The Board recognises that effective stakeholder engagement is a key component of good corporate governance and will help to promote long-term, sustainable success and growth.

The Board has always had regard to its obligations under section 172 of the Companies Act 2006 but, having regard to the 2018 Code and to guidance published by ICSA and the Investment Association, during 2018 the Board re-assessed its approach to stakeholder engagement.

This assessment was undertaken to: identify the Group’s principal stakeholders; appraise the levels of engagement by the Board and wider business with those stakeholders; and review how the Board takes into account the interests of stakeholders when making decisions. There were two principal outputs from that review. First, we established a “stakeholder map”, which you can view in our full report.

Read our full stakeholder report as per our Annual Report & Financial Statement 2018: