As our business grows and evolves, we remain committed to upholding the human rights of the people impacted by our operations.
For an energy company, our direct impact on human rights is quite low. Most of our operations are based in countries with legal frameworks to protect human rights, such as the UK, Canada and the United States, where risks of human rights violations are small. Only 0.04% of our employees are based in countries with a high risk1 to human rights. That figure climbs to approximately 0.1% if you include those employees who travel to countries for business but are not based in the country.
Nonetheless, we take our responsibility to respect human rights very seriously. Centrica is a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) PDF (0.11Mb), and observes the basic principles of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR), the Core Conventions of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), and the Voluntary Principles on Security and Human Rights. We embody these values in ourbusiness principles – our third principle is ‘Respecting human rights’. Our Group Human Rights policy PDF (0.03Mb) further outlines these responsibilities. These commitments guide our business conduct and our relationships with stakeholders as an employer, business partner and community member.
We provide human rights e-learning to our teams operating in countries with a higher human rights risks. To ensure our materials were based on best practice information, we developed our e-learning programme and training materials in collaboration with the Institute of Business Ethics (IBE).
The expansion of Centrica’s services business and increased focus on energy efficiency products has increased the need for awareness of human rights with suppliers of these products. Our Responsible Procurement and Supplier Management policy PDF (0.06Mb) commits us to consider the performance of our suppliers on corporate responsibility issues including human rights.
It’s also important that we recognise and respect the special relationship that exists between indigenous communities and their land. When our operations touch these communities, we undertake engagement programmes to understand our impact and ensure our operations support – rather than detract from – their cultural heritage (see Community engagement).
Our Security Policy PDF (0.04Mb) includes a commitment to ensure that any security forces with whom we work must respect human rights.
Our people are crucial to the success of our business and it is essential that we ensure their rights are upheld. We aim to have diverse approach to recruiting and managing our employees that doesn’t discriminate based on ethnicity, gender or age, and aims to boost representation of these under-represented groups where appropriate. We work closely with trade unions to understand the specific needs of our engineers and ensure we are meeting their needs.
1Country risk sourced from the Human Rights Risk Atlas 2011 by Maplecroft.
http://www.centrica.com/index.asp?pageid=1116