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About our report
Creation and care of essential assets.
Balfour Beatty has been formally reporting its safety, environmental and social performance through independently audited reports since 2001.
During that time, the Group has very substantially reduced its accident frequency rate, greatly improved the management of its environmental impacts and made significant progress in all aspects of corporate citizenship.
This progress was recognised when the Company won the top award for corporate social responsibility in the 2006 "Quality in Construction" awards.
We operate in four business sectors:
- Building, Building Management and Services
- Civil and Specialist Engineering and Services
- Rail Engineering and Services
- Investments
Our approach and management systems cover our global activities.
We report on incidents and penalties on a global basis.
Case studies are drawn from our activities worldwide.
Safety
Safety performance data is reported for all wholly-owned activities and for those joint ventures where we have management control.
Subcontractor safety performance is included for all activities, apart from the US where it is not common practice.
Occupational Health
Absence data is only reported for our UK businesses.
Environment
Performance data is reported for all wholly-owned UK and non-UK businesses unless stated. Data is reported by our significant joint venture business in Hong Kong.
Other overseas businesses are progressing towards reporting environmental performance.
Social
Employee data is reported for all wholly-owned businesses worldwide.
Our social responsibility programmes are described in terms of both stakeholder engagement routines and social outreach where we have a major presence.
Organisational changes
There has been a number of changes to the structure of Balfour Beatty since we produced our last report.
We expanded our presence in the US with the acquisition of Centex Construction in spring 2007. This operating company has now been renamed Balfour Beatty Construction US.
At the beginning of the year we completed our purchase of Exeter and Devon International airport in south west England. This is operated by Regional and City airports, our specialist airport investment and development group. We extended our presence in facilities management with the addition of Covion and bought Cowlin, a leading UK regional contractor. We also sold our interest in Devonport dockyard during the year and the data reflects these changes.
Chairman and Chief Executive's statement
We have continued to evaluate, critically, all our governance and management systems to ensure their suitability for purpose. Policies have been renewed and, where necessary, restated. We are updating the terms of reference of the Business Practices Committee so that it can monitor, evaluate and guide our non-financial performance more effectively.
Helping to tackle global issues
We measure our major environmental impacts and have set targets for reducing our carbon footprint. We have engaged with Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace to understand their agenda as well as the Environment Agency to ensure that our work is in line with their aims and objectives.