Greening Government Commitments

Today we've published our Annual Report 2022/23, and as part of that we have shared our update on the Government's Greening Commitments. 

We support the Government’s Greening Government Commitments and reflect the ambitions, commitments and targets through our investment practices and business operations where possible.

Our ambition is to operate in a manner which is consistent with the Paris Agreement* by minimising our own environmental impacts. We will aim to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from our building management, supply chain, technology and travel activities. 

Given that our Scope 1 and Scope 2 direct GHG emissions are already negligible owing to HVAC and renewable electricity systems, we will focus more on reducing our Scope 3 emissions from travel, and capture reductions in electricity through resource efficiency. 

The Greening Government Commitments refer to establishing a 2017/18 baseline and reducing emissions, waste and water consumption from that point. As we do not have reliable data from that time, we have established a baseline for 2019/20 instead and are now in a position to report our progress against this baseline. 

While we don’t yet have the systems in place to report on every measure, we’re working with our suppliers to capture reliable data and we are steadily putting together a better picture of our operational impact on the environment. As we lease our offices, we are gathering much of this information through the building managers. 

We have provided data based on the information available. In some situations we’ve estimated our usage or spend based on a proxy, such as the proportion of floor space we occupy in our buildings.

Our two shared-lease office buildings are already efficient. Both buildings have no direct combustion facilities onsite and our offices in Croydon and Cannon Street have BREEAM ratings of ‘Excellent’ and ‘Very Good’ respectively. All of the electricity our offices use is sourced via 100 per cent renewable electricity tariffs, which have been in place in both offices since October 2019. Therefore, our direct operational Greenhouse Gas emissions (Scope 1 and 2) are effectively zero using the Scope 2 market-based approach. 

We have also begun to make progress on reducing our environmental impact through the technology we use. For example, through our cloud migration we have moved away from higher carbon intensive data centres; and by encouraging our staff to move to Bring Your Own Device we have reduced the number of PPF company mobile phones by 72 per cent.

We’re pleased that use of paper in our offices has not reverted to pre-pandemic levels. We don’t currently have accurate data for all our Scope 3 paper use, such as letters sent on our behalf. However, we have been reducing the paper we use in our corporate publications and communications for several years. Most of our publications are now digital-only. We still send a paper copy of our annual PPF member newsletter where we don’t have an email address for the member, but as we encourage members to register for our member website, we are constantly getting more members’ email addresses and therefore the number of paper newsletters decreases year-on-year. Now that many member transactions can be completed online, we are sending far less physical paperwork to members. For example, the online retirement process dramatically reduces the amount of paperwork required.

With Covid-19 travel restrictions largely falling away in 2022, we saw the number of business flights being taken return to similar levels as our 2019/20 pre pandemic baseline. 

*The Paris Agreement aims to keep the increase in the average global temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to restrict the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.