For Barclays, there are two separate but mutually dependent aspects to sustainability. One is our duty as a bank to provide sound and enduring returns for our shareholders, and the best possible services for our customers. The other is our responsibility to conduct our global business ethically, and with full regard to wider social and environmental considerations.
Our ambition going forwards is to develop both of these complementary strands to our strategy: Barclays as a sustainable bank and Barclays as a responsible global citizen.
Banks are central to every society; they provide the funding that facilitates business and entrepreneurship, support a sound financial system, and help to create jobs and wealth.
In all of this, the customer is absolutely central. If we are to make sustainable banking successful and successful banking sustainable, we must put our customers at the heart of everything we do, and build our services around them.
This aspiration covers every aspect of our business and every stage in a customer’s relationship with us, from the purchase of a Barclays product for the first time, to the way we address applications for loans, to the more general aspects of customer service such as complaints-handling, confidentiality, and security.
In 2007 we made progress with the development of basic bank accounts, increased our focus on the ‘Treating Customers Fairly’agenda across the Group, and continued to refine the social and environmental criteria we apply to our commercial lending. This is an area where Barclays has demonstrated genuine leadership.
Being a responsible global citizen doesn’t just cover our award-winning community investment programme, but includes how we behave as an employer, our work on human rights, and how we manage Barclays wider social and environmental impacts.
Climate change has become the single biggest challenge the world faces at the beginning of the 21st century, and in response we are focusing increasingly on our work on the environment, which includes both our direct and indirect impacts. We are also working more closely with our suppliers to help them address their own sustainability performance.
Barclays has always been a proud and committed investor in its communities. In 2007 we invested £52.4m in communities around the world and 44,000 Barclays employees in 26 countries were involved in our fundraising and volunteering initiatives.
Our work on assessing the environmental and sustainability risks of project finance deals continued in 2007. The number of deals we reviewed, rejected or changed to meet our sustainability requirements increased on our 2006 figures.
One of our guiding principles is to develop the best people, and in such an intensely competitive industry we want to find, develop and retain the best talent. We are committed to diversity as a way of helping to ensure we are able to attract the best people. We have a wide range of development and leadership programmes for employees, and a policy that ensures that they are all treated with respect, regardless of age, race, sexuality, gender or disability.
We use our employee opinion surveys to understand and engage our employees. We continue to score well but we are working to improve our scores further.
As we grow internationally our workforce becomes ever more diverse, reflecting the worldwide markets in which we operate. The percentage of UK ethnic minority employees has increased significantly from 7.2% in 2001, to 12.3% in 2007. As we grow we are determined to build the local talent base in the markets in which we operate, we see this as a crucial success factor for us in emerging markets. In the UK we also continued to invest in the disability mentoring and ‘reasonable adjustments’ schemes in 2007, and have again been ranked in the top 20 of Stonewall’s list of the best employers for lesbian, gay and bisexual people.
These are clear successes; but we have much more work to do on our gender balance, especially at senior level: 20.6% of our senior managers are women. The drive to improve this comes from the very top of the bank.
We will set out our full work on Corporate Sustainability in our report that will be published on 20th May.