Sustainability Strategy

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 sustainability programme.

Our sustainability programme is structured around five key themes which are the principal areas in which our business activities have an impact.

The Way We Do Business
Our Customers
Our People
The Environment Around Us
The Wider Community.

Our commitments within these themes are governed by an overarching philosophy.

Overarching Philosophy

We believe that our business activities have direct, social, environmental and economic impacts and we therefore aim to act responsibly in everything we do to help secure a sustainable future.

Delivery of Sustainability Strategy

Our sustainability strategy aims for continuous improvement and broadly follows the ‘Plan, Do, Check, Act’ model. At the beginning of each financial year we go through an extensive period of consultation with employees across the business to develop our sustainability targets for the year ahead. We then monitor performance against these targets on a quarterly basis. We also have a series of longer term targets, performance against which is monitored in a similar manner.

New Strategy

Having pursued our sustainability agenda for some five years, in 2008 we reviewed our approach to ensure that sustainability was truly embedded in within our organisational structure and business strategy. This has resulted in the restructuring of our sustainability governance and a re-evaluation of our long-term sustainability aims. As preparatory work on this is still ongoing we will launch the new strategy, together with long-term targets, in the autumn of 2009.

In the meantime we are committed to improving our sustainability performance and will be extending the scope of our baseline data collection to help the development of meaningful, long-term targets. We are also pursuing a number of shorter term targets and other actions to ensure the continuing improvement of our performance.

Please visit the 2009 annual report for details of achievement against our 2008/09 targets and our targets for 2009/10.