESG performance by other leading organisations.
This includes:
CDP
CDP works withmarket forces to motivate companies to disclose their impacts on theenvironment and natural resources and to take action to reduce negativeimpacts. This year, we received an A- rating in the Climate Change disclosure,which is in the Leadership band.
GRESB
This year weachieved a 5* rating in GRESB Infrastructure Asset Benchmark.
