Materiality Assessment
Recognising and responding to issues that really matter to our stakeholders and our business.
Energy is at the heart of everyone’s lives. So our actions can have a big impact on a broad range of stakeholders. That’s why we undertake a materiality assessment to help us understand what the most important issues are that face our stakeholders and our business, to ensure that we’re able to effectively understand, consider and evolve our strategy in a way that maximises opportunities and reduces risk.
We examine the impacts, risks and opportunities of sustainability topics on our stakeholders and our business in the immediate and longer-term, with outputs used to create a Materiality Matrix.
This involves:
- Drawing on external insight from a broad range of stakeholders such as customers, colleagues, policymakers, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), local communities and suppliers as well as inputs like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
- Engaging internal experts across the business to understand how the issues may affect our operational or financial performance such as our operations, growth or reputation.
Prioritising issues through this process, enables us to focus our efforts on effectively managing our impact as well as our stakeholder relationships.
Our materiality assessment was carried out five years ago. We are evolving our approach to align with the double materiality assessment set out by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), and we will share our updated matrix in due course.
The review process allows us to reflect any significant changes within our business or the external environment, to inform the development of our People & Planet Plan and its Foundations.