At PPHE Hotel Group, we aim to incorporate environmental and social responsibility in every area of our business and our ESG Strategy provides us with a framework to do this. Grass-roots initiatives co-ordinated across the business have always made us proud of how our people take ownership of our corporate citizenship. Now we want to build on this with enhanced communication and data collection to show how we are all pulling towards a common goal.
This approach applies to all properties we develop, own and operate across all regions, including our unique hospitality experiences offered in our resorts and campsites, restaurants, bars and spas.
While the paragraphs below and linked pages provide an overview of the ESG strategy, more details on this and our achievements in 2023 are included in the ESG section of the 2023 Annual Reports and Accounts.
Our four pillars of responsibility
We understand that our business can have impacts on people, the environment, and society as a whole. We also acknowledge how critical people and the environment are to the success of our business. Therefore, to protect these resources and maximise our positive impact on society, we have based our ESG strategy on four pillars:
Properties
Local communities
Supply chain
People
Sustainable Development Goals
As of 2019, we restructured our ESG Strategy to ensure our efforts contributed to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
While we are able to relate our activities to most of the 17 SDGs, we believe our purpose and values are most closely aligned with the following five SDGs in particular.
Materiality assessment
In 2022 we conducted a materiality assessment, an analysis that helps businesses identify the sustainability issues that are most important and impactful for them. We reported the material issues identified through this process in the
2022 Annual Report (pages 68-69), with some of the top ones being carbon emissions, sustainable procurement, water, attracting and retaining talent, and climate change response. We can now use these material issues to guide our ESG strategy and make informed decisions about our priorities in these areas.
Our journey to net zero
In December 2023, PPHE formally committed to setting emission reduction targets through the Science-Based Target initiative (SBTi). With this commitment to SBTi, PPHE pledged to set a near-term emission reduction target for 2030 and a net zero target for 2040. The commitment is now public on the SBTi website. We are currently developing the two targets, which will then be validated by SBTi by the end of 2025.
ESG Committee
In 2021, in line with the requirements of Principle A of the UK Corporate Governance Code 2018 for companies to be “long-term sustainable” and "contributing to wider society", and the increasing investor focus upon ESG issues in evaluating companies generally, PPHE established an ESG Committee to:
Develop, monitor and re-evaluate policies on ESG matters in support of the strategy for approval by the Board;
Monitor the implementation of such policies in relation to management of PPHE; and
Report to the Board that appropriate policies and standards in relation to environmental and social matters, and governance of those matters are consistently applied.
The ESG Committee was constituted as a committee of the Board and comprises Non-Executive Directors. The ESG Committee is chaired by Ken Bradley, with other members being Stephanie Coxon and Marcia Bakker.
Download the ESG Committee Terms of Reference
Read more about the latest updates on our ESG Strategy at pp. 66-83 of our 2023 Annual Report and Accounts.