At my company we are reviewing our sustainability strategy. We have worked hard over the years to develop our schemes to as high a standard as possible and as part of a wider ESG agenda. The very nature of our work means we are able to make substantial claims about the socio-economic impact of what we build. But we have never set out our ambitions as a set of clear principles and we know we are behind the curve in this regard. This is what has been driving our current policy development.

Even though we have all been concerned about environmental sustainability standards for decades – when I worked at the Body Shop in the early 1990s we were one of the first quoted companies to publish an annual sustainability report – the wider subject of ESG is still in its infancy, particularly in terms of a common set of industry metrics used to measure performance.

We are going to publish a strategy in May which has led me and other colleagues to spend some considerable time in recent months researching existing strategies across a wide and diverse portfolio of projects all run by different teams in varied geographies to different planning requirements. It’s been a fascinating process working out where we should be directing our focus to allow as broad a set of policies as possible to work while setting some clear corporate standards which all our schemes must reach.

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