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Our Framework for Responsible Business defines the principles by which we manage our business and our day-to-day dealings with our customers, employees, shareholders, suppliers and local communities. It is underpinned by Group-wide policies and position statements that are also available on our website.
We believe strong corporate governance is essential to operating responsibly and achieving our goals. We describe our approach to corporate governance under Directors’ Reports – Corporate Governance.
We have set out the ethical standards we expect each employee to meet while conducting business for the Group in our Standards of Conduct applicable to our US employees and our Code of Business Conduct applicable to all our UK and other employees.
Allegations of misconduct are investigated and reported to our Ethics Office in the US or to our Business Conduct Committee in the UK. We aim to ensure that reported breaches are thoroughly and promptly investigated and, where appropriate, acted upon and any necessary improvements implemented. The Board Risk & Responsibility Committee receives a twice-yearly report on the number and type of inquiries and allegations.
We are committed to a year-by-year improvement in our environmental performance. Our Group-wide environmental policy sets out the key areas we are addressing, and we continue to implement environmental management systems certified to the international standard ISO 14001 to help us deliver improvements in these areas.
Approximately 86% of our employees work to systems certified to ISO 14001. Later this year, National Grid Wireless will become the latest of our businesses to seek external certification.
We are committed to making a contribution towards minimising climate change and our public position statement, Energy Delivery and Climate Change, sets out how we propose to address the issue of greenhouse gas emissions in particular. Following its publication, we established a Group-wide Climate Change Strategy Group, which has established a long-term strategy that maps out how we will achieve a 60% reduction in emissions well in advance of the target date of 2050 set by the UK Government.
We have already achieved the UK Kyoto obligation and what would have been the US obligation. We are seeking means of reducing our impact further, taking into account the planned acquisitions described in the Aquisitions and disposals section.
We manage a portfolio of contaminated land including former manufactured gas plants, industrial landfills, former gas holders and older substations on our distribution and transmission networks. Sites can sometimes have a complex mix of contamination dating back over 100 years.
In the UK, the main focus of our remediation programme is on managing the environmental risk and returning land to beneficial use, while in the US, our highest priority sites for remediation are those with the highest environmental risk profile and those we are required to remediate by regulatory agencies. Our goal is to return these sites to productive public or private use.
National Grid recognises that there is some scientific evidence suggesting certain adverse health effects are linked to electric and magnetic fields. There is also evidence linking an increased risk of certain diseases to proximity to powerlines, though the cause of this is not clear. As a consequence, there is public concern and we take these issues very seriously. The balance of evidence remains against both power-frequency and radio-frequency electric and magnetic fields causing ill health.
The World Health Organization has classified power-frequency magnetic fields as ‘possibly’ carcinogenic. Our recently updated Public Position Statement on EMFs helps set the framework within which we continually assess the scientific evidence in this area, determine any implications for the way in which we conduct our business and explain to society what the science is telling us.
In all our operations, as a minimum we aim to comply with regulations, guidelines or practices relating to EMFs in force in the different jurisdictions in which we operate. Where other companies, such as telecommunications operators, use our assets, we expect them similarly to comply with the relevant regulations, guidelines or practices.
Human rights are primarily the responsibility of governments. However, we believe we can make a valuable contribution within the context of our own operations to support and respect the observance of human rights.
We do not have operations in countries that are considered to have poor human rights. We have therefore focused on extending our existing risk management processes by identifying and understanding the areas where the Group might be exposed to human rights risks and opportunities, should we develop new business in such countries. We have also started to assess the human rights risks associated with our global supply chain and have worked with other UK utilities to extend the screening of potential suppliers to include labour-related issues.
We continue our work with the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights, an international business-led initiative aimed at developing practical business tools to incorporate human rights into day-to-day business decision-making. As part of this work, we addressed the informal interactive hearings of the General Assembly of the United Nations in June 2005 on how responsible business practices can help promote and fulfil the rights of everyone.
The role of National Grid as a good corporate citizen is one that complements and adds value to our strategic ambitions and as such must be delivered through a consistent and integrated approach.
The Group’s Community Investment Policy provides a framework for ensuring that investment delivers benefits for our business and the communities involved. All community investment must develop our business, support our employees, support communities and enhance our reputation. To achieve these benefits, we focus our investment on three key themes to ensure that we maximise the impact of our investment: Skills and Education; Environment and Energy; and Community Development.
Through our Social Policy Committee, successful projects are being reviewed to determine whether they can be adopted in other parts of the business: for example, opportunities to transfer the successful ‘Young Offender Into Work Programme’ to the US, a wider implementation of the US Syracuse Recycling Centre model, and a sharing of best practice for fuel poverty initiatives across the UK and the US.
National Grid has a diverse range of external stakeholders including customers, regulators, government and local communities. We adopt an open and constructive approach in our dealings with external audiences.
Stakeholder management includes coordinated activity ensuring appropriate engagement with the UK Government and Parliament, US Federal and State authorities and legislators, devolved assemblies, regulators and other key stakeholders. This is supplemented by business-specific stakeholder planning, enabling appropriate engagement mechanisms and agreements to be put in place in the context of the Group and the wider objectives of stakeholders.
Each of our businesses engages with relevant stakeholders, including customers, employees, contractors and the community, both in terms of the services we provide, the way that we operate and the impact that our activities have on each of our stakeholders.