Hooke Highways ESG case study

Julie Binney from Hooke Highways talked to us about their ESG journey so far:

What was the catalyst?

Being able to effectively measure and improve our Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) plans, apart from being the right thing to do, is also critical to our ongoing business growth.  We provide traffic management services across the South of England. We were established in 2012 and over the past 11 years, we’ve steadily grown as a business, now with a turnover of eight million pounds. We’re currently on our recruitment drive as well to grow the business even further.

Why now?

While we’ve intuitively been doing a lot of the right things around environmental impact – investing in new kit, reducing our CO2 emissions, using technology and supporting local charities – we’ve also noticed an increase in the need for ESG reporting.  For example, when we’ve been renewing client framework agreements, when responding to tenders and KPI reporting, our clients in the industry, and other organisations are requesting more and more information on our ESG plans.

We were asked to provide a load of data on our emissions to one of our corporate clients to satisfy their reporting which was great. Once we submitted the information, we were left wondering ‘We’ve collated a lot of data. We’ve input it all and it’s gone out into the ether, but how can we make sense of that data for ourselves? What could we use for our own business growth?

How have elephants child and eevery helped?

We signed up with the eevery platform so we could turn our information into some meaningful data and results that we could actually use to improve and ultimately create more value for our business. We’d collated a lot of data already we then spent a couple of hours with Sophie from eevery and Stephen from elephants child going through the ESG baseline assessment.

The completed baseline assessment was great because it provided this clear straightforward report showing the areas where we are currently doing well and the areas where we can improve, which is crucial. It’s an excellent visual report that we can share with our senior management team and also our clients – we’ve used it to support information for tenders.

How do you feel now/what difference has it made?

Getting the results and being able to turn them into some tangible action was obviously key for us and having access to the portal has also been very useful because we’ve been easily able to check back on the results.

It has given us an excellent framework as an SME – making sense of all the data that we already had. It’s enabled us to clearly focus on exactly what those immediate tangible actions are.

What’s next?

We’ve got a baseline set of results and we’re working through our improvement actions which is critical for us. There is a CO2 calculator on the portal which we’re planning on using, and then in about six months’ time, the plan is to go back in and redo the assessment, to   keep track on our progress and to keep pushing our ESG plans forward