Our Commitment to Sustainability
Being a sustainable organisation is important to our business processes and operations. We strive to ensure that our activities reflect our ongoing commitment to customer care, colleague engagement, responsible supply chains, driving stakeholder value, and helping to maintain a sustainable environment for future generations.
The Group continues to contribute to the development of a sustainable society through focused efforts on the four pillars of our sustainability strategy:
- creating a diverse, dynamic, and engaged workplace (‘our people’)
- commitment to customer care (‘our customers’)
- developing and maintaining partnerships with local communities and charities (‘our community’)
- mitigating the environmental effects of our activities (‘our environment’)
Our sustainability focus
As a provider of self storage facilities across Western Europe, and the UK’s largest self storage company, we are very aware of the impact we can have in society and on the environment and therefore, by making incremental changes year-on-year, we can ensure that our actions have positive implications for our colleagues, suppliers, and wider society.
We are continuously adapting our business to respond to our customers’ changing expectations including improving customer convenience, and offering flexibility for small, medium, and large businesses.
We are proud of the role we continue to play in the lives of our customers as we meet the demand for space from domestic and business customers, and we want to keep pace with their needs and expectations whilst delivering our commercial objectives.
Our sustainability strategy
Our material sustainability issues, as identified by internal and external stakeholder engagement (with colleagues, investors, customers, and partners), fall within four areas, which we call the ‘pillars’ of our sustainability strategy: our people, our customers, our community, and our environment. Although these ‘pillars’ do not fundamentally change, we periodically review our activities to ensure we are focusing clearly on material areas and are aligned with not only our corporate goals but also the principles of the UN Global Compact. We track progress against medium term targets set in 2019 using appropriate key performance indicators (“KPIs”).
We report in accordance with the European Public Real Estate Association’s (“EPRA’s”) latest recommendations: EPRA Sustainability Best Practices Recommendations (“sBPR”), third version September 2017. These recommendations are also aligned with the latest Global Reporting Initiative (“GRI”) standards. Once finalised, these indicators and supplemental information can be downloaded from
Report and Presentations section on our website.
In recognition of the progress made in our sustainability disclosures, Safestore has been awarded a Silver rating in the 2023 EPRA Sustainability BPR Awards. In addition, the Global ESG Benchmark for Real Assets (“GRESB”) has once again awarded Safestore an ‘A’ rating in its 2023 Public Disclosures assessment and MSCI has awarded Safestore its second highest rating of ‘AA’ for ESG. |
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Delivering our sustainability strategy
During the year, the Board continued to focus on delivering the Group’s strategy whilst addressing the key environmental, social, and ethical factors facing Safestore.
We continue to do this by:
- ensuring our colleagues are engaged and have the expertise to deliver high quality customer service
- developing long term relationships with local charities and creating strong ties to the communities where we have a storage centre
- strengthening partnerships with our suppliers so we can serve our customers better and grow our businesses together going forward
- managing the resources we use in order to minimise any negative impact on the environment either through our direct operations or through our sourcing activities
- maintaining our membership of the Self Storage Association to further industry standards and codes of ethics for the benefit of our customers
Sustainability highlights
2023
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we published our first diversity pay gap report |
4.5+
|
customer satisfaction rating in all markets |
41%
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reduction in accidents involving our colleagues |
32
|
gas appliances removed from UK stores |
100%
|
of construction waste diverted away from landfill in the UK |
19.4%
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reduction in market-based operational GHG intensity |