Making a big social impact in Lewisham
Our commitment: deliver long lasting social benefits for the communities we operate in.
Delivering lasting social benefits for the communities we work in has long been embedded in how Balfour Beatty operates. From regenerating communities to driving employment and training opportunities and supporting small, local supply chain partners, we help build new futures.
When we launched our Building New Futures Sustainability Strategy in 2020, we set out to create £3 billion of social value by 2030. We are now on course to achieve this target five years ahead of schedule and have brought forward our target accordingly to 2025. Having made significant advances on how we deliver social value since 2020 we have recently established our UK Regional Social Impact team. This team, which is aligned to the regions set out in the UK National TOMS framework, support our projects to create and deliver a social value offering that is tailored to the diverse needs of the communities we work in and delivers improvements that make the most impact. Where we have major projects with the scale and ambition to deliver larger social value programmes, we have expert resources in place to support and drive the delivery of these programmes.
Our target
With the US construction and infrastructure market forecast to grow in the coming years², we are seeing an increasing demand from our customers to create social value through our project delivery. Whilst there is not currently a US-wide measurement mechanism in place to quantify this social value, we are taking decades of best practice and lessons learned from the UK, and adapting them to develop our US offering.
As we look beyond our 2025 target, and with the social value that we create today being largely driven by the local economic value we generate through supply chain spend and the employment opportunities we provide, we will be increasing our focus on better quantifying and increasing the positive impact we have on individuals, communities and the environment.
Case studies
¹ Measured against a 2021 baseline
² U.S. Construction Industry - Statistics & Facts | Statista