Decent companies make sure they abide by the law and do no harm to the communities they serve or the environment they operate in. Responsible companies should go further than that.
Not having a negative impact is not enough in the 21st century; customers and communities are rightly demanding more. This is especially true for an energy company.
SSE is involved in an essential business: delivering energy to peoples’ homes, helping them keep warm and powering Britain’s businesses matters to everyone in the UK. So at SSE we aim to do it responsibly.
Many companies and organisations claim to be responsible in the way they conduct their business. By definition, a sustainable company must act responsibly to ensure positive impacts for the economy, environment and society. But how can stakeholders be sure that the claims being made are backed up by real activity?
We believe the best way to demonstrate our efforts to conduct our business responsibly is to publish information about the things we are doing that make a positive impact and be transparent about the negative impacts our operations might have and what we are doing to reduce these. We have therefore created a new area of SSE’s web site - ‘Being Responsible’ - which is dedicated to making this information more easily accessible to all.
A good first step to being more transparent is to publish the impacts themselves.
I have long known that SSE makes an important contribution to the UK and Irish economies – but until recently, we have never asked how much? So we asked PwC, a respected professional services firm, to undertake an Economic Impact Study. That report tells us that SSE boosted the UK economy by £9.1bn in 2012/13, that for every one person SSE employs, almost five other jobs are supported in the UK economy and as one of the largest contributors to the UK treasury, SSE’s Total Tax Contribution in 2012/13 was £536m.
But I know that SSE’s impacts go far beyond the creation of jobs and wealth.
A decent company ensures that negative environmental impacts are minimised and mitigated, but a truly responsible company seeks to bring about positive impacts too. That is why the £3.7bn we have invested over the last seven years in building new renewable energy capacity, matters; and why we are proud to be the UK’s largest producer of renewable energy. It is also why we are committed to helping our customers use less of our core product - energy - through the use of new energy efficiency measures.
The same goes for social impacts. It is one thing not to treat people or communities badly, and an entirely different matter to ensure we are a responsible member of the communities we serve so that they benefit from our involvement. That is the ethos behind our drive to be a responsible developer of new energy infrastructure. We go further than we have to with our approach to community consultation and the provision of community benefit funds.
SSE knows that our impacts are not simply about what we do, it matters how we do it too. We aim to be responsible in all that we do – and being transparent means we are serious about it.