Our CR&S Approach
Stockland UK
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Continue to develop our CR&S strategy, complementing Stockland's overall approach, while keeping in step with external demands in the UK and addressing our business needs. Engage with both our existing and new joint venture partners. |
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Refocused our original CR&S strategy appropriate to the current economic climate. We postponed launching a formal program of work to engage with our tenants and |
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Develop a more comprehensive plan for community involvement across our portfolio and commit to issuing a set of guidelines |
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Developed a draft Community Consultation Plan. In FY09 we have not had a project reach an appropriate stage to enable this to be trialed. |
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Develop an environmental sustainability plan. |
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Held environmental sustainability workshops for our employees, aimed at developing a specific and tailored sustainability approach for our asset management and major project areas of the business. |
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Continue to measure the carbon footprint of our most energy-intensive assets and identify ways in which we can reduce energy consumption. |
Business climate
The past 12 months have been a challenging time for the UK commercial property industry, which has witnessed a fall of over 25 per cent in capital values in the year to May 2009, with the total fall in capital values now expected to reach approximately 50 per cent in the second half of 2009. These pressures are further compounded by considerable downward pressures on rental growth and increasing levels of tenant administrations.
Against this challenging backdrop, we are continuing to focus on our relationships with our existing tenants to help support them through this difficult period.
The current economic environment has forced us to re-focus our FY09 CR&S strategy. In particular, it has affected our ability to launch a formal program of work to engage our tenants and joint venture partners on CR&S. With the financial pressures that these businesses are currently under and the proposed sale of our UK assets, we feel that engaging our customers on new initiatives at the present time may prove counter-productive.
Developing the UK sustainability strategy
Our UK CR&S Committee is made up of key employees from across the business. The Committee worked closely with the Australian business to formulate our FY09 strategy and implement this strategy across the business.
The focal point for the business in FY09 in terms of sustainability has been our existing asset management portfolio. We have continued to measure the carbon footprint of our most energy-intensive assets and are working to identify and implement measures to reduce the energy consumption of these assets. We also focused on meeting emerging environmental sustainability regulatory requirements.
We held a series of environmental sustainability workshops in the year to educate employees and develop a tailored sustainability approach for our asset management and major project areas of the business. Over 90 per cent of employees in these teams attended these workshops.
This year we have also continued to place a strong emphasis on employee engagement and have achieved very positive results as measured by our annual employee survey, as well as a high level of employee participation in the giving and volunteering activities we have run throughout the year.
Stockland UK information in this report
This report includes information on employee volunteering and community investment in our UK business, and on our community development project in Harlow in Essex. Employee data in the valuing our people section includes UK employees unless otherwise stated. We outline UK environmental regulation affecting our industry in the regulation section.