Stakeholders

Our investors are fundamental to the success and longevity of our business. Our aim is to provide investors with an attractive investment return, delivered with the highest ethical standards. We are pleased to observe that the investment community is increasingly considering the environmental and social responsibility of companies. In order to ensure that we understand the expectations of our investors, we regularly engage with them to establish their views on Grainger as a business and on its impacts on the environment and society.

As a publicly listed company, Grainger has a range of equity investors, which we engage with regularly. We are constantly striving to improve ways in which we can communicate with them and respond to them in an appropriate manner.

We also manage the UK's largest residential investment fund on behalf of investors and ourselves, totalling £375m in assets as at 31 December 2010. We aim to deliver high value returns for our investors by anticipating and acting to mitigate sustainability risks.

Joint venture partners

We work closely with our development and investment partners. Our commitment to transparency and openness means we both share the risks and rewards of our projects and learn from each other's expertise. We understand that our joint venture partners and prospective partners will be interested in our CR commitments and performance, in the same way that we are keen to know about their social, environmental and business performance.

Local authorities

We take an innovative approach to housing and community developments. We rely on the support of local authorities and planning departments in order to be a successful developer. We are committed to engaging in open dialogue with local authorities about our ideas and plans for developing space and to working collaboratively in order to achieve positive solutions. We believe that social, economic and environmental value are mutually enhancing when creating new communities. This is central to the success of our relationships with local authorities and allows us to generate profit while still behaving responsibly.

As the UK’s largest residential landlord, we have a duty to share our unique expertise with policy-makers on a national and regional level. Engaging with government increases the value we can deliver to shareholders and advances sustainability policies on a national scale.

Grainger is always open to dialogue with NGOs and strives to build close working relationships with charity partners, such as BITC. We welcome the views of NGOs and seek to incorporate them into our business activities as appropriate.

We have close links with a range of industry bodies, including the House Builders Federation, The Association of Residential Letting Agents, The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors and The European Public Real Estate Association. Grainger continues to work closely with the British Property Federation (BPF).

The media is the primary channel through which our company is represented to the public. We manage this relationship to foster trust and transparency. A positive, transparent relationship will ensure that our public image is protected and our company is fairly represented to the public.

We take a long-term approach to investing in places and creating communities and we therefore engage extensively with community representatives where we are undertaking development work. We use an internal guide to best practices to engage extensively and effectively with communities where we hold significant property assets or plan to carry out significant works.

The residents of our properties are very important to us as they are at the heart of our business. We recognise that in our position as landlord of around 14,244 properties in the UK and a further 7,150 units in Germany, we have a duty to deliver high quality, reliable tenant services. We employ a variety of tenant management methods, selecting the most appropriate for each tenant type.

With over 40,000 tenancies in the UK and Germany, customers are at the heart of Grainger’s business. Our success depends on their opinions and decisions. We aim to provide excellent service to tenants and continually engage with them to learn how we can do even better.

We are committed to the health and wellbeing of our employees and recognise that our success depends on their productivity.

250 employees work out of 6 offices in the UK and one in Frankfurt, Germany to support Grainger’s residential investment, management, refurbishment and development businesses. We intend to develop and attract talent through establishing a reputation as an excellent, exciting workplace.

We aim to build long-term relationships with our contractors and suppliers. We are committed to the prompt settlement of accounts and we also support our suppliers by guiding them through the demands of environmental and Health & Safety legislation.  We have also started to work with our suppliers to raise their standards of environmental performance and social responsibility. We are proud to work with a number of small local contractors as well as larger, national companies.