Why sustainability is hire’s USP

27 November 2023

It was very appropriate that my meeting with Amelia Woodley took place at Speedy Hire’s flagship low-carbon Innovation Centre at Milton Keynes (pictured above). 

The fact that Amelia sits on Speedy’s Executive Team shows how important the hirer believes ESG (environment, social and corporate governance issues) are to its business. She joined the company in April 2021 as ESG Director, becoming Executive Team ESG Director in April this year, and she says that the initiatives Speedy Hire is introducing to address these issues have united the organisation’s 3,500 people behind a common objective that can help customers, colleagues, communities and consumers as well as protecting the planet. 

As a publicly listed company, Speedy Hire is obliged to meet certain ESG targets. Another consideration is the set of disclosure recommendations and guidance developed by the Taskforce on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) for organisations to report and act on so that investors, lenders and stakeholders are aware of related risks and opportunities.

Speedy Hire has clearly given such issues a high priority. Amelia (pictured below) joined the business from South West Rail where she was Head of Sustainability. Previously she was Environment Sustainability Manager with Network Rail for the Thameslink Project, where one of her biggest achievements was in convincing the Board to put ESG at the heart of the project because it could deliver multiple benefits, when such a move was not mandatory. 

“The Speedy Hire ESG Director role appealed to me because after over 10 years in rail I had reached as far as I could as a Head of Sustainability,” Amelia told me, “and I was intrigued by the opportunity of introducing ESG and sustainability into a business in the world of hire, which was traditional, fossil-fuel dominated and predominantly male. It would be exciting to change that to become more innovative, clean and inclusive. 

“Hire is also a very circular business – perhaps the most circular – as equipment is used for its maximum working life and can be recycled, so it was a sector that could play a huge role. It’s hire’s USP.” 

Amelia’s immediate task was to devise Speedy Hire’s sustainability strategy, not just to cover all ESG angles, but also in a way that was easy to understand by everyone inside the business regardless of role and, indeed, by customers, suppliers, colleagues and the wider community. 

This included holding Board presentations, team workshops and initiatives to engage and enthuse people. As part of Speedy Hire’s business wide sustainability training programme the Company has launched ESG business partners where one person from every business unit is being trained to an Associate Institute of Environmental Management level to help roll out sustainability ideas. 

The sustainability strategy was formally launched last July. Called 'Decade to Deliver', it covers four broad pillars of Innovation, Climate, People and Communities, with relevant key performance indicators (KPIs), and effectively saying that the next ten years will dictate the following 100. 

The programme outlines ambitious targets to reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 50 per cent and Scope 3 emissions by 42 per cent by 2030. Speedy was also the first company in the hire sector to commit to SBTs (Science Based Targets) to acheive Net Zero throughout the business by 2040, which has recently been validated by the Science Based Target Initiative (SBTi).

Amelia is quick to point out that ESG is not just about adopting environmentally-friendly products, as some people assume. “It covers so much more, affecting virtually all aspects of a business and its stakeholders: supporting employees, promoting well-being, helping communities, human rights and modern slavery awareness, amongst other things. 

“Some might ask how these issues apply to them, but we can influence these as part of the wider supply chain.” 

Similarly, Amelia is against reducing the topic to achieving Net Zero. “Climate change is about more than carbon. It involves the whole of nature and we have to tackle things like deforestation and global heating. It’s about being nature positive and an equation where ‘emissions out’ equals ‘emissions in’, so that as well as cutting emissions, we make a positive contribution by measures like planting trees and other carbon capture methods.” 

‘Nature positive’ is one of several neat encapsulations designed to make the abstract subject of ESG easier to grasp. Others include the sustainability formula of ‘Logic + Magic = Change’.

“The magic is the cultural journey we are embarking on, with our 3,500 Speedy Hire colleagues and others in the supply chain mobilised about sustainability,” said Amelia. 

Similarly, there is a focus on three numbers: Net Zero (achieved by emissions out equalling emissions in); 2050 as the date the government has set for reaching it; and 1.5C being the target temperature rise limit for the end of this century set by scientists under the Paris Agreement. 

Amongst measures to reduce its Scope 1 emissions further, Speedy Hire will continue to replace its vehicle fleet with electric models, with 25 per cent of HGVs running on HVO as a transitory fuel by 2030. Scope 2 emissions will be addressed by measures such as cutting the carbon footprint of buildings like the Milton Keynes Innovation Centre (a new flagship green depot ‘London Gateway’ opens in Basildon later this week, incidentally) and continuing to procure renewable energy. 

Speedy Hire is working closely with suppliers to reduce Scope 3 emissions, which relate to other parts of a company's supply chain. The company has adopted the ISO 20400 standard on integrating sustainability within procurement and it is developing strategies to enable suppliers to calculate and reduce their own carbon footprints. 

Some 44 per cent of Speedy’s hire assets are now ‘eco’ alternatives with the aim to reach 70% by 2027. 

Amelia believes that by rolling out Decade to Deliver and its ESG messages, awareness will spread to other organisations and groups by osmosis as other stakeholders engage. In this way, people will be ‘nudged’ to think about procurement and operations in new ways, and as greener solutions are adopted more widely, economies of scale will bring costs down. 

“It’s about communicating and collaborating in new ways as part of a just transition,” she says, “ultimately preserving people’s jobs, giving them the right skills and creating a fairer society.”