We’re on a mission to unleash Britain’s full potential in a digital age – helping to transform entire communities and enabling our global economic success.

As we build the UK’s finest Full Fibre digital infrastructure, we strive to lead our industry, not just in terms of speed, reliability and service quality, but through our sustainable and responsible business practices too.

Our networks are modern and purpose-built from scratch, enabling us to make far reaching carbon-smart decisions up front, benefit from the latest power efficient technology and manage the environment in which that technology lives to optimise its lifecycle and reduce waste.

Our commitment & focus

We’re stepping up to protect our planet’s resources by constantly seeking opportunities to use less energy and raw materials, ensuring robust systems are in place to enable us to leave a fairer, greener, and healthier world behind us.

As part of this, we carefully select the partners we work with, ensuring they share our commitment to working more sustainably.

We’re committed to:

• Achieving our ‘net zero carbon emissions by 2030’ plan
• Monitoring, managing and publicly reporting on energy use and carbon performance on an ongoing basis
• Embedding our commitment into all aspects of our organisation and taking our people with us on the journey.

We’re focused on:

• Innovating with our supply chain to minimise the upstream environmental impact of rollout and operations – taking every opportunity to reuse raw materials and minimise waste
• Embedding our responsible procurement practices across our operations
• Working closely with suppliers to make environmentally-conscious equipment and product decisions.

Managing & monitoring

We manage our environmental responsibilities systematically and are committed to maintaining our ISO 14001:2015 Environmental Management system certification, along with other business management systems.

Our carbon emissions 2018 – 2020

*Scope 3 includes employee cars, flights, rail, public transport, taxi, paper, waste, electricity (transmission and distribution)

Table notes:

• Upstream transport and distribution and downstream transport and distribution are not applicable to CityFibre
• CityFibre’s reporting year runs from 1st January to 31st December.
• All 2020 emissions have been calculated using the Defra 2020 emissions factors.

We adopt an ‘operational control’ approach to defining our organisational boundary. Our greenhouse gas accounting and reporting follows the principles of relevance, completeness, consistency, accuracy and transparency. These principles have been applied when collecting, reviewing and verifying the data – ahead of performing the greenhouse gas emission calculations in scope 1 and 2 as well as selected scope 3. These principles are in accordance with the requirements of the following:

• World Resources Institute (WRI) Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol Corporate Standard (revised version)
• Defra’s Environmental Reporting Guidelines: Including Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting requirements, March 2019.

Never standing still

We are currently defining our ‘net zero carbon emissions by 2030’ strategy and have already begun work on a number of carbon reduction projects.

For example, during 2020:

• We began moving our Fibre Exchange (FEX) electricity tariffs to 100 per cent renewable energy tariffs. The impact of this move will be reported in 2021 onwards
• We refined our FEX model specifications, cutting energy use by 23 per cent compared to the earlier specifications.

As we continue our progress to achieving net zero, we project that our carbon emissions will decrease by 40 per cent over the next five years to 1788 tCO2e by 2026. We are ambitious and our strategy to achieve these savings includes:

• Implementing a sustainable transport policy
• Shifting to electric company vehicles
• Expanding renewable energy purchase to all electricity contracts.

Our sustainability declaration

The Carbon Reduction Plan outlined above has been completed in accordance with PPN 06/21 and associated guidance and reporting standard for Carbon Reduction Plans.

Emissions have been reported and recorded in accordance with the published reporting standard for Carbon Reduction Plans and the GHG Reporting Protocol corporate standard and use the appropriate Government emission conversion factors for greenhouse gas company reporting.

Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions have been reported in accordance with SECR requirements. The required subset of Scope 3 emissions have been reported in accordance with the published reporting standard for Carbon Reduction Plans and the Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) Standard.

This Carbon Reduction Plan has been reviewed and signed off by CityFibre’s Board of Directors.