Chief Executive Statement
I am delighted to introduce to you our fifth CSR report for the year to 31 March 2008.
This has been an exciting year for us with the acquisition of Laidlaw International, Inc. This transformational acquisition significantly increased the scale of our yellow school bus and transit businesses in North America and added Greyhound intercity coach services to our business portfolio. The acquisition has contributed to a significant increase in Group annualised revenue from £3.7 billion to over £5 billion. We now employ over 137,000 people across the UK and North America.
The continued growth of the business represents both opportunities and challenges. A key objective for us over the coming year is to continue to integrate our enlarged North American business to ensure we deliver consistent quality of service through a shared vision and values. The integration also provides an opportunity to share knowledge and experience and establish best practice in the enlarged Group.
Progress this year
Our core values are safety and customer service. The safety and security of our customers and staff is of paramount importance to us. Our safety principle is “If you cannot do it safely, don’t do it”. We want safe behaviour to be a way of life for our employees and we promote this through Injury Prevention, our industry leading safety initiative. This year we achieved a 23% reduction in our lost time injury rate and a 10% reduction in our passenger injury rate.
We seek to deliver high standards of customer service in line with our commitments. This means running punctual and reliable services in line with passengers’ expectations. We continue to invest significantly in new vehicles, property, technology and our people to achieve this. We combine this with seeking innovative ways to deliver partnership working, service improvements and customer communication, as we believe this is essential to delivering the sustainable transport systems our customers and society in general require for the future.
Our employees are our greatest asset and we continue to invest in developing and training them to ensure we have a motivated workforce and provide customer satisfaction. This year we took the important step of signing the UK Government’s Skills Pledge, a voluntary commitment to support our employees in developing numeracy and literacy skills.
As a public transport operator we have an important role to play in lessening the negative impact of travel on the environment. Bus and rail travel produces fewer emissions per passenger kilometre than planes or cars and helps reduce congestion and pressure for road development. However, there are environmental impacts associated with operating our services, which we are committed to reducing.
This year we have reduced energy usage in our UK properties and a growing number of our operating companies in the UK have now achieved accreditation to the international environmental management system standard ISO14001.
We are committed to reducing carbon emissions. We are challenging vehicle manufacturers in the UK to develop significantly more fuel-efficient vehicles using established technology, to ensure their earliest possible delivery to market.
We have established a North American CSR Working Group reporting to the CSR Steering Committee tasked with co-ordinating CSR activity in North America. This will include developing appropriate North American responses to CSR issues taking account of cultural and operational differences.
North America integration update
The integration of the new North American business is an ideal opportunity to identify and implement best practice from both businesses. We can already demonstrate significant progress in this area and have plans and programmes in place to ensure effective long-term integration.
Within one month of taking over the Laidlaw operations all our new North American employees had received a safety briefing. This included awareness raising and training on key company policies designed to keep all staff safe. We are developing a revised North America-wide safety management system drawing on best practice from both organisations and elsewhere to ensure it is ‘best in class’.
During the integration process a key priority has been to ensure that none of our activities disrupted the operations of our business or negatively impacted on our customers. We have carried out an extensive customer satisfaction survey the output of which will continue to inform our strategy for service provision. We are also seeking to strengthen our community programme to ensure we make a real difference in terms of our community work and charitable giving.
We have recruited an Executive Vice President of Human Resources for North America who will oversee human resource management across our operations. A new people strategy has been developed to ensure we deliver a positive work environment and appropriately reward and recognise the contribution our employees make to the success of our business.
The Laidlaw acquisition introduced more than 500 new properties to the Group. A programme of environmental compliance audits is being undertaken across all these sites. We are devoting more dedicated resources to environmental management in North America to effectively manage environmental risks and establish systems to bring about performance improvements.
I believe the integration process will strengthen the management of CSR issues across the business as we seek to build on best practice.
Outlook
I am pleased with the progress we have made this year. As the business continues to grow we will look for opportunities to develop our CSR activities and manage new challenges that we face. CSR is integral to all of our business activities and I believe it is key to our long-term sustainable growth and continued success.
Moir Lockhead
Chief Executive