Supply Chain Integrity

Sourcing goods and services from a diverse supply chain promotes economic inclusion, fosters innovation and builds supply chain resilience. Our commitment to our ‘Think Global, Act Local’ approach, has seen us deliver iconic nationally critical infrastructure and projects, with our supply chain partners, at the heart of local communities – reflecting the strength and importance of these partnerships. 

As part of our approach to inclusive procurement, we're expanding our work with social enterprises and charities. Through our Social Enterprise Accelerator and Development programme, employees volunteer their time and expertise to support small businesses and social enterprises. 

The goods and services we purchased in 2024, represented 83% of our Scope 3 carbon emissions and included hard to decarbonise products like concrete, steel and aggregates. As we do not directly control these emissions, this area is our biggest challenge and that is why we have set an ambitious, but realistic target of reducing these emissions by 25% by 2030. 

To meet this target, we are focussing our efforts on three key groups:

• Our procurement teams – responsible for the day-to-day selection of our supply chain partners for the products and services we buy. This group are growing their sustainability knowledge through training that helps them to consider carbon alongside other factors when making decisions. Using our sustainability heatmap tool, they identify partners who can have the biggest impact on reducing our Scope 3 carbon emissions and are working on initiatives like Cement 2 Zero - a trial of the world’s first zero emissions cement at an industrial scale.

In 2024, we also launched a Concrete Knowledge course to upskill teams and surveyed 50 steel suppliers to assess their decarbonisation strategies to ensure we’re buying from the right partners.

• Our supply chain partners – all of our UK supply chain partners work to our Sustainable Procurement Policy which outlines priorities including minimising carbon emissions over the lifecycle of a product or service and enabling the reporting of Scope 3 carbon emissions. To help our supply chain partners meet these requirements, we are collaborating with them on a range of innovative projects including the development of a software solution that uses invoice data to provide embodied carbon data. This will enable the benchmarking of the carbon footprint of different products and services, which can be used to inform purchasing decisions.

• Our customers and design teams - a key lesson from our ‘Towards a Zero Carbon Construction Site’ initiative at the Royal Botanic Garden project in Edinburgh, was the importance of early engagement and decision making. Working closely with customers and design teams helps to embed low-carbon solutions early in the design, construction, operation and decommissioning of an asset.

At Balfour Beatty, doing the right thing is central to how we operate. As part of this commitment, we are determined to fight against slavery and human trafficking by ensuring we have the systems and processes in place to guarantee that all our dealings and relationships uphold the highest ethical standards.

 While we believe the risk of modern slavery within our own operations is relatively low – due to the strength of these systems and processes and our clear line of sight to who we are directly employing – we acknowledge the higher risk within our indirect supply chain. We actively collaborate with and support our supply chain partners to address this, including working with ConstructionLine to enhance pre-qualification criteria for all suppliers to our UK business. Following these changes to ConstructionLine, we have now mandated that prequalified UK supply chain partners provide us with their own modern slavery statement.

In 2024, we conducted 187 modern slavery supply chain audits – bringing our total to 308 since 2023. We are continuously refining our audit process, with 2024’s redesign providing more targeted and specific improvement actions and enhancing guidance to help our supply chain partners to improve their approach. The audit report and guidance also signposts supply chain partners to the free resources available within the Supply Chain Sustainability School and training resources including the School’s People Matter Charter to which Balfour Beatty is a signatory.

As we continue to support cross-sector collaboration by contributing to industry guidance and toolkits and helping our supply chain partners upskill, we are realigning our focus to our operations. This includes leveraging technology and digital solutions to reduce the risk of modern slavery and labour exploitation on our projects.

Read our Modern Slavery Statement to find out more about our latest progress in this area.

¹⁰ Measured against a 2020 baseline