Roger Bright, Chief Executive

Dinah Nichols, non-executive Board member. Member of the corporate responsibility committee.

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CR Statement

The Crown Estate is unique. Our portfolio of buildings, shoreline, seabed, forestry, agricultural and common land creates valuable revenue for the Treasury, and therefore the taxpayer, every year. It also provides a valuable environmental and heritage resource for the entire nation.

The Crown Estate is keenly aware of its responsibility to protect the long-term value of its legacy and the well-being of those who make their living from it. We work with our customers and tenants to improve the social and environmental standards of the estate and minimise the impact of our activities.

Our commitment to sustainable development is underpinned by our three core values – commercialism, integrity and stewardship. These values are reflected in the specific objectives we seek to achieve in our corporate responsibility programme.

Over the past four years, we have been implementing a formal corporate responsibility programme, made up of long-term objectives and annual targets. Our progress against them is audited by third party advisers each year.

In 2006-07, we set ourselves 19 challenging public targets (in addition to another 19 internal targets which are not reported on here).

Fifty-eight per cent of targets were fully achieved, representing a slight drop on 2005-06 which was partly attributable to the increasingly challenging nature of the targets being set. Encouragingly, none of the targets remained with no, or very little, progress at the end of the year. The work carried out has reflected an increasing commitment to CR from all employees and a growing awareness of the importance of integrating sustainability principles into all business decisions. The senior management team have also been working to define a series of high level aspirational CR targets to underpin our efforts in this area until 2011.

• Each agent managing our urban properties achieved their target of meeting 75% of the foundation criteria in our bespoke environmental performance index (EPI).  This sets out our requirements against key objectives related to: the efficient use of natural resources; the minimisation of emissions; the reduction, and increased recycling of, waste; and the communication of our CR commitments to our advisors, contractors and suppliers
• We now have, for the first time, a set of data for the majority of our close managed urban properties in respect of energy use, associated carbon emissions and water use. This will enable us to monitor our resource efficiency throughout the year and develop targets for improvement
• A significant amount of work has been across The Crown Estate to further understand the carbon footprint of our activities and has led to a continuing programme of work on carbon management
• Our rural agents work to an environmental plan aligned with our specific CR commitments.  Furthermore, farm tenants are being encouraged to sign up to the Linking Environment and Farming (LEAF) audit.  This includes an “Environmental ladder” which will be introduced to agricultural customers in the coming year.

Nevertheless, like any other organisation on a quest for more sustainable development, we are also faced by a number of future challenges. These include

• Integrating CR standards into our supply chain
• Engaging with staff to ensure they take up the community volunteering opportunities
• Capturing the various CR initiatives that are already taking place across our business, and sharing lessons learnt and knowledge acquired amongst all our staff.

Our commitment to corporate responsibility remains unabated and we will continue to seek ways to increase its profile within the business, and to find innovative ways of doing business that are more efficient and sustainable.