Hammerson uses third parties - Upstream Sustainability Services, part of Jones Lang LaSalle and Bureau Veritas - to provide external evaluation of progress and data quality. As both these organisations provide consultancy advice to Hammerson, statements provided should not be interpreted as a fully independent verification or assurance statement.
Advisors’ Statement
For Hammerson’s CR Report 2009, Upstream Sustainability Services, Jones Lang LaSalle has been involved in three main capacities - undertaking an assessment of Hammerson’s progress against the 2009 targets; providing assistance on achieving Global Reporting Initiative Level B; and validating data for the performance indicators. Given that Upstream Sustainability Services is Hammerson’s long-term strategic advisor on corporate responsibility (CR), this statement does not represent a fully independent verification statement but intends to provide an external evaluation of progress achieved during the year.
Target assessment
Upstream Sustainability Services performed the target assessment on the basis of telephone interviews and face-to-face meetings with those responsible for CR targets, as well as a detailed review of documentation and data submitted as evidence of action against each target. This year Hammerson set itself 64 targets - 37 for the UK business and 27 for the French business; as the scope for these targets varied for the UK and France, they were assessed separately.
In 2009, 72% of Hammerson’s targets were either fully achieved or in progress (41% achieved; 31% in progress). This target achievement rate is low in comparison to 2008 performance; this in part reflects the fact that the company continued to set ambitious targets in very difficult market conditions. Note that 8% of the targets set in 2009 are not applicable mainly due to Hammerson’s limited development activities in 2009.
Notable target achievements during 2009 include:
- A sea-change in the capture of community investment data through the roll-out of the LBG toolkit
- Creation of sustainability training programmes in the UK and France to embed sustainability skills and knowledge in more business functions
- Further progress towards achieving the rolling energy target for the consistent portfolio, with reductions of 15.9% for UK shopping centres, 17.3% for French shopping centres and 19.6% for UK offices against the 2006 baseline
- Completing the biodiversity programme to identify opportunities for ecological enhancement in the existing assets
- Progress towards understanding the water baseline in the shopping centres, although metering arrangements remain problematic in some assets
In terms of the 20% of targets not achieved, we reiterate our comment from 2008 regarding the need to implement Hammerson’s responsible procurement policy in a systematic fashion across all operational and development activities. Progress has been made in 2009 but there remains a lot more to be done in 2010.
Target assessment
As in last year’s report, Upstream Sustainability Services has provided guidance to enable the CR Report 2009 to meet the GRI principles defining report content and quality. As this is a self-declared GRI report, we recommended the inclusion of a self-assessment against these GRI principles to enable greater transparency for the report reader (http://www.globalreporting.org/ReportingFramework/G3Guidelines/). A checklist of the required profile disclosures, management disclosures and indicators to meet GRI Level B is provided here.