Thank you, you’ ve given us a lot of insight into one of the bigger corporate insurance providers. So, we want to know, if you were talking to the uninitiated, why is all this so important?
DS: Yeah, that ' s a very good question. Well, look, it ' s undeniably important to us. You will have your own version of what you think is important for you and your family. You ' ll have issues around social equity and social justice that you care about. You ' ll be concerned about climate change and nature. You ' ll have been impacted by that. If you look at the Edelman Trust Barometer, a fantastic piece of research that comes out every year. They did a climate deep dive; so in the UK, 90 % of people are really concerned about climate change. But, interestingly, only 33 % of those people, started out with that position. So, what we ' re seeing is 57 % are coming to that conclusion. That might be influenced by things like floods, extreme heat, or other environmental issues that are affecting your local area. So we can absolutely see in all of our data, the majority of people are really concerned and motivated in their everyday decision making, including their consumer decision making.
Times have changed. It’ s now about the brands that I consume with. Do my values match with the values of that brand? So one of the things that we ' ve done, is work with a company called The Ethical Corporation, and we ' re accredited in the Good Shopping Guide, because people are concerned about who they do business with.“ You are no longer what you eat. You are what you consume. It says something about your identity.” It may be that in protection, we ' re just not even asking that question and opening up that behavior driver of our customers to be able to then hopefully provide them with some choices.
We can certainly see that consumer demand is here to stay. Its outlasted COVID. It ' s outlasted the cost of living crisis. This is not a trend that ' s going away. Same with regulators. There ' s a whole host of regulation that ' s come through; the FCA and the anti-green washing rules, and that ' s a response to the demand and the rising trend. So we ' re seeing lots and lots of good reasons. Our data shows that you care about this stuff as well, and this is backed up by our employees’ attitudes towards this. We did about 87,500 hours of volunteering last year.
That ' s double the year before, so we have a really high engagement and participation rate from our employees, and it’ s not just on the traditional corporate responsibility, but thinking about how we can look after our vulnerable customers, how we can work with great partners like Citizens Advice to improve the customer outcomes.
So you know, particularly if you ' re looking at talent, attraction and retention, this is a core issue. It ' s the kind of thing people ask about in the interview.“ Where do you stand on this stuff? Because I want to spend my career, spend my talent, somewhere that I can believe in and somewhere that shares my values, where I can make a difference.” What a wonderful thing that young people come into our workplace saying that, and if you ' re a place where they can do that, you ' re going to get more of the best talent. So there ' s a whole host of reasons there.
You are bang on with the number of assets in management and investments that are going down the sustainability route. It is not getting any smaller. And that social value is actually now starting to transpire into other areas of financial services. So the next question would be, what are challenges and opportunities?
DS: This is about being on a journey. In 2021 we set an ambition to be net zero by 2040, ahead of almost all of our peers. And whilst that is tremendously difficult, the problem is, if you wait till it ' s all easy, it ' s already too late. So we need to get on top of this now and solve it, not just as Aviva, but with the rest of the sector as well. We are progressing towards that net zero goal. We’ ve reduced our direct emissions by 50 % since 2019. And, we ' re also tracking that through our investment portfolios, and seeing some areas of that reduced by 57 % in the same time frame. We said we ' d invest 10 billion pounds in UK real estate and real asset infrastructure to help invest in the UK economy, and we achieved that earlier on this year. And, we contribute 2 % of our pre-tax profit back into our communities as community investment. So, just by doing business with Aviva, you ' re getting behind this drive towards creating a sustainable future for all of us, and you ' re helping us make those contributions.
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