Striking the balance 2004: Wessex Water’s annual sustainability report. 40 pages.
‘Our
aim’, declares Wessex Water in its latest non-financial report, ‘is to
be a genuinely sustainable company in all aspects of our business’.
That’s a sentiment all too familiar to readers of sustainability
reports. Yet the UK company’s latest offering comes closer than most to
achieving its declared hope of reporting progress towards its long term
goal of becoming a sustainable operation.
In part this is
because the company has something to say. Wessex has been considering
its wider impacts for decades rather than years. Its key performance
indicators, hived off into a small booklet inserted loose into the
report, cover five years rather than the usual one.
Wessex has
also found an interesting way of telling its story, which begins with
the 1975 annual review of Wessex Water Authority, complete with what
look like the original black-and-white photos, giving this section a
retro feel. Then come details of current performance, followed by a
final section looking ahead to 2034. In other words, the report in fact
spans three decades either side of the company’s 30th anniversary.
The
approach has several advantages. First, it highlights how much things
have improved since the days before privatization. In 1975, a third of
sewage sludge was dumped at sea (today 99 per cent is spread on the
land) and there was no requirement to report water quality (leave aside
the fact this was driven by regulation). Second, it shows the company
has a vested interest in sustainable business practice. This, in turn,
allows it to present its ‘vision for a sustainable Wessex Water’ not as
airy-fairy corporate waffle, but as part of a considered long term
strategy.
All this is in a report with bags of personality and
a homespun feel, even though Wessex is in fact owned by YTL Power
International, a faceless Malaysia-based concern with interests in the
Cayman Islands and Switzerland. With an advisory board mainly of locals
and the company’s head of economic regulation posing with his children
at a cottage door, the message is: your local water company cares for
the future. A sustainability report, then – and a community one too.
