community involvement
“We’re proud to have set out a commitment to work with the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust charity over the next ten years. The ‘People and the Planet’ agreement shows our commitment to our local communities and the importance and benefits of volunteering to our colleagues.”
Richard Kirwin, area director north west
As well as maximising the positive benefits we bring through employment, contribution to local economies and developing skills, we aim to use our presence to make things better for the people living around us.
highlights
10 year partnership
Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust
£1 million +
charitable donations
36,000
volunteer hours delivered over last 5 years
We recognise we have an important role to play not only as a local employer but also a key member of the local community in which we operate. We ensure every site keeps the local community informed and connected by developing a site-specific Community Engagement Plan. Developed by our local site managers, they provide a framework to helps us to work with communities on the issues that are important to them, through activities such as liaison meetings, open days and major community events. They also identify where we can support communities through investment, employee volunteering and charitable donations.
The COVID-19 pandemic made it difficult for us to engage with local communities and many of our activities were affected. However, we successfully delivered against many of our commitments. We are proud to have contributed over 36,000 hours of our time to our local communities over the last 5 years. This has helped us to form strong partnerships with organisations such as, Solutions for the Planet and Wildlife Trusts and allowed us to support our communities.
Supporting the NHS
At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tarmac launched an employee led campaign to donate personal protective equipment (PPE) to hospitals and NHS and social care workers up and down the country. Equipment including protective facemasks, gloves and goggles were among the supplies that were shared by local teams based at Tarmac’s network of sites across the UK. Tarmac also worked with central and devolved governments to offer its assets to support efforts to combat the pandemic.
5,000 pieces of PPE
Donated to the NHS and key workers
Despite the COVID 19 pandemic, our employees still managed to contribute over 6,700 volunteering hours in 2020 to support their local communities. Tarmac also made over £1 million + donations to charities and community projects, directly, with in-kind contributions of materials and labour and through contributions from the Tarmac Landfill Communities Fund.
We have taken many actions across the country to support our communities through the challenges of 2020. One example has enabled The Weir Archer Academy’s Paralympic sports facility in Kingston-Upon-Thames, London to officially open. Our employees volunteered to help with a range of developments at the new facility, from providing a more accessible entrance for young athletes in wheelchairs to carrying out remedial groundworks. Read about some of our other examples in our case study.
We are keen to provide opportunities for young people to learn and gain experience of our industry and our business to spark potential career aspirations. We work closely with local schools and colleges to promote science, technology, engineering and math’s (STEM). School closures in response to the COVID-19 crisis made engagement through our school’s programme, Solutions for The Planet, extremely difficult. To overcome this the Solutions for the Planet team pulled out all the stops to move the programme from face to face to on-line. A new online platform was launched on the Solutions for the Planet website, giving pupils and mentors the means to collaborate and continue working together in a virtual environment. This was wholeheartedly welcomed by the students and teachers and meant we were still able to engage with over 30 schools and 3,800 pupils. This played an important part in keeping students engaged, supporting mental wellbeing and helping continue education while schools were closed.
In 2020 Tarmac joined Warrington Youth Zone’s family of founder patrons, a group of businesses and philanthropists who are united in support of young people and their ambition to see Warrington flourish.
The facility is part of a national charity which has created a network of Youth Zones across the country, providing young people with somewhere to go, something to do and someone to talk to.
Tarmac is committed to making a net positive contribution to biodiversity, leaving our sites in a better condition than when we acquired them. In doing so we can also use our skills and resources to enhance the environment for those in the communities around us. We often work in partnership with local community groups and environmental organisations that share our views on the importance of community involvement and provide volunteering opportunities in nature conservation.
During 2020 we launched our new volunteering initiative in partnership with the Yorkshire Dales Millennium Trust (YDMT). The ‘People and the Planet’ commitment will see Tarmac complete 7,700 hours of volunteering over the next ten years with the Lancashire-based charity.
We also work with organisations like The Wildlife Trusts, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and Groundwork; helping communities find practical solutions to some of the challenges they face. For example, Tarmac’s Holborough Marsh, on the outskirts of Snodland. This thriving 35-hectre nature reserve, once part of Tarmac’s largest cement and quarrying operations, has been managed on behalf of Tarmac by Kent Wildlife Trust (KWT) for nearly a quarter of a century, demonstrating an excellent collaboration between the two organisations.
Looking forward
Having reached the end of 2020, we are about to launch the next phase of our sustainability strategy. We want to build on existing relationships and create new ones with our local communities to make a positive difference in the areas we operate. To achieve our long-term commitments, we will continue to engage with the next generation of skilled employees to help develop essential skills and promote career opportunities in our industry. We will also focus on providing more opportunities to enable communities to connect to nature through our sites or by supporting environmental improvements in the local area.