Lead the way to a bright, sustainable future
The BT Group Manifesto boldly focuses on accelerating growth – through responsible, inclusive and sustainable tech. This will help us achieve our purpose to connect for good and our ambition to be the world’s most trusted connector of people, devices and machines by 2030. This allows us to focus on the things that will make the biggest difference to enabling a bright, sustainable future.
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Responsible
- Applying responsible tech principles across BT Group’s full value chain.
- Investing in new growth tech that will help us live and work better.
- Partnering to build a responsible tech ecosystem that builds trust and drives growth.
- Conducted user research to understand how our responsible tech principles could build trust and differentiate us.
- Launched a ‘worker’s voice’ pilot in five supplier factories, to understand the experience of people working in our supply chain.
- Published an AI standard for colleagues, to ensure our use, development, purchase and sale of AI is consistent with the responsible tech principles, thereby helping to reduce risk at every stage of the AI life cycle.
- Enhanced sales due diligence in Business by adding checks for negative media coverage. This helps us assess any potential human rights risks through the life of a customer’s contract.
8.7
10.2
16.10
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Inclusive
- Building a diverse and inclusive workforce through our inclusion and diversity targets.
- Passing 25 million households with full fibre by December 2026.
- Expanding 5G to 90% of the UK geography by 2028, and continue to expand 4G.
- Helping 25 million people with digital skills by the end of March 2026.
- Improved both our gender and ethnicity median pay gaps, but we recognise there is still more we need to do to build a truly equitable and inclusive culture across BT Group.
- Reached over 14 million households (including 3.9 million in rural locations) with full fibre, and extended access to broadband for low-income households, through the BT Home Essentials social tariff and Openreach’s Connect the Unconnected offer, and to discounted mobile through EE Basics.
- Maintained the UK’s largest, fastest 4G network, and continued the rollout out of 5G that now reaches 75% of the population in the UK.
- Helped a further 3.7 million people improve their digital skills (23 million since FY15), including supporting 1.2 million small businesses, helping secondary school students ‘Get Work Ready’, empowering young people to get PhoneSmart and tackling online hate with EE Hope United.
4.3 & 4.4
5b
9.1 & 9c
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Sustainable
- Becoming a net zero carbon emissions business by the end of March 2031, and for suppliers and customers by the end of March 2041.
- Building towards a circular BT Group by the end of March 2030 and circular tech and telco ecosystem by the end of March 2040, while protecting biodiversity and nature.
- Helping customers avoid 60m tonnes of CO2e by the end of March 2030.
- Cut our carbon emissions intensity by 61% since FY171, by introducing more electric vehicles to our fleet, decarbonising our building estate and through improvements in energy consumption and efficiency.
- Cut our supplier carbon emissions by 25% since FY17 (against our 42% target by the end of March 2031) by continuing to work with suppliers to encourage them to set science based targets and improve transparency by reporting emissions through CDP.
- Refurbished or recycled 166,000 mobile devices and 2.4 million home hubs and set-top boxes, and recovered or recycled 92% of our operational waste worldwide.
- Helped customers avoid over 1.5 million tonnes of carbon, mainly through full fibre broadband reducing personal or work-related travel.
1 Target has been approved by the Science Based Targets initiative as in line with 1.5°C climate pathway. Target is to reduce the carbon intensity of our operations by 87% since FY17 by the end of March 2031, (scopes 1 and 2 worldwide emissions tonnes CO2e per £m value added).
12.5 & 12.7
13a
We are being recognised for our work as a responsible business, here are some of our accolades:
‘A’ rating on climate for the eighth year running (top 2% of over 21,000 global reporters)
Ranked in the top 200 public companies that earn the most revenue from clean, sustainable sources, supporting the transition to a clean energy future
‘Advanced’ rating score of 73/100 – in the top 4% of over 600 companies assessed in the telecoms sector
Franco-British Trade & Investment Awards – Sustainability category winners
Confirmed as 2024 member of the LSE Russell FTSE4Good index
BT Group recognized as a ‘Leader’ in Global Child Forum’s global children’s rights and business benchmark 2024
‘B-’ rating ‘Prime’ status on ESG
‘A’ rating for ESG investment risk and opportunities
Prime Minister’s Award for Cyber awarded to BT Group, for helping customers avoid text message scams
Payroll Giving Platinum Award quality mark from HM Government awarded to BT Group, for generating sustainable income sources for UK charities through Payroll Giving
ESG low risk score of 18.1 (top quartile of c.16k companies assessed)
Leading telecoms company and ranked 6th overall in the UK FTSE100 across a range of ESG indicators in 2023 (ranked 1st on Climate)
Ranked 14th of 100 companies in our industry sector on digital inclusion
See our ESG Addendum 2024 for the full list of our ESG ratings/rankings and awards.
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ESG Addendum to the BT Group plc Annual Report 2024
Contains various disclosures and data points, including Manifesto-related targets and progress, social and economic disclosures, detailed colleague and environmental data, and our SASB index.
pdf - 449 KB
31 October 2024
