Our client, Kier, a major UK construction company’s current sustainability strategy was reaching the end of its current phase, there had been a number of key changes since the strategy’s inception and so they were looking for a partner to support a review to determine the future strategy.
Given the fast-paced nature of corporate sustainability, Kier wanted to ensure that the updated strategy was focusing on the most important issues to both Kier and its stakeholders. Current best practice, and emerging regulation, helped determine that a double materiality was the best approach for this.
The Sancroft team developed an approach consisting of three phases. The identification of a long list of sustainability issues, engagement with stakeholders to gather insights on the issues and then the analysis of results and prioritisation of sustainability issues based on findings.
The first phase consisted of a deep analysis of the context of the client’s business. This included a peer benchmarking exercise using bespoke criteria, analysis of investor and client expectations, and understanding the material topics being faced by the wider construction sector. This stage formed a long list of potentially significant sustainability issues.
Once the list had been developed and agreed with the client, the engagement with stakeholders began. Sancroft developed and undertook a survey and interviews with key internal and external stakeholders. This phase provided insights from a wide range of stakeholders across the value chain to inform the prioritisation of issues which will be addressed in Kier’s revised sustainability strategy.
Sancroft then developed the final double materiality assessment. The prioritisation process included the quantitative assessment of both the impact and the financial materiality of identified issues, based on the insights gained during the engagement phase from various stakeholders, previous desk-based research, and additional topic-specific research. The final matrix was accompanied by recommendations for future focus areas. We complemented the double materiality assessment with reports for the group function as well as individual outputs for each business stream.
The findings from our work have been used to evolve and refine Kier Group’s sustainability framework to ensure resources are focusing on sustainability issues which are the most material either from a financial and impact perspective. The outcomes from the analysis have been used to inform the strategic sustainability priorities of the entire business to provide a consistent direction of travel.
The scale of this work presented an opportunity to engage the entire workforce with Kier’s sustainability ambitions and activities. With engagement of 15% of Kier’s workforce, the project has raised awareness of sustainability and its crucial role in building the UK’s vital infrastructure.
