LISTEN Hammerson was the first property company globally to set itself a net carbon positive target. In 2017, it set itself an ambitious target not just to completely eliminate its carbon emissions, but to create an environmental benefit for the planet by removing additional carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
“We knew and still know that this is an incredibly ambitious and bold plan,” says chief executive David Atkins, “but my feeling was if you don’t set a high bar and a big target then people just don’t get up and do it.”
“One of the things that we’ve learnt from setting the net positive targets is that you need to be ambitious,” adds group head of sustainability Louise Ellison. “If you set those targets quite high, you galvanise a lot more action, a lot more activity.”
“We wanted to make our shareholders, our wider stakeholders, local authorities, our customers and our retailers understand that we really meant this. This was not just some broad target with a load of numbers in it,” says Atkins. “It’s a seismic shift in the way we run our assets and build our assets, and I’m glad to say we’re well on the way to achieving it.”
Hammerson could be forgiven for letting its attention on sustainability slip. As a major landlord of retail space in the UK, it is not without its more immediate challenges and pressures. But Atkins says that changing tack on sustainability or reducing its commitment to it would be more damaging to the business.
“Retail is very challenging at the moment, but this is what we do so to stop doing it we would have to do things differently and that feels almost harder than continuing what we are doing,” says Atkins. “It has become so embedded that it feels like the right thing to do. It is the right thing to do from a business point of view, because it is saving money for us and our retailers particularly, and ultimately will provide returns for our shareholders.”
He adds: “For me, the business, the board and the wider senior management, Covid-19 is strengthening our resolve when it comes to sustainability. It just proves not only how fragile the planet is, but how fragile we as people are. And we just cannot divert away from what we’re doing. I think that would be absolutely the wrong thing to do.”
Business benefits
It would be absolutely the wrong thing to do from a business investment and business sustainability perspective, says Ellison.
“Hammerson is a very hard-nosed commercial business. So anything that we want to do, we need to explain to the business exactly why we want to deliver that. We have to be very clear about why we’re doing it and what the business benefits are,” she says. “And that means that when you do get challenges like we’ve got now our sustainability strategy isn’t optional. It’s something that we’re doing because it’s a business need and it makes sense for the business.”
She adds: “It’s not about corporate comms, it’s not about feel-good things. It’s about doing things that really make sense for your business. You have to understand what the material issues are for your business to really get a strategy that works for you and then it sticks. Otherwise, it’s always optional. And sustainability, climate change, resolving climate change, cannot be optional for the business investment sector now.”
This crisis merely accelerates our ambition to expand City Quarters in the business, and sustainability will absolutely be at the heart of it
– David Atkins, chief executive, Hammerson
Atkins says that the current Covid-19 pandemic has given the business the chance to look at its asset use strategies and further develop the City Quarters project it launched 18 months ago. The City Quarters strategy sees a reimagining of Hammerson’s retail spaces, knocking down walls, bringing in a mix of uses, making more permeable spaces – places, says Atkins, where people want to spend time.
“This crisis merely accelerates our ambition to expand City Quarters in the business, and sustainability will absolutely be at the heart of it,” says Atkins. “Creating buildings which are seen by the end users as the greenest possible buildings with the lowest running costs will become a real USP of City Quarters.”
While Hammerson says it will remain committed to sustainability because, alongside the pride it fosters within the Hammerson workforce, it makes business and economic sense; the jury is out on whether the UK government will follow suit.
While numerous proposals and declarations have been made to government to make sure the environment is placed front and centre in the country’s economic recovery plans, the depth of the recession the country faces may mean sustainability gets pushed down the agenda.
Atkins remains hopeful that government will invest in industries that provide sustainable returns rather than trying to prop up weak, failing and dirty industries.
“I think this is a massive opportunity,” he says. “In many ways, I would be as bold as to say this is a bit like a post-war event, and we must seize it. We’ve got to think carefully about what we do, how we do it. The reality is they are going to have to tear up their fiscal rules anyway. So why not go the whole hog and reset the economy?
“With great leadership, we will look back in five years’ time and think this was quite a defining moment for the UK economy. I just hope that the leaders of our country seize the moment.”
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