Our communities

We constantly look for ways to involve our people in our CSR programmes. Almost 10,000 of our people are now involved in volunteering projects across the ELLP firms, contributing more than 77,000 hours of volunteering.

Increasingly we are looking to involve people in volunteering and pro bono initiatives that allow them to use their own business skills to make a difference. During the year we set a target to increase pro bono activities by 50%.

The BRIGHT programme, launched in 2010, is an example of how we are using volunteering in a more sophisticated way to achieve a range of positive outcomes for our communities, for our people and for the business.

Directly linked to the UN’s Millennium Development goals, the programme is designed to tackle some of the greatest challenges facing developing countries and is promoted across the firm under the tag ‘KPMG BRIGHT Minds helping to create a BRIGHTer world’.

We asked people from across the business to suggest innovative ways to use our skills to help local community organisations operate more effectively or to reduce the carbon footprint of our client work. More than 1000 people developed BRIGHT ideas and the winning teams were provided with grants and support to implement their ideas locally. A total of 58 people from winning teams drawn from across the ELLP firms and Ireland are also providing pro bono work with three leading development organisations in sub-Saharan Africa: Fairtrade Africa; Restless Development; and Child Helpline International.

We have contributed more than 2,400 pro bono hours worth more than €500,000 across seven African countries.

For example, 17 people have been working for six months to create financial training modules for hundreds of Fairtrade farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa with their work showcased on the Fairtrade goods we use in our offices.

We are also creating employability toolkits for Restless Development to support its work in developing countries where unemployment among the under-25s is running at a shocking 75%. In a third project we are helping Childline International build its capacity and improve its financial and governance structures.

Locally, as a result of BRIGHT, we have been able to continue to develop and share innovative best practice across KPMG Europe LLP, enabling our people to use their skills and expertise to make a difference in support of the UN Millennium Development Goals: ‘Acting Locally’ and ‘Acting Globally.

Our ambition is to use programmes like BRIGHT to help ELLP firms build increasingly valuable relationships with clients.

This is in line with a trend that has seen our CSR team increasingly involved in assisting the ELLP firms with their client proposals. As leading companies with their own developed approaches to corporate responsibility, clients look to work with like-minded organisations that genuinely practice what they preach.

And many existing clients expect us to provide evidence of how we are meeting key CSR commitments in our work for them. One long-standing and very important global client, for instance, now expects us to measure very precisely how we are cutting the carbon emissions we create in working for them.

Our CSR work is also leading directly to work for our ELLP firms with new clients and stronger relationships with existing ones.

At the same time we are developing ways to involve our own suppliers — from whom we purchase some €680 million of goods and services each year — in meeting similarly high standards of CSR performance.

Our UK, Spanish, German and Dutch practices are leading the way on implementing a Procurement Code of Conduct (‘the Code’) designed to achieve tangible improvements across the supply chain in both CSR and diversity.

Based on the UN Global Compact, the Code targets improvements in key areas such as environment, labour and human rights, bribery and corruption. We have set three specific goals: to cut carbon; improve diversity; and to achieve efficiencies that will allow our suppliers to pay the living wage as we are already doing.

Current economic conditions, coupled with global development and environmental challenges, have convinced us that sustainability will remain an important priority for KPMG Europe LLP and for our clients long into the future.

We continue to be recognised as leading practitioners, for instance being one of only 15 UK companies to have been awarded Business in the Community’s prestigious Platinum Plus award and the only Big 4 firm to be recognised Europe-wide for the award. We hope to incubate new ideas within KPMG Europe LLP, and spread them among our clients and suppliers.

Internally we know from our people surveys that our approach to CSR is highly valued by KPMG people and plays a positive role in how they view the leadership of the firm and in retaining talented staff.

We are determined to keep developing our approach to corporate responsibility and sustainability to achieve lasting benefits for our people, our clients and for the communities we work in and support.