Lead the way to a bright, sustainable future
The BT Group Manifesto boldly focuses on accelerating growth – through responsible, inclusive and sustainable tech. This will help us achieve our purpose to connect for good and our ambition to be the world’s most trusted connector of people, devices and machines by 2030. This allows us to focus on the things that will make the biggest difference to a bright, sustainable future.
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Responsible
- Apply responsible tech principles across BT Group’s full value chain.
- Invest in new growth tech that will help us live and work better.
- Partner to build a responsible tech ecosystem that builds trust and drives growth
- Started embedding responsible tech by design into new product development – to build trust and drive growth.
- Continued to do due diligence on our suppliers and started embedding our ‘Responsible AI for Buyers’ guide into our supplier onboarding processes.
- Developed our data ethics standard. It sets out how we use responsible tech principles to determine what’s ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ when deciding why and how to process data (personal or otherwise).
- Created our Responsible for AI standard for building, buying and using ethical AI. It will help mitigate risk at every AI lifecycle stage – from conception to real world monitoring.
8.7
10.2
16.10
- Apply responsible tech principles across BT Group’s full value chain.
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Inclusive
- Pass 25m households with full fibre by December 2026.
- Expand 5G to 90% of the UK geography by 2028, and continue to expand 4G.
- Help 25m people with digital skills by the end of March 2026.
- Build a diverse and inclusive workforce through our diversity and inclusion targets.
- Improved both our gender and ethnicity pay gaps, but we recognise there is still more we need to do to build a truly equitable and inclusive culture across BT Group.
- Reached over 10.3m households with full fibre, and extended access to broadband for low-income households, through the BT Home Essentials social tariff and Openreach’s Connect the Unconnected offer, and to discounted mobile through EE Basics.
- Maintained the UK’s largest, fastest 4G network, and continued the rollout out of 5G that now reaches 68% of the population in the UK.
- Helped a further 4.6m people improve their digital skills (19.3m since 2014/15), including supporting 1 million small businesses, helping jobseekers through FastFutures, empowering young people to get PhoneSmart and tackling online hate with EE Hope United.
4.3 & 4.4
5b
9.1 & 9c
- Pass 25m households with full fibre by December 2026.
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Sustainable
- Be a net zero carbon emissions business by the end of March 2031, and for suppliers and customers by the end of March 2041.
- Science-based targets1:
- Reduce the carbon intensity of our operations by 87% by 20312
- Cut supplier carbon emissions by 42% by 2031.
- Help customers avoid 60m tonnes of CO2e by the end of March 2030.
- Build towards a circular BT Group by the end of March 2030 and circular tech and telco ecosystem by the end of March 2040, while protecting biodiversity and nature.
- Cut our carbon emissions intensity by 56% since FY17, by maintaining 100%3 renewable electricity, introducing more electric vehicles to our fleet and decarbonising our buildings.
- Cut our supplier carbon emissions by 20% since FY17 by continuing to work with suppliers and supported small businesses to set net zero targets.
- Helped customers avoid over 935,000 tonnes of carbon, mainly through full fibre broadband reducing personal or work-related travel.
- Continued working with tech scaleup partners through our Green Tech Innovation Platform – developing breakthrough manufacturing tech to support the race to net zero.
- Refurbished or recycled 190,000 mobile devices and 1.8 million home hubs and set-top boxes, and recovered or recycled 88.5% of our operational waste worldwide
1 Approved by the Science Based Targets initiative as in line with 1.5°C climate pathway.
2 By the end of March 2031, based on reductions since FY17 (scopes 1 and 2 worldwide emissions tonnes CO2e per £m value added).
3 99.9% of the global electricity BT consumes is from renewable sources. The remaining 0.1% is where renewable electricity is not available in the market.
12.5 & 12.7
13a
- Be a net zero carbon emissions business by the end of March 2031, and for suppliers and customers by the end of March 2041.
We are being recognised for our work as a responsible business, here are some of our accolades:
On the A List for climate for the seventh year running (top 2% of over 15,000 global reporters), and recognised as a Supplier Engagement Leader
2nd in the UK and 27th globally for our leading solutions to support the transition to a clean energy future
EDI Hero Awards 2023: BT Group’s Ethnic Diversity Network awarded Network of the Year 2023
Low risk score of 17.1 for ESG (top quartile)
Leading telecoms company and 6th overall in the UK FTSE100 across a range of ESG indicators (ranked 1st on Climate)
Sustainability award winner 2022: BT Italia for developing an Industrial IoT platform and edge/cloud intelligence solution with Iveco Group, leading to improved sustainability performance
‘Advanced’ rating on corporate social responsibility and sustainability performance – in the top 6% of 6,000 companies assessed worldwide
AA rating for ESG investment risk and opportunities
Digital Skills award winner 2022 for ‘Skills for Tomorrow’ digital skills programme
EMEA Social Governance award 2022: BT Global for powering a more sustainable digital world leveraging Equinix technologies
See our ESG Addendum 2023 for the full list of our ESG ratings/rankings and awards.
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ESG Addendum to the BT Group plc Annual Report 2023
Contains various disclosures and data points, including Manifesto-related targets and progress, social and economic disclosures, detailed colleague and environmental data, and our SASB index.
pdf - 680 KB
14 September 2023
