Our Environment

Helical has a duty to care for the environment, which leads us to constantly seek innovative ways in which we can improve our performance with regards to sustainable consumption and resource use. We also believe there are business benefits in doing so through increased ability to secure planning consent, improved marketability of assets to prospective tenants and reduced operating costs of assets.

The Group’s corporate commitments to environmental issues are outlined in our Sustainability Strategy “Built for the Future” and the Group’s Environmental Policy, both of which can be found below.

Our strategy and supporting policy set out Helical’s commitments across a range of impact areas including its development and property management activities. The Group sets itself targets to guide its environmental responsibilities, including: resource use and waste production; pollution; biodiversity; timber sourcing; flood risk and sustainable design and construction.

We recognise our responsibility to reduce any adverse environmental impacts arising from our business activities and we work within existing regulatory frameworks to comply with all relevant environmental legislation as a minimum through our operations. Our overall goal is to operate in an environmentally sustainable manner throughout our activities

Our response to environmental issues is practical and pragmatic and reflects our desire to be a responsive, flexible and collaborative partner and landlord. The management system has been developed specifically to reflect the flexibility of Helical’s business model.

Key elements of our Environmental Management System (EMS) include:

• Environmental and Corporate Responsibility Policies which set out Helical’s high-level commitment across a number of impact areas. These are reviewed at Board level annually and are implemented by our senior management team.
• Annual (rolling) performance targets to enable us to focus our efforts throughout the year on measurable, yet achievable performance goals. We report on energy and water consumption at our large multi-let assets and head office, and measure our performance against quantitative targets set the previous reporting year. In addition, we measure the proportion of waste at our managed assets as well as within our developments.
• In collaboration with our consultants, we developed a sustainability project management and contractors checklist to ensure that sustainability issues are incorporated into all decisions throughout the development lifecycle.
• Effective use of internal evaluation and review through quarterly meetings of key Helical personnel, external corporate responsibility advisors and principal managing agents to ensure effective delivery of the objectives and targets.