Preventing bribery
PA Consulting Group is committed to operating in an ethical way throughout the world and we are particularly aware of the danger of bribery. Our Code of Conduct, which we review regularly, is our key defence against bribery of, or by, our people and describes our procedure on how to report suspicious practices, either openly or in confidence.
Our Code of Conduct demonstrates that PA always strives to do the "right thing" rather than the "easy thing" and that we understand the consequences of poor behaviour. We encourage our employees to review these policies regularly and provide a variety of training to our employees to ensure compliance.
We take action to ensure that those in our supply chain also have appropriate procedures in place. We will take relevant action against those who fail to meet our standards.
Alan Middleton
Chief Executive Officer
PA Consulting Group
If you would like to see our code of conduct, please contact us.
Environmental responsibility
While working with clients to help them make their businesses greener, we remain absolutely dedicated to reducing our own environmental impact year-on-year.
In 2012, we made great progress towards achieving ISO 14001 – the International Standard for Environmental Management Systems (EMS) – at our offices. We have fully implemented an effective EMS, which aims to ensure continual improvement with a focus on our most significant environmental impacts. By undergoing an initial audit, we also officially started the process of becoming ISO 14001 accredited. In addition, we are now Carbon Trust accredited after receiving one of the Trust’s highest ever carbon management scores.
To raise awareness among our people of the environmental work we are doing, we organised a dedicated week of activities and events in November. This focused on initiatives associated with energy, travel and waste, highlighting what our people can do to ensure we meet exacting standards of environmental responsibility year-on-year.
We continued to make progress in reducing energy use across our offices worldwide. In our Melbourn office, we launched an energy partnership scheme, teaming up with British Gas and Centrica. This involved implementing four key energy-saving schemes: ‘Transformer Tap Down’, ‘Boiler Optimisation’, ‘Building Management System Strategy Upgrade’ and ‘Solar PV’. To date, we have saved 410 tonnes of CO2 and 1,789,564 kWh of energy as a result of these schemes.
At our corporate headquarters, we diverted 15% more waste away from landfill than in 2011, achieving this in part through a three-bin, colour-coded system that enables paper, cardboard, bottles, cups and cans to be sent for recycling. This represented a saving of 27.6 tonnes of CO2 from the waste we recycled. At our Edinburgh office, we signed up to the 2020 Climate Group and have committed that PA will comply with the Waste (Scotland) Regulations six months early by ensuring dry recyclable waste is collected separately.
On the travel front, we continue to reduce our business travel and associated emissions by using videoconferencing facilities in our offices and laptops with built-in webcams to hold meetings with clients and colleagues. Our travel booking system, which we rolled out in 2012, has allowed us to capture accurate data on all the travel undertaken by our consultants and will help us calculate our carbon footprint for 2013. In addition, we are now investigating a car-share scheme for the offices that we own. We also offer a plan that promotes greener transport and healthier living by giving our UK people a tax-saving incentive to buy a new bike. Furthermore, our car-plan scheme encourages employees to choose new cars with emissions below 160 g/km of CO2 by allowing them to save on VAT costs for these vehicles. In 2012, to support the car plan, we installed an electric charging point at our Melbourn office in addition to the 12 electric charge points we already have at our Copenhagen office.