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Summary report due in June 2008. Reserve your copy

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In 2007 British Land commissioned independent sustainability agency, Upstream, to benchmark our corporate responsibility progress and approach to reporting, as well as our objectives, targets and key performance indicators.

The benchmarking of our corporate responsibility objectives identified that our focus on stakeholder engagement was a key differentiating factor in our approach to corporate responsibility. We will continue to build on this through our Building Together programme, working in partnership with our customers, suppliers, local communities and internal teams.

The review included a number of recommendations regarding specific corporate responsibility targets, including:

• Providing longer-term energy use targets for properties
• Using existing water use data as a baseline to set appropriate improvement targets against
• Setting a consistent BREEAM rating target for all new development projects
• Setting targets for contractors to halve waste to landfill by 2012
• Measuring and monitoring community activities using the London Benchmarking Group model
• Developing more performance focused targets
• Developing occupier engagement targets, with particular focus on engaging occupiers on corporate responsibility issues.

The benchmarking review showed that our progress against targets continued to be above average for our peer group, with 59% of 2006 targets 100% complete. We will continue to set challenging targets, even though this means that we may not always be able to achieve 100% completion, as this will drive performance most effectively.

We performed well in our approach to reporting for having a stand-alone Corporate Responsibility Report, a summary report and a corporate responsibility website, as well as for disclosing stakeholder engagement responses and for having our targets and data independently reviewed.

This benchmarking review contributed to the development of Building Together, which is our new way of looking at corporate responsibility, engaging with our stakeholders and managing our impact on the environment. We will continue to learn from best practice amongst our peers, key occupiers and suppliers, improving our own performance and communicating with our stakeholders as effectively as possible