Materiality Assessment
Recognising and responding to issues that really matter to our stakeholders and our business.
Energy is at the heart of everyone’s lives. So our actions can have a big impact on a broad range of stakeholders. That’s why we undertake a materiality assessment to help us understand what the most important issues are that face our stakeholders and our business, to ensure that we’re able to effectively understand, consider and evolve our strategy in a way that maximises opportunities and reduces risk.
In line with best practice, we examine the risks and opportunities facing our business in the immediate and long-term, scoring them based on their level of importance to us and our stakeholders, using the outputs to create our Materiality Matrix.
This involves:
- Drawing on external insight from a broad range of stakeholders such as customers, colleagues, officials, policymakers, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and suppliers as well as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
- Engaging internal experts across the business to understand how the issues may affect our operational or financial performance such as our reputation or growth.
Prioritising issues through this process, enables us to focus our efforts on effectively managing our impact as well as our stakeholder relationships.
Our materiality assessment is typically carried out every three years and we expect to run our next assessment in 2024.
The review process allows us to reflect any significant changes within our business or the external environment, to inform the development of our People & Planet Plan and its Foundations.