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Objectives and strategy

Responsibility

We are committed to operating in a responsible way and this underpins our commitments to performance, growth, talent and relationships as discussed above.

As an asset-intensive business our operations have an impact on the environment, the most significant of these are climate change and historic land contamination. We also take actions to minimise other environmental impacts of our operations, we are committed to strong governance and high ethical standards, we take the issues surrounding electric and magnetic fields seriously and we are committed to protecting human rights.

Climate change	Climate change is possibly one of the greatest challenges facing society in the 21st century. Our public position statement on energy delivery and climate change sets out our approach to delivering energy while playing our role in minimising any impact our operations may have on the climate. Our target is to reduce National Grid's greenhouse gas emissions by 60% compared with a verified baseline ahead of the UK Government target of 2050. Our biggest greenhouse gas emission is methane leakage from our UK gas networks. A major ongoing programme of replacing old cast iron pipes with modern polyethylene pipe is reducing leakage from our distribution system year on year. A programme to install new compressors at key sites will also reduce emissions from our UK gas transmission system. We plan to reduce emissions relating to our own energy use, saving at least 5% in energy consumption, and use the resultant cost savings to enable us to procure all of the electricity we use from renewable sources by the end of 2010. With our skills in balancing supply and demand, we believe there are no insurmountable technical problems to accommodating the quantities of intermittent renewable generation that the market will bring forward. We are therefore investing in our networks to connect renewable generators and to reinforce them, ensuring large-scale, renewably generated power can get from where it is generated to where it is used. The key performance indicator we use to monitor our performance in this area is the percentage reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions against our verified baseline.
Historically contaminated land	We manage an inherited portfolio of historically contaminated land including former manufactured gas plants, industrial landfills, former gas holders and older substations on our transmission and distribution 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.
Protecting the environment	We are committed to continuous improvement in our environmental performance. Our objective is to help protect the environment for future generations. In addition to aiming actively to reduce our contribution to climate change we are committed to: being efficient in our use of natural resources; keeping our waste to a minimum and increasing the economic value of any waste we produce; acting to prevent environmental incidents; and improving, where we can, the environmental status of the land on which we operate. We aim to implement environmental management systems certified to the international standard ISO 14001 in all our businesses to help us deliver improvements in these areas. Key performance indicators that we monitor in this area include the number of significant direct environmental incidents and the total value of fines from prosecutions and citations.
Corporate governance	We believe strong corporate governance is essential to operating responsibly and achieving our goals. We describe our approach to corporate governance under Corporate Governance.
Business ethics	Not only are we committed to ensuring that all our behaviours are lawful and that we comply with our policies and licences, we also expect all of our employees to live up to our core values of respect, integrity and ownership.
Electric and magnetic fields	We take the issues that surround electric and magnetic fields seriously and in all our operations, as a minimum, we aim to comply with the regulations, guidelines or practices relating to electric and magnetic fields in force in the different jurisdictions in which we operate.
Human rights	Our public position statement sets out our commitment to protect human rights within our sphere of influence and ensure our own operations are a force for good wherever we operate in the world.