We engage with a wide range of stakeholders to run our business including our employees, subcontractors and suppliers, customers and communities, shareholders, local, regional and national government, NGOs, industry bodies and experts.
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Employees
We engage with colleagues through our national and local employee forums and regular surveys.
Customers
We engage with customers during and after the buying process and seek their feedback through follow up surveys and post-occupancy research.
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Suppliers
We meet regularly with key suppliers to communicate our standards and expectations and to collaborate on business and sustainability improvements.
Community engagement plays an important role in developing effective schemes and supports good relationships with the communities we work in. Every one of our sites has a tailored planning and community engagement strategy and a clear point of contact.
We use a range of methods to inform local people about our plans, including our website, meetings, exhibitions, workshops and information boards.
We aim to reach a wide range of stakeholders, including neighbouring residents and property owners, potential customers, local authorities, businesses, schools and other groups. Many consultations take place online and we use social media, online exhibitions and virtual forums to ensure a broad section of the community can participate.
Our Political and Community Engagement Toolkit helps our teams to consistently engage a wide range of stakeholders in the planning process and to use research to understand local needs and priorities.
Our Community Communication Plan provides a step-by-step framework for our regional businesses to communicate with the community and prospective buyers throughout the lifecycle of a development.
Our Engagement Academy gives our land and planning and technical teams the skills, knowledge and confidence to run best practice engagement processes. The training covers the planning process, the roles and responsibilities of local planning authorities and their members, legal requirements, the purpose of engagement, how to deal with difficult issues and questions and a range of other topics. It includes role play exercises to help colleagues practise engagement techniques.
We provide affordable (social) housing on a significant proportion of our developments. We work closely with independent housing organisations that are Registered Providers to ensure that affordable housing is integrated effectively into our developments.
Regulation has an impact on our business and we think it is important to share our views with policy makers at the local, regional and national level.
This includes direct engagement such as responding to Government consultations, engagement with local and regional government through the planning process and engagement via our membership of trade associations.
We engage with local authorities, parish councils, Homes England, the Greater London Authority (GLA), regional government, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), Nature England and other public sector organisations to understand their priorities and share our views.
Public policy work is carried out in a way that reflects our values and cultural principles and key policies such as our Business Conduct Policy. We strive for clear, open and accurate communication. It is our policy not to make donations to political parties or organisations.
As well as site-specific engagement, we participate in the development of strategic frameworks, Local Plans and Neighbourhood Plans, which consider broader development needs and enable local people to shape new developments in their area. This often includes working closely with local authorities to develop the local design code as part of the local development plan.
Industry association memberships
We engage with Government through our membership of industry organisations such as the Home Builders Federation (HBF) and the British Property Federation (BPF). Regional businesses are also members of trade associations, for example our Scottish businesses are members of Homes for Scotland.
Recent public policy engagement
We engage with central and devolved Government on issues relating to planning and sustainability. Examples from 2023 include:
We proactively engage with investors on our approach to ESG issues throughout the year. We also participate in several global and sectoral benchmarks used by investors, including:
We partner with NGOs (non-governmental organisations) and expert organisations in areas such as urban design, ecology and innovation to help us create sustainable communities across the UK. For example, we are partnering with Hedgehog Street and Buglife to help us implement aspects of our environment strategy.
Many environmental issues for our sector are systemic and require collaboration among regulators, industry organisations, housebuilders and the supply chain. We work with others to tackle industry-wide challenges including through the Home Builders Federation, the Future Homes Hub (FHH) and the Supply Chain Sustainability School. We chair and are involved in a number of FHH working groups including those on metrics, embodied and whole life carbon and zero-carbon ready homes.
We have updated our materiality assessment, which helps us to identify the most relevant and significant impacts for our business and our stakeholders.
We have taken a ‘double materiality’ approach to identify the socio-economic and environmental issues that have most impact on the value of our business and those where our business activities have the most impact on people or the environment.
Comparing the significance of different types of impacts is not straightforward, particularly where quantitative and comparable data is not available. We will continue to develop our approach to materiality and assessing impacts and regularly update our assessment.
Key steps in our methodology include:
• Identifying impacts – we identified a long list of impact areas based on our previous materiality processes and a review of external reporting standards.
• Evaluation and prioritisation – we used stakeholder input and analysed a range of sources to prioritise the identified impact areas. This included stakeholder interviews, a media and policy review, reference to sector-specific standards, multi-stakeholder and corporate benchmarks, and alignment with our business strategy and risk management process.
• Review and validation – the findings were reviewed by members of our senior leadership and some minor adjustments were made to reflect business priorities.
We identified 16 material impacts grouped into four key themes. Click the link below to download our materiality matrix, and keep reading on this page to learn more about each of the impact areas.
Impact area | Impacts, risks and opportunities for our stakeholders and our business |
| Customer wellbeing in our homes |
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Quality and sustainability of new communities |
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Affordability and accessibility of new homes |
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Our people and suppliers Our people and suppliers
Impact area | Impacts, risks and opportunities for our stakeholders and our business |
| Health, safety and wellbeing |
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Inclusion and equality |
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Skills development |
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| Employment practices |
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| Responsible sourcing and human rights |
|
Impact area | Impacts, risks and opportunities for our stakeholders and our business |
| Climate change |
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Nature |
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Resource use and waste |
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| Water quality and management |
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| Site environmental impacts |
|
| Impact area | Impacts, risks and opportunities for our stakeholders and our business |
Financial performance and economic contribution |
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Governance and transparency |
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Ethical and responsible business |
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