About our Reporting
The responsibility section of this website comprises our fullest source of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainbility Reporting. In addition to this full web report, we also produce a summary report for our stakeholders. This document is available to download from this website or you can request a copy by visiting the Feedback area of this site.
Scope
This is Balfour Beatty’s eighth annual Corporate Responsibility report and covers our worldwide operations for the twelve months ending 31 December 2008. Our previous report was published in May 2008, covering our fiscal year 2007. This year’s report has been aligned to relevant sections of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Framework.
As a world-class engineering, construction and services group, which serves customers for whom infrastructure quality, efficiency and reliability are critical, we endeavour to build the principles of sustainable development into all aspects of our business.
This means doing business with integrity, aspiring to the highest levels of standards of safety and health for people, managing our environmental impacts and being committed to delivering on our full range of social responsibilities.
Our approach and management systems cover our global activities and we report on incidents and penalties on a global basis.
We collate safety data for all of our 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.
Our environmental data is reported for all wholly-owned UK and European operating companies and for those joint ventures where we have management control. Our US businesses are progressing towards reporting environmental performance to the same standards.
We report on employee data for all our wholly-owned businesses worldwide.
There have been a number of changes to the structure of Balfour Beatty since we produced our last report and this is reflected in the content.
During 2008, the Group made a number of acquisitions. In March, we acquired Dean and Dyball, a leading UK regional contractor. In May, this was followed by the purchase of GMH in the US, a leading military PPP accommodation business. In the same month, Balfour Beatty acquired Blackpool International Airport in the North West of England. In June, Barnhart, a leading Californian construction management company was added to the Group, followed closely by Schreck Mieves, the German rail engineering group. Later on in the year, Colledge, Trundle and Hall, the automatic energy control system company also joined the company.
Our projects contribute to improving the lives of people and their communities. Understanding their expectations is critical to our future as a business.
Independent External Assurance of our Report
URS presented their assurance findings to the stakeholder panel, aligning their work with requirements of the AA1000 assurance standard. A key component of the reporting process has been external assurance to verify data and claims made within the report. For the period 2001 – 2007, this verification activity was undertaken by csrnetwork and then Sd3. This year, we have taken a new approach to assuring our report. For the first time, we have established a stakeholder panel, whose role is to provide an external and independent opinion of Balfour Beatty's approach to CR / Sustainability and the reporting of its non-financial performance. This process has been facilitated by URS Corporation Ltd (URS). We believe this approach is integral to improving our reporting processes and in moving towards best practice in corporate responsibility reporting.
See the section about Assurance in our online report for more on the stakeholder panel’s work.
Subsidiary Reporting
Three of our subsidiaries publish their own, separate Corporate Responsibility Reports. These can be accessed via the homepages of each operating company:
Bookmark using:
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUpon
