Strategic sustainability support

Brook Lyndhurst was appointed to provide ongoing consultancy support to set up, develop and help implement Quintain Estates & Developments’ sustainability strategy. We continue to provide ad hoc strategic advice.

Objectives

Having recognised the importance of incorporating sustainability into their development and investment activities, Quintain Estates & Development appointed Brook Lyndhurst to provide a range of support, advisory and delivery functions.  The overall objective was two-fold:

• to conduct a variety of research and benchmarking functions that would enable Quintain to understand its current sustainability impacts and to formulate meaningful targets for the future
• to support the development of internal practices and procedures to embed sustainability within the day-to-day operation of the business

Methodology

Reflecting our twin objectives, our support required a mixed methodology:

• close working with professional staff throughout Quintain to gather performance data; and, where necessary, specify and/or conduct bespoke surveys to gather new data.  This included, for example, a survey of employees' travel to work patterns in order to estimate CO2 emissions
• discussions with senior management on an ongoing basis about staffing levels, skills requirements and organisational structure; and, where necessary, to analyse business opportunities from a sustainability perspective 

Findings

In addition to a variety of confidential items, the most visible manifestations our of work were Quintain's Corporate Social Responsibility Report for 2007, their Sustainability Report for 2008 and the establishment of a Sustainability Committee of the Board.