Managing our travel emissions

Business travel remains our single largest source of carbon emissions, and so we committed to reducing it by 50% by 2030 in line with our near term Net Zero Target. Although travel emissions have gradually increased since pandemic restrictions were lifted, we've maintained our total carbon emissions at 51% of our 2019 baseline, just shy of our 2030 target. We have a Net Zero Working Group and Thoughtful Travel programme in place to ensure we remain on track to meet our 2030 Net Zero commitments.

Business travel is a necessary part of the way we work, as our ability to serve our clients largely depends on being able to visit their locations. It's also important for building relationships, which is at the core of our brand. However, we continue to challenge ourselves on the need, frequency and mode of travel.

Between 2019 and 2023 we halved our carbon emissions from business travel, while increasing the size of our business by a third, highlighting how we’re decoupling our business growth.

Our approach

Our strategy for reducing travel emissions involves both reducing the number of journeys our people make and also looking for less carbon-intensive ways of working.

We've worked to reduce unnecessary journeys, encouraging both internal and client-facing teams to make better use of technology-based alternatives that support collaborative working from different locations.

And our travel policy encourages our people, once they’ve considered the need to travel, to use our internal systems to book travel, so we can improve our management information, risk management and costs.

Programmes

We have several programmes to help our people take practical measures to reduce their carbon footprint:

Alternatives to travel
Internal controls
Low carbon driving
Support for cycling
Commuting

Alternatives to travel

The simplest way to cut emissions caused by travel is to avoid it. So our Thoughtful Travel programme challenges our peoples to “Sense check their travel”, while also providing practical ways to lower their business travel carbon impact and hold conversations with clients.

Technology can help us to connect with clients and colleagues effectively, so we launched a multi-phased campaign to boost the use of online meetings, and encourage a “Virtual first" approach, which evolves to emphasise different benefits of the technology to our people, and specific features that aid collaboration.

When first launched, more than 5,000 of our people completed online training in these technologies. We instantly saw the average number of virtual collaborations per person rise significantly over that period, and while we saw a marked reduction in business travel, most of the collaborations were in additive, enhancing our connectivity, and client collaboration capabilities. It’s one part of our wider digital transformation.

Internal controls

Our travel policy encourages our people to use our internal systems to book travel, giving us greater influence over how they travel. And our requirement for senior management approval helps to challenge the assumption that flying somewhere is always the best option. It was a significant contributing factor in reducing our emissions from non-client related air travel, which fell by 90% between 2007 and 2023.

Low carbon driving

We've continued to raise awareness of low carbon driving options among our staff, promoting hybrid, electric and low carbon vehicles available through our staff company car scheme. A recent push to promote EV uptake in our car scheme, means over 80% of our current order book are now electric vehicles.

Support for cycling

We’ve participated in the Government's Cycle to Work scheme for several years, enabling us to lend bikes and cycling safety equipment to our people as a tax-free benefit. The scheme had 345 participants in 2023.

We continue to reimburse our people with mileage expense payments for work-related journeys, as well as making improvements to our buildings such as double tier bike racks, extra showers, lockers and a bike repair station in our More London office to help our people to keep cycling. We’ve also launched a scheme for staff to borrow Brompton bikes to cycle between our London offices at Embankment Place and More London.

Commuting

In addition to our business travel, there is also a sizeable carbon impact from our people commuting to work. This depends, in part, on where our people live, where clients are based, and the location of our offices, which have generally been located close to public transport as part of our real estate strategy and strategic business planning.

We’ve been measuring aspects of our commuting for over a decade. Getting robust data remains challenging, but we periodically analyse how far and how often our people commute to different offices, together with the mode by which they travel. In 2023 we modelled carbon emissions from our people commuting at approximately 6,739 tonnes CO2e.

However, there is still work to do to improve the reliability of this data and the actionable insights that it gives us.