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Striking the balance 2004: Wessex Water’s annual sustainability report. 40 pages.
‘Our aim’, declares Wessex Water in its latest non-financial report, ‘is to be a genuinely sustainable company in all aspects of our business’. That’s a sentiment all too familiar to readers of sustainability reports. Yet the UK company’s latest offering comes closer than most to achieving its declared hope of reporting progress towards its long term goal of becoming a sustainable operation.
In part this is because the company has something to say. Wessex has been considering its wider impacts for decades rather than years. Its key performance indicators, hived off into a small booklet inserted loose into the report, cover five years rather than the usual one.
Wessex has also found an interesting way of telling its story, which begins with the 1975 annual review of Wessex Water Authority, complete with what look like the original black-and-white photos, giving this section a retro feel. Then come details of current performance, followed by a final section looking ahead to 2034. In other words, the report in fact spans three decades either side of the company’s 30th anniversary.
The approach has several advantages. First, it highlights how much things have improved since the days before privatization. In 1975, a third of sewage sludge was dumped at sea (today 99 per cent is spread on the land) and there was no requirement to report water quality (leave aside the fact this was driven by regulation). Second, it shows the company has a vested interest in sustainable business practice. This, in turn, allows it to present its ‘vision for a sustainable Wessex Water’ not as airy-fairy corporate waffle, but as part of a considered long term strategy.
All this is in a report with bags of personality and a homespun feel, even though Wessex is in fact owned by YTL Power International, a faceless Malaysia-based concern with interests in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. With an advisory board mainly of locals and the company’s head of economic regulation posing with his children at a cottage door, the message is: your local water company cares for the future. A sustainability report, then – and a community one too.
‘Our aim’, declares Wessex Water in its latest non-financial report, ‘is to be a genuinely sustainable company in all aspects of our business’. That’s a sentiment all too familiar to readers of sustainability reports. Yet the UK company’s latest offering comes closer than most to achieving its declared hope of reporting progress towards its long term goal of becoming a sustainable operation.
In part this is because the company has something to say. Wessex has been considering its wider impacts for decades rather than years. Its key performance indicators, hived off into a small booklet inserted loose into the report, cover five years rather than the usual one.
Wessex has also found an interesting way of telling its story, which begins with the 1975 annual review of Wessex Water Authority, complete with what look like the original black-and-white photos, giving this section a retro feel. Then come details of current performance, followed by a final section looking ahead to 2034. In other words, the report in fact spans three decades either side of the company’s 30th anniversary.
The approach has several advantages. First, it highlights how much things have improved since the days before privatization. In 1975, a third of sewage sludge was dumped at sea (today 99 per cent is spread on the land) and there was no requirement to report water quality (leave aside the fact this was driven by regulation). Second, it shows the company has a vested interest in sustainable business practice. This, in turn, allows it to present its ‘vision for a sustainable Wessex Water’ not as airy-fairy corporate waffle, but as part of a considered long term strategy.
All this is in a report with bags of personality and a homespun feel, even though Wessex is in fact owned by YTL Power International, a faceless Malaysia-based concern with interests in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. With an advisory board mainly of locals and the company’s head of economic regulation posing with his children at a cottage door, the message is: your local water company cares for the future. A sustainability report, then – and a community one too.
Alistair Townley
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