BT 2011 Annual Report Download - page 41

BUSINESS REVIEW
38
OUR CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY
driving low-carbon purchasing decisions in other markets such as
white goods and vehicles.
We believe this type of transparent carbon information, supported
by tax incentives, would stimulate demand for green energy, and
help the UK to move more quickly to a low-carbon energy market.
It would also resolve the problem of ‘double-counting’ of green
electricity and remove the confusion surrounding current ‘green
tariffs’.
Engaging with vendors
In February 2011 we introduced a new procurement standard
requiring all suppliers to measure and report their carbon and
greenhouse gas emissions and set reduction targets. This is
designed to encourage supplier innovation and to speed up
development of low-carbon technologies. We ran workshops in
partnership with the Carbon Trust this year to help 80 UK SMEs
improve their understanding of climate change and develop action
plans to reduce their impact.
Engaging with customers
Reports such as SMART2020 show that the ICT sector as a whole
has the opportunity to help society reduce global carbon emissions
by as much as 15% by 2020. We work with customers to help them
to reduce their carbon emissions and energy consumption through
the supply of energy-efficient products and solutions. We
encourage business customers to replace travel with digital
communications and in the UK we announced a smart metering
consortium in partnership with Arquiva and Detica. These and other
low-carbon opportunities are realised through our customer-facing
lines of business and described in BT Global Services on page 23
and BT Retail on page 26.
Behaving responsibly
We strive to behave responsibly towards our customers, suppliers,
employees and neighbours.
We expect everyone at BT to meet high ethical standards and we
want to do business with suppliers and customers we can trust and
who share our values.
We have a governance structure in place to monitor that our ethical
policies reflect best practice and are routinely applied.
We are implementing an anti-corruption and bribery programme to
build on our ethical culture. We have policies and procedures in
place to mitigate the risk of any BT employee, or anyone acting on
our behalf, breaching our ethical code of conduct.
Ethical performance measure – an index measured on a five point scale of
the success of BT’s employee awareness and training.
Non financial performance
Target 2012 2011 2010 2009
Maintain or improve our 2011 4.16 4.10 New in 2010
index score
Financial performance
Revenue support £2.1bn £2.1bn £1.5 bn
Customer bids with a
sustainability element
We take our responsibilities as an ISP seriously. Using Cleanfeed –
our content filtering solution – BT continues to prevent inadvertent
access to images of child sexual abuse as identified by the Internet
Watch Foundation. We have shared, without charge, the technical
solution with other carriers. To supplement this, in March 2011 BT
launched a new range of printed and online safety advice to help
parents keep children safe on the internet. At the same time we
launched a major campaign to prompt BT broadband customers to
consider BT’s free Family Protection parental-control software. The
software is offered automatically as part of the install process.
BT is participating in research at the University of Cambridge,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Tsinghua University,
assessing how people react to technological change and how these
changes affect the productivity and well-being of individuals and
society as a whole.
BT’s approach to privacy and data protection includes both
technological solutions and a focus on employee awareness and
behaviour. In 2011 we established a number of regional governance
committees which oversee our approach and monitor progress.
Disaster response and resilience
Resilience is incorporated into the design of our network, but
disasters and emergencies can strike unexpectedly. BT has formal
legislative civil contingency responsibilities as a UK Category Two
responder. As the largest guardian of Britain’s telecommunications
Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) we are responsible for
maintaining communications for our customers, including other CPs,
as well as national, regional and local government, emergency
services and public sector bodies. We also aim to help shape and
implement best practice.
We extend this core value of being a responsible business into our
community investment focus through engagements with the
Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC), the British Red Cross and the
American Red Cross and via maintaining a dedicated emergency
response team.
Our corporate responsibility risks
We quantify the most significant social, environmental and ethical
risks to BT in our corporate responsibility risk register. This is
updated twice a year and reviewed annually.
The current corporate responsibility risks which we monitor and
report on are:
•health and safety risks to employees and the public exposed to
BT operations
•breach of integrity or unintended release of private customer
data leading to a loss of trust in BT
•mitigating climate change impacts such as increased costs
associated with changing legislation
•adapting our business to reduce our exposure to the direct
impacts of climate change, such as severe weather
•ensuring that our activities and their outcomes meet legal or
ethical standards for a diverse workforce
•unacceptable supply chain working conditions.
Where appropriate, references are made within the Our risks
section on page 39 to the aspects referred to above.
Further information
More detailed information about our CR and sustainability
performance is available in our independently verified 2011
sustainability report at www.bt.com/betterfuture
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