Community assurance statement and commentary

The Corporate Citizenship Company has been commissioned to provide assurance of the community involvement aspects of O2 plc’s corporate responsibility reporting 2006, which comprises a printed review of key issues – ‘Mobile Matters’ and an extensive online resource.

Our approach was based on the principles of the AA1000 Assurance Standard, relating to materiality, completeness and responsiveness. Our work included independently consulting a sample of O2’s community partners, assessing expectations among O2’s reporting stakeholders around community issues, interviewing O2 employees, using benchmarking techniques to assess comparative practice by other companies, checking the validity of key facts and assertions used in reporting, and reviewing community contributions data against the evaluation principles of the LBG (London Benchmarking Group – managed by us on behalf of its 100 corporate members).

In our opinion, the report provides a fair and balanced representation of O2’s community involvement activities. Community partners attest to the quality of their relationships with the Company and its responsiveness. We have found that the LBG evaluation principles have been correctly and consistently applied, with an effective Group-wide system for recording and reporting contributions. From our benchmark work, we believe O2’s overall contribution compares well with others in its sector. Its charity selection processes and overall management of flagship programmes are particularly effective, as was the Group’s response this year to world emergencies through its own contributions and the development of a text donation infrastructure, especially for the Asian tsunami and Live 8.

Last year we commented on the need for O2 to focus attention on assessing the community and business impacts being achieved, through systematic measurement of outputs and longer term impacts. During the year O2 has worked with the Charities Aid Foundation to develop a monitoring process for this.

Going forward, we believe O2 should focus attention in three areas, mirroring the three components of the LBG model. Our comments are based on the interviews we conducted with stakeholders. First, on charitable donations, we recommend that O2 consider including emergency response in its formal strategy for community involvement, given its current strengths in this area. The second area is longer term community investment projects, where O2’s strategy is to engage its own services and the skills and active involvement of employees. Here we recommend that the smaller operating businesses, Manx Telecom and Airwave, should keep the content and reporting of their programmes under review, so that the connection with the business strategy is clearer to stakeholders. Third, on commercial initiatives in the community, we recommend that stronger links be made between community programmes and O2’s main corporate responsibility issues, as presented in the CR report. Here opportunities exist to work with non-profit partners to make a real difference through community projects, alongside action by the business itself.

The Corporate Citizenship Company
www.corporate-citizenship.co.uk
June 12, 2006