Sustainability

At RPA, we strive to operate in a sustainable manner to continually improve our financial performance, maintain business stability and produce outputs to the highest standard whilst appropriately considering the company’s influence and impact on people and the environment.  The protection of people’s health, safety and the environment has always been fundamental to every client project we carry out.  Not only is this key to our external work, but we also take our responsibilities toward everyone we are connected to – our employees, the local community, the environment and wider – very seriously.  As such, RPA applies the following core principles to its operations:

1.    RPA provides totally independent advice of the highest quality and remains a highly respected and independent authority in its areas of expertise, both internally and externally.
2.    RPA provides a positive, respectful and diverse working environment for all employees, which is an excellent place for innovation and learning.
3.    RPA expects everyone across its team to work in line with its values to drive an ethical and sustainable organisation which delivers true excellence.
4.    RPA will not work on projects which are likely to result in adverse impacts to human health, public safety and/or the environment

These have been central to the company’s operations since its inception with RPA’s sustainable approach recognised by two consecutive first prizes from the UK Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) under its annual awards scheme for sustainable reporting in the SME category in 2001 and 2002.  Also, in 2013, RPA was selected as a finalist for the Environment and Sustainability category of the Eastern Daily Press (EDP) Business Awards.

Staff at RPA hold personal memberships for The Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) and The Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM). These professional bodies promote best practice standards in environmental management, auditing and assessment and allow us to keep up-to-date with best practices and promote sustainable development.  In recent years, RPA has undertaken numerous measures to enhance sustainability performance including improving the energy efficiency of the offices (through installation of double glazing and loft insulation and the use of more energy efficient equipment), changing to an energy supplier with a more robust environmental policy, providing charitable donations, assisting local organisations with environmental protection policy work and substitution of face-to-face meetings for virtual meetings (where possible).

As with all aspects of the business, we aim to further improve our sustainability performance.  To achieve this aim we endeavour to expand our record keeping, enabling yearly comparison against sustainability indicators.  Other future targets include encouraging supplier sustainability by disseminating a supplier code of conduct, investigating means of further reducing energy and water consumption and estimating RPA’s contribution to the local economy in terms of induced financial and employment benefits.  These measures, in conjunction with the core principles that RPA continues to abide by, will help ensure the continuation and further enhancement of our sustainable performance in the future.

Further details of RPA’s sustainable approach, along with future targets, are provided in our sustainability report.