Responsible Business Report 2022

As an employer, NATS strives to provide proactive support and to equip employees and managers with the tools and skills to help balance work and home responsibilities. This means adapting as an organisation to look after our people while meeting our customer requirements.

During the year, our priority remained the health and safety of all our employees, contractors and visitors at all our sites across the UK and overseas, including Gibraltar, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions. A challenging time was made even more difficult by the complex and shifting Covid restrictions that differed from location to location.

As the pandemic continued throughout the year, most of our non-operational colleagues stayed working remotely, as we deferred the re-opening of our sites. In the background, a collaborative team made up of professionals from various departments developed our approach to agile working, ready for when people could return to an office environment.

Our Whiteley site in Hampshire reopened in September 2021 after a huge amount of work to allow employees to return to a reconfigured workspace should they wish, ensuring they had the tools and equipment necessary to do their job safely, efficiently and effectively. After some delay due to Omicron, we also made agile working spaces available for our non-operational colleagues at both our air traffic control centres – Swanwick, Hampshire and Prestwick, Ayrshire.

It was imperative that our operational employees, air traffic controllers, engineers and individuals doing project work, who could not work remotely or without engaging with others in person, felt safe and secure as they worked. Innovative ways of working continued to ensure social distancing so that flights could still be handled safely, and members of our Health, Safety & Wellbeing team spent many hours ‘virtually’ sitting in airport towers and overseas offices via phones and laptops, to get a true understanding of how our people worked and develop Covid-secure processes and procedures.

We will continue to focus on employee wellbeing, providing support through our Peer Support Programme and Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) where individuals can receive the help they need to deal with their wellbeing and mental health issues.

We made encouraging progress in narrowing our gender pay gap, moving from 19.2% to 16.8%, which we hope to better again in future years through our gender pay action plan. We also published our Ethnicity Pay Gap Report for the first time, as one of our commitments to Business in the Community’s (BITC) Race at Work Charter, which we signed in January 2022. We strongly believe that attracting and retaining employees with diverse backgrounds, thoughts, experience, knowledge and skills is fundamental to the success of our business.

In another first, we submitted for assessment in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index, which evaluated our achievements and progress on LGBTQ+ equality. We were assessed on eight areas of employment policy and practice, including family policy, gender identity and menopause. We also conducted an anonymous employee survey as part of the assessment.

In line with our D&I vision, we created a new D&I statement for recruitment advertising, refreshed our job advert templates and NATS Careers web pages, and held a virtual careers exhibition, particularly in support of Early Careers, and as part of an inclusive and accessible recruitment campaign.  We expanded our learning and development offering for our existing employees, covering topics such as inclusive leadership, respect for all and inclusive teamworking. 

We formed new partnerships and opened new recruitment channels to help improve the diversity of our workforce, including an alliance with Fantasy Wings, an organisation that promotes individuals from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds and women into the aviation industry. We are also now working with Vercida, which provides an inclusive job board platform. 

We refreshed, simplified and introduced new policies covering the menopause and work and family, including carers leave, in an effort to spark awareness and discussion, as well as offer support and guidance.

Creating an inclusive culture where colleagues feel safe to share their personal stories is core to our company values and corporate communications strategy. Our focus this year has been to work with our employee networks to raise their profiles and recognise the many D&I awareness events celebrated throughout the year.  We have also supported colleagues, and provided them with a platform where they can share their life experiences and alternative perspectives, which has created new conversations and connections. 

We provide dedicated communications support to each of the six employee networks we now have: Disability network, Faith network, GlobeAll, SkyPride, Women’s network and Young Professionals network. Employee networks promote diversity within our organisation and help create a culture where everyone is included, business challenges are addressed, and support and advice can be shared. Our employee networks are run by colleagues for colleagues, who come together based on shared characteristics and life experiences to influence, shape and foster a diverse and inclusive workplace.

Each network has a volunteer committee, with co-chairs and supporting lead roles, and an Executive sponsor. They meet independently as a network, hold Annual General Meetings, provide regular updates to their membership, and the co-chairs meet monthly with HR and join the D&I Steering Group meetings.

Each network has developed its own communications plan that delivers the network’s objectives, and is aligned to our D&I vision, Under the Same Sky.  We collaborate with the networks on significant celebrations and awareness campaigns, for example, Black History Month, Women’s History Month and Pride. The networks also have a dedicated page on our internal intranet and their own community groups on Yammer.

Last year, for the first time, we celebrated National Inclusion Week. A core team of representatives from the employee networks, HR, Trades Unions and Employee Communications, organised a week of 25 virtual sessions, to explore a wide range of topics, including unconscious bias, inclusive recruiting, inclusive language and terminology, Trans and non-binary awareness, adult ADHD and menopause.

In March, on International Women’s Day, we partnered with Swiss ANSP Skyguide, for a CEO-led panel discussion entitled #BreakTheBias. Employees from both organisations were invited to the live discussion to converse and debate.

We have also introduced an internal quarterly D&I business round-up, where we provide an update on business-led activities and deliverables. To support their visibility, the employee networks are invited to contribute to the update, enabling them to raise their profiles and share their activities beyond their membership.

The industry has collectively set a net zero target for 2050 based on its CO₂ emissions, but aviation’s overall climate impact is known to be broader than CO₂ alone. Other greenhouse gases, including nitrogen oxides, contrails and contrail-induced cirrus have an overall warming effect on the planet – with climate scientists suggesting that when taking these effects into account, the overall climate impact of aviation could be two to three times higher than if non-CO₂ effects are ignored.

Avoiding the creation of persistent contrails could be a useful short-term option to mitigate climate change, especially given that many of the industry’s major developments, such as sustainable aviation fuels, and other propulsion sources are still some years away on a commercial scale. We have been active in this developing landscape for several years; we were founding members of the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) contrail avoidance group in 2015 to help establish the feasibility of minimising persistent warming contrails. Since then, we have established links across industry and academia to drive research in this area and supported a number of demonstration flights with partners.

During the last year, we worked with a number of partners including technology start-ups (SATAVIA), research centres (DLR and Imperial College London), ANSPs (MUAC) and airlines (KLM and Etihad) to demonstrate the use of atmospheric modelling that optimises flight plans for contrail prevention and test the science through flight trials. Our role has been to provide air traffic control expertise during the flight planning phase, helping to adapt the flight plan based on contrail forecasts and making our controllers aware of the flight so that it can achieve its requested flight plan – which isn’t always the case as our airspace gets busier and traffic patterns change.

Our activities in this area have also contributed to the development of a consortium, which is seeking European funding for a three-year project to investigate and demonstrate large-scale strategies to reduce aviation’s non-CO₂ emissions (CICONIA) and the publication of four research papers. This is in collaboration with Imperial College, DLR and others.

A paper published earlier this year and which we co-authored, focused on aircraft operations in the North Atlantic and found that between 2016-2019, on average only 12% of flights were responsible for 80% of the annual climate impact caused by persistent warming contrails. The study also identified a number of relevant factors including time of day, season, background meteorology, aircraft and engine type, etc. which could help to target any potential intervention at those flights most likely to create strongly warming contrails.

In the past year, we delivered the first tangible steps in modernising UK airspace to be more efficient and to support sustainable growth in the future.

With sustainable fuels and new engine and aircraft technology still some years away, managing our airspace in a way which allows more efficient flying is already playing a major role in helping the aviation industry reduce its environmental impact.

Free Route Airspace (FRA) is a deliverable under the UK’s airspace modernisation strategy, to remove long-established air routes above 25,000ft, allowing airlines to fly the most direct, fuel efficient and timely routes considering variable factors such as weather and wind speed. This level of flexibility hasn’t previously been possible, with the UK’s airspace structure requiring aircraft to follow predefined routes which can often be longer than necessary. Now, with the introduction of FRA and with new technology, we can make this high level flying much more efficient.

The first deployment of FRA into UK Airspace came in December last year enabling annual savings of 10,500 t CO₂. It is the biggest ever geographical change to UK airspace, covering approximately 150,000 square nautical miles of airspace over the North Sea, Scotland, North Atlantic, Northern Ireland and a small portion of northern England – a footprint twice the size of the UK. This is a busy area, handling up to 2,000 flights per day and around 80% of all transatlantic traffic. This means FRA will enable a reduction of up to 500,000 nautical miles of now unnecessary distance for aircraft using this airspace.

We are currently developing a further deployment of FRA and are on track to implement this across the Southwest of England and Wales in 2023, subject to CAA approval. This is one of many changes over the next few years to help the aviation industry achieve its target of reducing its CO₂  emissions by at least 15% by 2030 (vs 2019) and reaching net-zero by 2050. The introduction of FRA in Scottish airspace alone will save CO₂ equivalent to the power used by 3,500 family homes every year.

Modernising UK airspace is a once in a generation opportunity to change and adapt to ensure we deliver lasting improvements and long-term environmental benefits.

We were proud to play our part in supporting COP26 in Glasgow last year in what was a complex proposition. With high numbers of VIP flights, business jet flights and helicopter flights arriving at the same time as commercial flights, months of planning from our teams came together to deliver a safe and efficient service.

In the lead up to the event, we also supported a second ‘Perfect Flight’ project, with a flight between Heathrow and Glasgow on 14 September 2021 to showcase the efforts being made across the industry to reduce emissions. Led by British Airways and involving Heathrow and Glasgow airports, Airbus and bp, it was up to NATS’ air traffic controllers to optimise the flight profile and provide the most direct routeing. The flight proved to be a great success, reducing CO2 emissions by 62% compared to the original Perfect Flight more than a decade ago. Each part of the journey was optimised across the flight profile from push back to destination stand.

The Airbus A320neo used for this year’s demonstration towards a Perfect Flight was able to fly without the everyday but necessary constraints imposed on air traffic because it was a special project, but our work to modernise airspace will make flying inherently more efficient, providing greater CO2 reductions and ensuring aviation can connect people and goods in a sustainable way. While the Perfect Flight might not be a reality today, the industry has made great progress over the last decade, and with further collaboration and stakeholder and Government support, the industry can move closer still to the Perfect Flight in the future.

NATS’ role is to keep the UK aviation industry operating 24-hours a day, 365 days a year. To do this, we operate a large infrastructure of communications, navigation and surveillance sites across the UK, providing our air traffic control centres and airport towers with the ability to communicate with and see where aircraft are positioned. Understandably, energy consumption is the largest source of our own emissions and a priority focus area for my team, not only to support our net zero trajectory but also to help keep the spiralling costs of energy down.

We have been exploring opportunities across all our sites, with a huge breadth of initiatives progressed across the year.

We continue to develop plans to generate our own on-site renewable energy through large-scale solar installations for our main air traffic control centres. We have also identified a number of remote communications and surveillance sites for on-site solar and, where we need to build new sites, we are challenging the business and our suppliers to make it zero emissions or as close as possible.

The installation of smart energy metering has identified a range of opportunities to reduce energy use, with reductions arising from improvements to lighting, cooling and equipment settings already delivered and further improvements rolling out to our largest sites in the coming year.

At our remote sites, backup generators are crucial to maintaining our critical infrastructure in severe storms like we saw earlier this year. A change in the fuel type from diesel to Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (HVO) means that when used, our generators have a much smaller impact on the planet.

During the year, we completed an assessment of how the most recent UK climate projections could impact our infrastructure. We identified nine physical climate risks based on the latest climate scenarios which point to  warmer, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers along with an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. This information is feeding into our long-term investment decisions, alongside requirements to reduce emissions taking a lifecycle approach. 

We are currently exploring our electric car charging infrastructure with an eye on our commuting emissions and the transition to electric vehicles.

We continued to financially support our corporate charities throughout the pandemic, and as Covid restrictions eased, especially later in the year, both Aerobility and the Jon Egging Trust (JET), were able to re-start their face-to-face programmes and events, which we were delighted to participate in once again.

We hosted three workshops with JET at our corporate headquarters in Whiteley, with more than 40 students participating in a range of activities with NATS volunteers from across the business to inspire them. Focusing on communication and leadership skills, the days were an important part of JET’s ‘Blue Skies’ youth engagement programme, a three-year STEM-inspired syllabus that provides young people who face barriers to learning, with long-term support and access to inspirational teams and individuals to boost confidence, academic engagement, aspiration and work-readiness.

We provided more than 20 auction prizes of air traffic control tower tours in England, Northern Ireland and Scotland to help fundraising efforts at Aerobility’s events, namely the Aviator’s Ball and the Armchair Airshow. As long-standing supporters, we attended the ball, which was in-person after a virtual event the previous year and celebrated one of our own employees, Brian Wheeler, Deputy General Manager at Swanwick, winning Fundraiser of the Year, a real achievement and a great honour.

In celebration of our tenth anniversary of partnership with Aerobility, our Airports team also took on a huge challenge to raise £15,367 for the charity, climbing each of the tallest peaks in England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Gibraltar, the territories where we operate airport towers. Various training exercises and events beforehand also contributed to the fundraising efforts, which boosted the total to over £20,000.

Following a year’s suspension due to Covid-related budget restrictions, the Footprint Fund, a grant scheme for which our employees nominate their chosen local charities, was reinstated. We donated up to £500 to more than 25 charities, with monies going to projects ranging from new kayaks for a Sea Scouts unit, to training kit for a community youth football club, to building a garden for a community centre.

Our employees have continued to support charities and causes they care about via our Payroll Giving scheme, which has been operating since 2008. Thanks to the generosity of 12% of the workforce, a total of £207,294.37 was donated to hundreds of different charities in 2021-22 via the scheme, ranging from the British Lung Foundation to the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Air Ambulance.

As an organisation we are committed to understanding the views of local communities and considering these in decisions we make that may impact the public. While the pandemic largely prevented our usual round of face-to-face meetings with community groups at airport and government forums, we have continued to engage widely with this audience through the now familiar online meeting tools.

As mentioned in last year’s Responsible Business report, we have been working in partnership with London Luton Airport (LLA) on a consultation to change the airport’s arrival routes, separating them from Stansted’s. The change was implemented in February, and we followed this up by attending a public surgery in a newly overflown village to understand the impact of the change. The findings from this surgery and emails we have received from residents from a wider area will be included in the evidence we submit to the CAA’s Post Implementation Review (PIR).

As traffic has started to return, so our public enquiries email inbox has got busier. The pandemic had a dramatic impact on aviation with the skies becoming much quieter. During that period, when aircraft were often able to take more direct routes thereby cutting down on emissions, this meant many flights were seen in areas which don’t normally experience aircraft overhead and residents worried that airspace changes had been introduced. Now, as flight numbers have increased, the familiar pre-pandemic patterns have returned and we have had to remind communities that this is just a return to normal operations and flight paths.

Despite the continued constraints the pandemic has enforced, we have continued to support the local community through STEM engagement and Apprenticeship support. Our partnerships with local schools and colleges have continued through the delivery of both virtual and face-to-face sessions centred on innovation and the importance of engineering.

We have also been working on a partnership with STEM Returners to support Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) professionals to get back to work after a career break. We look forward to welcoming our first ‘returners’ into fully paid 12-week placements this coming year.

Our partnership with the RAF Cadets has continued as well as the creation of new partnerships with charities such as Womens World Gliding.

We have also continued to support small and medium-sized enterprises in the Solent region through our work with the Solent Hub. NATS will be pledging a further £100,000 of unused levy funds to SMEs across the Solent region to cover the cost of apprenticeship training for smaller businesses.

The last year continued to be unpredictable and hugely challenging for our airline and airport customers. The summer of 2021 saw travel and air traffic start to recover, but demand remained suppressed by changing restrictions and travellers were understandably apprehensive.

In late 2021 the Omicron variant emerged, restrictions were re-introduced, and our airline and airport customers were yet again impacted. Thankfully once the restrictions were lifted, consumer demand returned strongly, and the challenge switched to servicing the demand, with the added complexity of network restrictions in Europe and rising fuel prices and we continue to see significant volatility in the Summer 22 schedule, with flight cancellations and delays, challenging the whole industry.

Throughout this last year, we continued to meet with our customers, bilaterally and as part of larger industry groups, to share information and insights on each other’s operations. Every month we hosted a collaborative lookahead call for the following month, providing weather forecasts (direct from the Met Office) and air traffic predictions across the UK and European network. This is a platform for airlines and airports to share with each other any salient points. We are grateful to the many airlines who take time to engage in this dialogue and we value the benefit this provides to us, airports and airlines in preparing for the month ahead.

We shared our medium-term plans with customers through our “Service and Investment Plan” consultation and encouraged a dialogue with them through meetings and requests for written feedback. In the Autumn of 2021, we consulted with our customers and stakeholders on a new price control business plan (NR23: 2023 to 2027). With their feedback in mind, we finalised our business plan and published this in February of 2022 and we look forward to hearing the CAA’s initial conclusions later this year.

We will continue to support our customers through the coming year, as we hope for a sustained recovery in demand for travel.

Last year, as part of the broader refinancing of its debt structure, NERL agreed a £400 million sustainability-linked revolving credit facility with a syndicate of six banks. The key performance indicators (KPIs) for this facility relate to our scope 1 and 2 emissions, scope 3 emissions (i.e., categories 1, 3, 4, 6 and 7) and the group’s CDP rating. A condition of these GHG emission KPIs was that they needed to be validated by the Science Based Target initiative (SBTi). Our recent receipt of this validation, alongside being awarded ‘Business Ambition’ status is really pleasing as it demonstrates our commitment to environmental stewardship and implementing best practice in the areas of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) and it enables us to complete the documentation of these validated GHG emission targets in the facility agreement.

In the meantime, our A- score from CDP, which represents a ‘leadership level’ score, meant that our recent sustainability compliance certificate led to no change in the margin for loans under this facility.

Being prepared to commit to sustainability-linked finance and engaging with providers of finance on ESG issues continues to grow in importance. The targets that we have set ourselves currently stand us in good stead in this regard. However, we remain mindful that maintaining our current CDP score and continuing our downward trajectory for GHG emissions will be far from straightforward. That said, our approach to meeting this challenge, including having an objective within our newly launched corporate strategy to 2040 of being carbon negative across our estate, provides me with confidence that we will continue to have strong, and cost-efficient, support from our providers of finance.

The partners and suppliers that we work with are key to how we deliver our services and investment programmes. We seek to work with suppliers who can help us deliver these outcomes in ways that reflect our own values and ethics. We work with suppliers responsibly and set out our expectations of them, and what they can expect of us, in a Supplier Charter that is published on our company website. The charter covers two-way expectations in terms of ethics, conduct, health and safety, fair treatment of employees and contract staff, corporate & social responsibility, and the environment.

In responsibly managing our supply chain, we strive to pay suppliers promptly within agreed terms, and work to a policy that sets out how we engage flexibly with micro, small and medium sized enterprises, many of whom bring new ideas and innovation to our business.

Our procurement process includes an assessment of the benefits that a procurement, and the supplier providing it, can bring to the ESG aspects we are looking to advance. In the past twelve months, we have applied these criteria to a laptop replacement programme, selecting a product with both the lowest carbon involved in its manufacture and also lowest energy consumption. We also applied the criteria when selecting new dry air coolers, which cool equipment and operational rooms during the warm summer months. Energy efficiency was key in the selection criteria and from the products offered to us, the project team and Supply Chain opted for a solution that saves around 220 tonnes of CO2 per annum compared to those being replaced.

We also like to work with our supply chains to bring benefits to our local communities and have recently worked jointly with one of our suppliers, CGI, an IT and business consulting firm that provide NATS with resource and support to our Analytics department, to reforest a local woodland. The trees were provided by CGI and planted by members of NATS staff, most of whom had not previously met having worked remotely during the pandemic. We are also working with a number of suppliers keen to help develop STEM opportunities in the communities local to our operations.

For our longer-term suppliers, we work collaboratively with them to understand how they can help us achieve our carbon negative and other sustainability goals, and also where we can help them in achieving their plans relating to carbon reduction, and Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI). Where there are a number of suppliers working together on a shared outcome, for example in delivery of our new technology programme, or who have a shared responsibility around areas such as operational cyber security, we bring supplier groups together and work to foster a collaborative learning or working environment. Where a supplier is more experienced than we are, we learn from them and incorporate best practice into our own ways of working.