Client Service Delivery

Why this matters to PwC

Our work with clients is our greatest opportunity to make a real and positive difference in society. Increasingly, our clients are facing challenges around sustainable development including climate change, energy security, waste management and ethics in the supply chain. If we are to take our responsibilities to clients and society seriously, we must ensure that we embed sustainability thinking into the advice we provide.

We also know that our people want to make a real difference for clients and society. So providing you with opportunities to work on sustainable development issues is important in building staff motivation, enhancing our employee brand and creating the leaders of tomorrow.

What we do

We work with many clients who require sustainability advice. Recent examples include a review of social, environmental and ethical risk management in corporate banking for the Bank of Scotland Corporate and our partnership with the sustainability think tank, Forum for the Future, to develop an assurance framework for the Commission for a Sustainable London 2012. The Commission plans to use the framework as a means of independently assessing progress toward the sustainable development objectives of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

We are also working with industry groups or even wider coalitions that have come together to address sustainability and corporate responsibility challenges. One example of these is the Council for Responsible Jewellery Practices (CRJP).

In 2005, PwC assisted a group of 14 organisations to form the CRJP. We acted as the CRJP Secretariat as well as leading the development of Principles and a Code of Practices.

As a firm we are increasingly involved with the new generation of businesses – including wind farms and the wider renewable energy sector – springing up to tackle issues such as waste and climate change. We are advising either the procuring authority or one of the bidders on 60% of major municipal PFI/PPP waste management deals currently in procurement in the UK.

However, this work is just one part of our involvement in advising on sustainable development since it is now relevant to every one of our clients in some way. 'Mainstream' projects increasingly need to address sustainable development issues, and effective service delivery requires a blend of business skills and specialist knowledge in areas such as environmental management, health and safety, human rights and development issues. We have a sustainability network of over 400 practitioners in more than 40 countries to help us achieve this balance on a global basis. For example, teams in Delhi and London worked together this year to advise SRF Ltd, a leading diversified industrial group in India, on the structuring, marketing and sale of carbon credits generated through a large industrial emissions abatement project under the framework of the UN Clean Development Mechanism.

In response to the growing importance of sustainable development we created a new Sustainability Forum in early 2006 to share our skills, experience and services more effectively across the firm. The Forum has developed a business plan that will increase the focus on sustainable development and corporate responsibility in our UK client work.

Delivery on the plan will help us meet our clients' growing need for advisory and tax professionals who understand and know how to respond to sustainability challenges such as achieving carbon neutrality. It will also help us respond to the growing demand from clients keen to enhance their governance and assurance over sustainability related policies and processes. And in the public sector, where sustainability has become a central platform of service delivery, we will focus on supporting the overall sustainability strategy, and advising on policy, economic regeneration, sustainable communities and transport economics.

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