Good afternoon and welcome, everybody. I'm Ed Petter, BT's Group Corporate Affairs Director. Thank you for joining us for our ESG Manifesto briefing, either virtually or here in One Braham. Given the focus of today's session, it felt relevant to point out that like all of our buildings in our Better Workplace Programme, this new headquarters is built to the highest sustainability specifications and powered with 100% renewable electricity. If you haven't already, you can download today's presentation from our website, or for those in the room, you can use the QR code on the flyers on your table. One year ago, we launched the BT Group Manifesto, which set out how we'll accelerate growth through technology that's Responsible, Inclusive, and Sustainable.
Our Manifesto is underpinned by a number of commitments outlined here on this slide, which we will refer to today. Since then, those parts of my team that lead on social impact and sustainability have been working with colleagues across the business to embed the Manifesto into our plans. Today, you'll hear from Philip Jansen, our Chief Executive, who will talk about the progress we've been making on the Manifesto. Sara Weller, one of our board members and the new Chair of the Digital Impact and Sustainability Committee, will focus on the governance aspects of the Manifesto. We'll then hear an update on each of the Manifesto pillars and the way in which we're integrating the Manifesto into the business. Philip will close the presentation section of this briefing by sharing his priorities for the future, after which we'll open up for your questions.
With that, Philip, over to you.
Thanks, Ed. Hello, everybody. Thanks for coming. Appreciate you joining us today. I'm gonna keep my comments relatively brief so that we can hear in more depth from the team before we move to the Q&A that Ed mentioned. I wanted to touch on three things. First, how we advance our Manifesto agenda, not only as an ESG platform, but as an integral part of the BT Group growth strategy. Second, how our Manifesto supports a caring and robust response to the cost of living crisis. Third, I wanna sum up the progress we're making, not just in terms of specific projects, but by embedding the Manifesto into the fabric of the BT Group. Let's start with growth. This is the BT Group strategic framework, which many of you will have seen before.
It sets out our purpose, we connect for good, our ambition, to be the world's most trusted connector of people, devices, and machines. It also covers our values, which guide how we do business. Finally, the strategic pillars that drive our growth. The Manifesto is essentially the route map for our third strategic pillar over on the right-hand side of this chart. Whilst it reflects our desire to be decent corporate citizens, it is unashamedly about commercial growth, too. We believe there is competitive advantage in focusing on the ethics of technology development, building trust and sales through a more responsible approach. We believe that greater inclusivity will give us the colleague and customer bases we need for the future.
We've been clear that in our collective ability to live and work more sustainably will determine the type of society and markets which companies like ours operate. We all know that people, business, and society as a whole are under immense pressure as rising costs impact every aspect of life. Marc Allera went into some detail on our support for U.K. consumers during last week's consumer business briefing. I won't repeat everything that he said, but I do just wanna mention some of the steps we're taking to stand by our customers, to stand by our colleagues, and to stand by the country as a whole. Starting with customers, consumers on Universal Credit can get discounted broadband from BT and EE with our Home Essentials package. In fact, we have more customers on social tariffs than the rest of the market combined.
You may have seen we recently launched EE Basics, which mirrors this offer for eligible mobile customers. We've been market leaders on social tariffs and the customer fairness agenda for a long time, protecting 1 million vulnerable customers from price rises on Home Essentials and other products. We're also helping people across the U.K., even if they're not BT or EE customers. Openreach's Connect the Unconnected scheme waives connection fees for vulnerable customers via their communications provider. Secondly, we're looking after our colleagues. In April, we gave the highest pay rise for frontline colleagues in more than 20 years. That's GBP 1,500, which is an average of 5% across the group, but up 8% for those on the lowest salaries.
On Monday, we announced our intention to make another GBP 1,500 cost of living pay rise for all U.K. colleagues earning GBP 50,000 or less, which is 85% of our U.K.-based people. Prospect and CWU, our union partners, are supportive and will be putting this to their members for a vote. Of course, we also have a range of benefits available to help our colleagues contain all sorts of household costs, from transport to insurance to high street shopping. Just as we did during the pandemic, we also recognize our wider responsibility to the country as a whole. Despite facing intense cost pressures ourselves, we are continuing to make landmark investments in the digital infrastructure, that's full fiber and 5G, that the U.K. desperately needs.
We continue to engage with local communities through a number of programs focused on digital skills to help people into the workplace and improve their economic prospects. In total last year, more than 33,000 people took part in our Work Ready program. We're particularly focused on supporting young people who are suffering the highest rates of unemployment, and you'll hear more about this in a few minutes. With our charity partner, Home-Start, we've also gifted laptops and connectivity to some of the families that are worst affected by the cost of living crisis. Despite the extraordinary headwinds in the 12 months since its launch, we've made deep and sustained progress on the objectives we set out in the Manifesto. In a moment, others will take the stage to run you through the detail.
You'll notice that in every area, we're doing two key things. First, addressing the basics. Second, making sure the Manifesto is part of the BT Group's growth strategy. We're forging ahead toward net zero. We're also launching new commercial solutions to support our business customers on the same journey. We've set ourselves stretching diversity targets. Now we're linking those targets to the way we foster the digital talent our business and our industry more broadly needs. We've built robust systems to manage risk across BT Group. We're also developing commercial differentiation in the way we address issues such as data ethics.
What we hope you take away from today is a sense of the many steps we're taking to help with the cost of living crisis and insight into the way we're embedding the Manifesto and an understanding of the way we are weaving together our ESG and growth strategies. This is a real group effort led by the individuals you see here, but really crucially supported by 100,000 colleagues worldwide. We are very fortunate that it is overseen by a committee that brings some of our most experienced board members together with key members of my executive team. That is chaired by Sara Weller. Let me hand over to her to say a little bit more about governance.
Thank you, Philip. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Sara Weller. I'm delighted to welcome you here today in my capacity as the new Chair of the Digital Impact and Sustainability Committee, or the DISC, as we call it internally. The BT Manifesto is led from the top of the organization, as you just heard from Philip, it provides the committee with a clear remit. I'm really excited about the work we're going to do on DISC, building on the equivalent work that I led at Lloyds Banking Group. Slide 11 outlines the BT Group board structure, including the DISC. The DISC provides oversight and direction to our digital impact and sustainability strategy, which is broadly encompassed in the Manifesto.
My own retail experience means that as well as overseeing the ESG agenda per se, I'm well placed to ensure that the committee offers support as the business develops new converged products and services, enabling our business units to draw on the best practice, build ambition and energy across the group. ESG is embedded in the group's reward approach and will remain so as we progress our triennial review of the remuneration policy. Progress against specific KPIs is therefore reported on at the DISC and to the remuneration committee. In addition, climate risk is firmly part of the group's risk framework, with oversight through the board audit and risk committee, of which I'm also a member. Hopefully you can see that our oversight of the ESG agenda is thoroughly integrated across all of our governance structures.
Slide 12 shows the dashboard that we use to track progress on the BT Group Manifesto. Applying the same rigor we use to track all other aspects of our business performance. This is the first time we've shared this dashboard externally. You'll already be familiar with how we track progress on many of the goals, such as FTTP, but for some, a more subjective approach is needed. For example, under our responsible pillar, we draw in the views of experts, internal and external, to appraise our performance. We're in good shape overall, and we'll talk through some of the things we're gonna do to focus more strongly on as part of the updates that you're about to hear. Right, time for some specifics and for you to hear from some of the team who are driving the work forward.
Given the breadth of our ESG agenda, we've decided to focus on specific aspects of each of the three Manifesto pillars, guided largely by their materiality. Under the responsible pillar, Lauren will describe how BT is embedding its Responsible Tech principles to build trust and growth. Under the inclusive pillar, Mark will talk to you about the group D&I context. He'll then spotlight the Digital unit's talent agenda. Under the sustainable pillar, Sarwar will explain how BT Group is reducing its carbon emissions and becoming circular before spotlighting how sustainability is fueling growth in our B2B business. Without further ado, let me welcome Lauren.
Thanks so much, Sara. Hello, everyone. I'm Lauren Kahn, Responsible Tech and Human Rights Director for BT Group. As Philip has already said, at BT, our ambition is to be the world's most trusted connector of people, devices and machines. We know that it's not enough to simply minimize harm. It's imperative that we also connect for good. Our Responsible Tech Principles, outlined here on the slide, ensure that our tech is always for good, that is empowering people and improving their lives, as well as accountable, fair and open. We're committed to applying these principles across our entire value chain each and every time we develop, use, buy and sell technology.
They are the premise on which we build customer trust. Today, I'd like to talk to you about the two sides of the trust coin, how we're managing risk to build trust, and how we're leveraging trust as a growth opportunity. Our group risk framework gives us the tools to be smart with risk, enabled by the right culture, leadership, and governance. There are three areas of risk that I'd like to talk about today that cut across our business and our value chain. These are technologies, geographies, and user groups. Firstly, technologies, and specifically data and cybersecurity. Our networks and the data that flow through them are the core of our business, and protecting these assets is vital. Take a look at these stats and you'll get a sense of the scale of the challenge facing us, along with our response capability.
EE blocks up to 4 million scams a week, and our global network of security centers protect BT from 200,000 cyber attacks a month. We already employ some 3,000 cybersecurity professionals, and we have an 80 strong team of Ethical Hackers: constantly probing our own security. Not all of them are IT specialists either. Some are behavioral psychologists addicted to finding our personal information via telephone scams and using this to break passwords. Reflecting the growing importance of security to our business, our CTO, Howard Watson, who we have here today, has seen his role expand to Chief Security and Networks Officer. I'll now move on to high-risk geographies. We serve customers in 180 countries, and our supply chain spans 100 countries.
Risk management is critical. We use tools such as Crisis Gaming to stay on top of global changes such as rising energy costs, sanctions, natural disasters, and geopolitical conflict. We also conduct regular audits of our suppliers. We use digital technologies such as AI and blockchain to monitor labor practices in our supply chain. Finally, very importantly, we think carefully about particular groups of users who might be impacted by technology. As a company serving families all across the country, children are a key focus for us. Now more than ever, children's lives play out in the digital world. Research from Ofcom last year showed that 90% of children have their own mobile by age 11, and 80% have had at least one potentially harmful experience online in the past year.
That's why we recently carried out a groupwide assessment of our impact on children's digital rights and safety, and on the back of that, created a robust action plan. Of course, we don't do all of this alone. We work with children, with parents and caregivers, and expert organizations. For example, EE PhoneSmart, the first phone safety license for children, has been created with Internet Matters and other experts such as Home-Start and Childnet. Our greatest risks, managed well, are also a commercial opportunity and a differentiator. Data and cybersecurity, which are becoming a key part of our growth story across the group, are a good example. More and more of our customers want to understand our security capabilities, we leverage our internal security expertise to offer security solutions to customers in businesses and governments across the world. Our credentials build trust and trust builds custom.
For example, we've invested in Silicon Valley, a cybersecurity company, SAFE, to provide our customers with objective assessments of their cyber protections and to quantify the financial cost of their cyber risk. We've also embedded AI technology into our Eagle-i platform for multinational customers. This uses self learning and automation to predict, to detect, and to neutralize threats before they can make an impact. We're helping our consumer customers to stay safe in their homes and their digital lives through our EE security offering. We're also innovating with data safely and ethically to help unlock value for our business units, for our customers, and for society. Our new AI Accelerator is a great example of responsible innovation in action. New automation helps us expedite checks on the quality and the effectiveness of new machine learning models, which are really the building blocks of artificial intelligence.
In turn, this helps us deploy AI more rapidly, but without sacrificing the ethical, the privacy, and the security checks needed to make this work responsibly. This capability will help us unlock millions of GBP of value for the group. Our Active Intelligence solution is another example of driving value while remaining a trusted custodian of individuals' data. Through our mobile network, we're able to create anonymized crowd movement analysis, and this can help give public sector and our government customers really rich behavioral insights, such as determining catchment areas for regional airport passengers. We were also very proud to support the Department for Health and Social Care with evidence-based analysis that helped inform the local and the national response to the pandemic. This is harnessing data for public good, but it's also good for business.
Revenue from our Active Intelligence solutions have grown more than 90% in a year. To conclude, being responsible is about risk and opportunity. We are being smart about risk to build trust, and we're actively leveraging that trust to drive commercial growth in areas where we have a strong right to play. I'll now hand over to Mark Murphy, who'll spotlight some of the work that we are doing in the Digital unit as part of the inclusive pillar. Thanks.
Thank you, Lauren. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Mark Murphy. I'm the Director of HR for our Digital unit, and I had the pleasure of meeting many of you when we held our digital business briefing, back in March. It won't surprise anybody to learn there's a major digital talent shortage in the U.K., which in turn presents a major barrier to unlocking the full potential of new technologies and for the economy and society. If we just take AI, while the AI industry has the potential to boost the U.K. economy by as much as 10% of GDP by 2030, 35% of companies are either experiencing now or foresee a related skills gap in their business in the next two years. The problem isn't just one of scale. There is a major lack of diversity in the digital talent pool.
Only 20% of data and AI professionals in the U.K are women. At BT Group, we firmly believe the future of tech must be inclusive and diverse for everyone to benefit. This is the right thing to do for a fairer digital world, and also key to growing our customer base by ensuring our tech works for more people. Today I'm gonna focus on two things. Firstly, looking in, what we're doing to become a more digital, diverse, and inclusive business. Secondly, looking out, how we're helping to drive the scale and diversity of talent in the wider digital ecosystem. Back in 2020, we set ourselves challenging and stretching targets on the makeup of our workforce for 2025 and for 2030.
We've increased the representation of women and ethnic minority colleagues at almost every career level over the past year, and our gender pay gap remains below the industry benchmark. There's more to do, particularly on Black talent at all levels and on disability representation, where we're seeing a reduction at every career level, except in our graduate population. We must continue to match our efforts in recruitment with a joined-up approach to retention supported by an inclusive culture. To create an inclusive culture, our diversity and inclusion strategy has five clear strategic priorities outlined here on the slide. Building on our workforce targets, we're looking to reflect the same ambition in how we show up externally through our products and our customer experiences.
As we think about consistency of approach, we're giving our colleagues high-quality training to help them develop the sort of inclusive habits we know will help to differentiate us. For example, to ensure all colleagues are knowledgeable about disability-related issues and language, we've worked with disability experts like the Global Disability Innovation Hub to develop a wide range of awareness-raising initiatives. These have covered topics including neurodiversity, introduction to disability, and digital accessibility. I'll talk more in a little bit about how we're improving outcomes for disadvantaged groups in society and using this as a lever to attract diverse talent into our business. Finally, we've fostered an external reputation through transparency in areas such as pay gap reporting on ethnicity.
Working with our partners, Rubik and AKD, we're running a mentoring program for colleagues that matches ethnic minority talent with external mentors to introduce a different perspective and to really build confidence. Let's now look at what we're doing in Digital. Specifically, I'd like to bring to life how we're tackling the two challenges of scale and diversity in our own Digital talent pipeline. We founded Digital last year, bringing together seven organizations from across BT Group. To give a sense of scale, we're made up of over 4,000 colleagues, although around 80% of our work is carried out today by external subcontractors. We're on a mission to double Digital's productivity and transform the way that we work. We're partway through a significant insourcing program, taking on 700 of a planned 2,800 colleagues by 2024.
Now, we know we can't achieve that if we don't acquire and retain the diverse skills and talent that are needed to make that happen. We're building a world-class training offer, and we're working with partners to access a pool of digital talent and help them develop to ensure we win in the longer term. As we talked about in some detail in March, we're building a Digital Campus, a one-stop-shop learning and community opportunity. As you can see from the slide, it spans everything from the basics through to more advanced skills like cloud infrastructure. It's landed really well so far, and we've seen great engagement, both from our own colleagues and from partners such as Salesforce, Amazon, Google, and others who are part of the campus offering.
We're also working with a fantastic set of partners to access a wider pool of digital communities, including 10,000 Black Interns, Code First Girls, Women Returners, and for the first time, we had a presence at the Black Tech Fest this year. We've also just joined the Hidden Disabilities Sunflower Scheme, which is a commitment from the business to support individuals with non-visible disabilities. We have been for many years and continue to be a major source of U.K. Apprenticeships, working with leading U.K. universities and investing in a range of entry schemes. We're not alone in needing to deepen the pool of digital talent, and as I said earlier, in the future of our industry is critically dependent on diversity. That's why last year we committed to build a future talent pipeline for both BT Group and the U.K. that is truly reflective of society.
Last month, we convened AI Ready Nation, bringing together industry, policymakers, higher education, and digital training providers and learners to identify key challenges and find solutions. We're making sure this is not just a talking shop, it's also about concrete investment and practical action. First, we plan to open source our own investments. For example, we're making Digital Campus available outside of BT next year. Second, we're looking for opportunities for our partners to help amplify and accelerate even further. Our fantastic partnership with Avado Learning FastFutures scheme is a great example of this. We're coming together with some of the U.K.'s largest employers to support diverse young people into digital roles, aligning with the U.K. government skills agenda.
We co-founded this initiative during the pandemic, to date, it supported 5,700 young people to build their networks, gain experience, and accelerate their careers. As you can see, the FastFutures community is extremely diverse. Our people get actively involved too in all aspects of the program, giving expert input on curriculum design, running career talks, and mentoring over 250 participants so far this year. To sum up, we're rapidly becoming a more digital, diverse, and inclusive business. We're helping to build a diverse ecosystem, and we're working to create a virtuous circle between the two. I look forward to your questions later on. In the meantime, I'll pass to Sarwar, who will talk in more depth about our sustainability pillar. Thank you.
Thank you, Mark. Hi, everyone. I'm Sarwar Khan, Global's Head of Digital Sustainability. We all know the transition to a low carbon society needs to happen much faster. In this update, I'll talk about two things, how we're getting into good shape here in BT, and then two big cutting-edge areas we're engaging with customers on. This slide recaps on the longer-term ambitions we've set. Let me first ground that in the five priorities we're going after. On carbon emissions, we've committed to being net zero for our operations in 2031 and for our full value chain in 2041. We also want to help our customers on their own journey towards net zero and a more circular world. All of this is founded on transparency and on a sound contribution to public debate in areas such as the transition to electric vehicles.
We've made significant progress in cutting carbon emissions and have reduced our carbon emission intensity by 55% since the base year in FY 2017. Getting to net zero is about decarbonizing our fleet, our estate, and our networks. We're aiming to convert the majority of our van fleet, the U.K.'s second largest, to electric or zero emission vehicles by 2030. We've already added more than 1,500 electric vehicles to the fleet. To spur progress, we have launched the U.K. Electric Fleets Coalition to advocate for a progressive public policy. We are decarbonizing our estate by downsizing and consolidating many of our offices into new ones, which are designed to minimize environmental impact through energy saving features. BT accounts for around 1% of the U.K.'s electricity usage.
Building energy-efficient networks that are renewably powered and switching off legacy networks play a key part in tackling climate change. As well as energy save, full fiber networks are more resilient to the impacts of physical risks, such as flooding and increased temperature, and this leads to fewer faults and fewer truck rolls. You can see that modernizing our networks is a massive boon to sustainability. We're making good progress. When we look at BT's end-to-end carbon emissions, only 6% comes from our own operations. That brings the focus on to Scope 3, with 70% of our total emissions coming from our supply chain and the remainder from customers using our products and services. We've hardwired carbon reduction into our supply contracts, we're asking them to report to the Carbon Disclosure Project so we can better track and act on emissions.
Thanks to these, we've already cut our supply chain emissions by 28% since FY 2017. We look up the customer use of our products, decarbonization of the grid, and improving the energy efficiency of our products will accelerate the journey to net zero. This takes me to our closely related focus on circularity. This is one of two areas I'll now focus on to show we're building from the work to get BT into good shape to engage our customers. The transition to a Circular Economy is key to decouple business growth from resource consumption whilst helping customers reduce their environmental impact. We've set an ambitious new goal to build towards a fully circular BT by 2030 and our full ecosystem by 2040. We're not starting from scratch.
The rate at which people return routers and set-top boxes to us for reuse and recycling rose by 7% to 65% in Q1 this year. We're also stepping up activity on the mobile side and have expanded our two-hour repair service at a number of stores. Our ECO programme, which takes in our old network equipment, has reused and recycled over 280 tons of kit so far this year. We've also had some exciting new developments this year. We announced a new sustainability partnership with Cisco, which is enabling B2B customers to return their own network devices for reuse and recycling. Earlier this month, we joined the Eco Rating initiative for mobile devices launching in Q4. This will help customers to make more informed and sustainable choices.
There's another exciting launch coming in Q4, a new hub and TV box with a more sustainable design, with up to 85% recycled plastic, using 23% fewer materials by weight and plastic-free packaging. Really good progress on building more sustainable business practices, and we'll work to embed this throughout BT in the year ahead. Now let me turn to those practices that are helping us to grow the business. Our B2B customers are prioritizing sustainability. Around 60% have already set some form of carbon reduction target, and we know 50% of all telco RFPs are expected to include sustainability as standard by 2025, up from only 5% last year.
For us, sustainability will be the tipping point in winning and losing business, and we're already seeing it make a difference through some of our recent contract wins, for example, with Atos, DHL, and ABB. We know we need to do more, that's why we're embedding sustainability by design, helping solve our customers' sustainability challenges. There's three key parts to this. The first is helping customers track energy and carbon emissions across their networks in real time, enabling them to reduce their Scope three emissions. We're creating customer dashboards that will help them to do that. The second is helping customers to choose sustainable products from BT. Our partnership with Cisco enables end-of-life returns, the BT Eco SIM for mobile customers offers 2 current examples. Finally, we're supporting customers to drive down their operational emissions, Scope one and Scope two.
In partnership with QiO, we've co-developed an AI capability that can help customers to optimize energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions in their own operations. To summarize, we're accelerating towards net zero and a circular world and supporting a low-carbon economy that fuels growth for BT and for our customers. I will now hand back to Philip to close the session.
Thanks, Sarwar. Right. You've heard about the progress we're making, of course, there's obviously so much more to do on every front. What are my top priorities for the coming month? Well, firstly, within the responsible strand of our BT Group Manifesto, it's all about security. As Lauren said, the threat of cybercrime grows exponentially, BT Group is in the frontline of the fight at all levels, from protecting the nation against rogue actors to safeguarding our most vulnerable consumers. It is actually a thriving part of our business, only because we work day and night to ensure that the sophistication of our detection and armory matches the evolving tactics of the ever-present cybercriminals. Second, for me, inclusion. Mark ran through some of the great work we're doing already, I'm absolutely determined we pick up the pace and we intensify our efforts even further.
This will be a huge area of focus for Athalie Williams, our new Chief Human Resources Officer, who joins us tomorrow. Finally, within the area of sustainability, as Sarwar outlined, we're looking hard at circularity. That's not easy, but we're looking across our operations, our products, our services, our major network transitions, and how these can contribute to a more circular and sustainable world. To conclude, we're stepping up our support for our customers, our colleagues, and the country through the challenges of today's economic climate. We are making real strides in embedding the BT Group Manifesto into what we do, how we measure it, and into the culture we're building, including reward.
Lastly, we're more determined than ever to bring together our two overarching and complementary aims: to build a modernized, growing BT Group, whilst at the same time living up to our ultimate purpose, we connect for good. With that, I'd like to go to Ed we'll call back the Q&A.
Thank you very much. What I'm going to do, everybody, if it's okay, is invite the presenters back up onto the stage. While we do that, I'm delighted also that we have in the room some ExCo members with us. We have some deep subject matter experts here as well. I'm hoping that we have any question that you may have covered in one way, shape, or form. For those of you joining on the WebEx, I think pro-protocol, please, if you could raise your hand, that will be signaled to me, and we will come to you for a question. In the room, again, please, if you could raise your hand. We've got microphones dotted around. If you could just wait for a microphone to come to you.
If both on the Webex and also in the room, if you could just announce yourselves, introduce yourselves even, and we will take it from there. Start with the gentleman on the table here, and then we will go to Carl Murdock-Smith after that.
Yeah. It's Maurice Patrick from Barclays. A question, please, on, I guess it's a BT question, but also wider industry one. You've talked about leveraging trust and putting yourselves at the, you know, the heart of the customer world when it comes to data privacy and security. I think when it comes to most telecom materializing matrices, it is the number one issue is privacy, security. You're not the only people to be doing that, to try and put yourselves at the heart of the customer.
Many different verticals are doing it as well. I just wondered, do you benchmark yourself how much you are doing to help customers compared to some of your peers in different verticals, maybe different telcos? If you think you're doing enough and if you need to dedicate more resources to that over the coming years in what feels like an area regulators and governments are only looking more at.
You wanna have a go.
Well, go ahead.
Lauren, yeah.
Yeah.
Howard as well, maybe.
It's an absolutely crucial area, right? It's wider than that. It's the data security, safety, and how one packages it all together with the whole cyber area is really complicated. You know, there is no question BT is extremely well-positioned on it. I mean, we have so much data. We cover so much of the world. We're, as you know, 180 countries. We see an enormous amount of things that other people just simply can't see. That's the first advantage. We got scale, and we got scope, and we got access to the data. With that comes huge responsibility. I think, you know, I'm very confident we are more than competitive in what we have and in what we do.
The question is, how do you handle the privacy and the security, and what philosophy and what principles do you stand by? I'm gonna ask Howard and Les to talk in a minute actually on this because it's. Lauren might wanna pitch in as well. The need to look after people who are vulnerable, who may not know they're vulnerable, right, or who are being targeted and don't know they're being targeted, and there are easy ones that you can talk about. The elderly are one group, for example. We have the data on that, obviously. Also, you know, children who are being exploited online and targeted, terrorism, all those things are data, right? We are in a very privileged position to work with some government bodies to deal with those things.
The MI5, MI6, GCHQ groups. It's no secret. Again, that's a competitive advantage. We charge for that. Actually, there are people that, you know, Les works with who are working on that every single day. It's, it's sure as hell we connect the good part. If you then go all the way to the other part, which is, you know, for a large global customer, and we have multiple ones of those, and some are more sensitive than others, so the European Union, for example, you can think of the complications there. We see an awful lot of data. We've gotta work out where's the data going, and which countries does it flow through and why. I would reassure you that we're reasonably sophisticated, but you're only as good as the source data you get and how you manage it.
You know, versus other people, I feel really good about it, but it's really challenging. It's an ever-changing landscape. It's much bigger than just the pure data, if that makes sense. I think, Howard, do you wanna just give a perspective? Les, I'd love you to give a feeling for what we do and maybe, Janice, if you wanna this, I'm sure Peter got a question. We might as do it all in one go. This is a security data privacy. The whole gambit is hugely important to what you just heard about. I'll let these guys chip in with their thoughts, and maybe we'll go, we'll get a follow-up question, stay on this subject for a little while. Is that all right? Maybe there's a follow-up from you if I haven't answered it fully. Howard.
Maurice, you mentioned benchmarking. We are strong advocates of what's called the CAF Framework, which the National Cyber Security Centre have encouraged industry to follow. That, you know, we've had independent scoring of that done. I'm not sharing the comparatives, 'cause that's something that clearly we keep quite secret. Don't forget also that Ofcom quite recently adopted what they've done in the financial services. It's called TBEST, where they effectively ask us to employ some independent Ethical Hackers: agreed by those to have a go at our perimeter. You know, we undertook that with them just over a year, about a year and a half ago .
I would say what I believe differentiates us, and certainly Les could talk more about this, in protecting the BT network and our customers' data is the quality of the Ethical Hackers: we have in our red team. We had them assessed by a, you know, boutique cybersecurity team, NCC Group. You know, they affirmed that they are world-class in their ability, you know, state, nation-state type level of capability. It drives me crazy 'cause I never quite know what they're doing at any one time and, with the Chinese wall so that, you know, Les is aware, but I'm not. Often we look at, you know, whether our SecOps team, how quickly do they detect the activity that's being done there. You know, and usually, you know, in most cases, they do.
If we find that they don't, there's a whole set of remediation activity. I mean, a great example. Just over 2.5 years ago , we looked at identity and access management, and I decided, based on some, a little bit of work the red team had done, to force every single one of 107,000 employees to have a 12-digit pass-password. Drove everybody crazy across the organization. I'm also checking that password against known words, so it rejects it if you've got silly words in there. You know, again, that was all about, you know, just improving the overall security hygiene. We're very, very obsessed with that. Another area where I would say, and it relates to Philip's point about our customers, we are leading the industry on eliminating scam.
Stopping either that fixed line or that, you know, the mobile phone. Quite a bit yet to do as many of us I'm sure are aware. In terms of the technology we're deploying, particularly recently on SMS scams, you know, you saw the numbers earlier, so we're quite proud of the progress that we're making there. You know, the key challenge here and, you know, I report up to the board twice a year on cybersecurity as part of the, you know, our group risk portfolio of risks. You know, we still rate ourselves as red, fundamentally because the threat landscape is continuing to increase massively. We've done a lot of remediation, initially worried about the potential threat as a result of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Haven't seen anything on the back of that. Has nobody else really. They're so focused on using their cyber capabilities to support the conflict, but we've done lots of work to ensure we're ready if that landscape changes. You know, big, big, big challenge, but we're confident of our capability. Les, do you want to add anything to that briefly?
Les, what you should do, Les, is. No, go ahead. You know, we have this, you know, protect our data, help protect our customers' data, and then do good things with data, right? Les, just give your perspective on some of the things that you do.
Yeah.
I will spare his blushes. We have had an independent assessment to both benchmarks on some of his people. You'd expect when you're doing the kind of work that I inferred, we've got fantastic people in his team.
Yeah. Les Anderson, BT Group CSO. I mean, we have a philosophy, a principle, which is defense in depth at BT, but also it's cyber operations made surgical by data analysis, so we can have sharp, focused forensic operations. Because, you know, we've got a finite size of a team, and so we need to be, have indicators and warnings about where we should go. As part of that defense in depth, Howard's talked about red teams. Within my workforce, my colleagues, we have very experienced offensive security cybernauts. They don't simulate, they don't sample, they actually emulate and be a nation-state attacker, a serious criminal group, a terrorist, a hacker, or an insider, and then we let them loose on the BT enterprise. From the premise that I have to assume that we're breached.
I want them to go and find where the breaches are before somebody else, a bit nefarious, can find those breaches and exploit. It's probably one of the most powerful forces in the armory, as part of defense in depth. As Howard said, we have an amplifier. When red does well and against blue needs to do better. If blue finds red needs to do better. We have a different color called purple. Sometimes when the red team's doing its thing and finding alarming incidents, we have to sort of spawn a real incident and get two parts of those teams, some red, some blue, to actually do the remediation. That's the first part. The second part is, I mean, my heritage is from the security services.
Probably quite a few of you know that already. Embedding ourselves with agencies that Philip's talked about, but also with partnering with industry across many sectors to share information in a justified, proportionate, and necessary way, means that what we're trying to all collectively do is raise the bar of entry for bad people to do badness to whichever company. That's really, really important. I've got people who are embedded at the National Cyber Security Centre, so we can exchange in real time, at the pace of an incident, what's actually happening. The last thing I'll probably say is, all of what I've said is great, and it's necessary, and it's been very effective for BT, but we also need to do the basics really, really well, because the baddies are gonna go for the low-hanging fruit.
You have to be absolutely certain that you've got your defenses as good as they possibly can be.
I'm conscious of getting around other questions. I hope that gives you a pretty full answer. I think they said Carl next at the front. Thank you, Les. Get Carl the microphone. Thank you.
Thank you. Carl Murdock-Smith from Berenberg. Firstly, I just wanted to ask some follow-up questions on the diversity targets on page 2021. Simply looking at those numbers, there seems to be quite a discrepancy in the kind of ambition levels between Openreach and the rest of the group. Looking at the gap, for example, on the percentage of women between last year and 2025, it looks like for the rest of the group, you're targeting 11 percentage point increase, whereas at Openreach it's less than 2%. It's similar on ethnic minorities as well in terms of the rest of the group is far more ambitious than Openreach. I was just wondering if you could kind of talk about why the targets aren't quite as stretching for Openreach as for the rest of the group?
I might, if it's okay, just refer Catherine Colloms. Do you wanna come and take the mic? Catherine, who's the Corporate Affairs Director for Openreach, can probably address the Openreach part of that, Carl.
Hi, Carl. Look, look, I think we knew as Openreach when we started looking at these targets, we had a long way to go. you know, when we first looked at this, we had something like 3% of frontline engineers as female. We have a very large workforce, and that workforce has been accelerating as we've been hiring to fulfill the full fiber ambition. The workforce is nearly sort of 34,000-35,000 now. We are very ambitious about what we're trying to do at the front line, we have a target of 20% front line engineers, both on a hire basis, but also on actually physically retained in the business by 2025. We're making good progress against that. We were at 16% last year.
We'll outturn at sort of closer to 17%-18% this year. We're getting close to that 20%. We're actually, we're seeing a huge pipeline of women coming through. We've done some really good pieces of work, and research and campaigns to try and get more women coming through. We did a big campaign called Watch Me, which was really successful, targeting lots of different people on social media to try and think about a career in engineering. We've also changed our adverts in terms of the language in hiring. We did a piece of work called In Plain Sight, which basically looks at the terminology. Women are off-put by certain things that we put into our adverts. Women actually don't like the concept of engineering.
At least, you know, the way we describe being an engineer. It can be very appealing to some. It's, it's very appealing naturally to a male workforce. It's less appealing to women. Similarly, some of the stuff we talked about, you know, working at height, I think it felt a bit intimidating. Interestingly, when we did different job adverts, we saw hugely different uptake and interest in a broader and more diverse range of people, in particular, women applying. Look, we do have slightly different targets. We still have the same targets when it comes to senior management. We have a 50% target at senior management, and are closer to 35%-40% on that. But the front line's tough. We started from a sort of 3%, very low benchmark, we're actually doing really well in accelerating through towards that 20% target and hope to be above that before 2025.
Great, Catherine. Thank you very much. Sorry, Carl, can we let Carl do one follow-up, and then we'll come to the gentleman at the front table here?
No, it was actually a clarification. On the chart, it says by 2030, women will make up 13%. You mentioned 20% front line, 50% management. What's dragging it down to 13% as quoted on the chart? Thank you.
Let me come back to you, and I'll look at the numbers separately, Carl.
Okay.
The ambition is 20% hires and then 20% at the front line. Let me come back, and I'll square the numbers with you.
Okay. Thank you.
Sash, down at the front, please. Thank you.
Thank you. It's Andrew Lee from Goldman Sachs. Some really clear targets laid out in very succinct fashion today. One of the things we see, though, within ESG investments and ownership of sectors is that telcos under indexes within ESG portfolios, relatively meaningfully at the moment. I guess that may also be paralleled in perceptions about your ESG friendliness and your support to the, to the wider economy from governments.
I guess the question is how are you seeing the progress in what you're doing, in terms of showing to investors more broadly, and I'm sure there's some ESG investors in the room, and to the government that what you're doing can save energy in terms of the shift to fiber, for example. What you're doing can reduce the need to travel for people to do meetings, et cetera, and actually raising the profile of telcos intrasector, between other sectors, as an ESG-friendly sector.
I'll give it a crack. Maybe someone else. I mean, it's a really good question, by the way. We haven't quite got the perfect answer. I'll tell you why. What we did at the beginning was to say, you know, what kind of company do we wanna create and why? Our role in society, all the stuff, you know, we talked about a bit today. Hence the targets sort of appeared, right? The targets are calculated based on, you know, solid thinking, and they're very ambitious. What they have then done is they've created the exact conversation we heard from Catherine. I mean, the detail that she went into of the adverts, the work, so you're forcing people to do things differently because you're trying to achieve something that is very different to what you currently get.
I think the great news is we've got the targets, we've got the conversations, whether on diversity or sustainability, happening at every level, and everybody knows about it. It's a proper it's not sitting on the side saying, "Oh, we must do something about sustainability or diversity or inclusion." It really is embedded as a thought within our growth plan. That's the biggest victory. Now, we may not hit every single target, once we've got the plan and the philosophy and the principles and the stuff you've seen today, we're then more like delivery and then communication. I think you're right. I get, in my conversation with investors, it's not high enough up in the agenda. When it is, people feel slightly disappointed because we take 1% of electricity off the grid and we're actually very energy consumptive.
We have talked quite a lot about the new state. When you're in an all IP world, full fiber, 5G, no more copper, you know, we have 4,500 exchanges. We'll end up with 1,100, and we'll be losing. I mean, how is target is half the power, right? Whether we actually make half the power, I don't know yet. It depends on lots of things. Then you're into, you know, what we're actually selling and what we're providing, the routers, the mobile phones that we sell, you know, they have a footprint. So for, you know, we're doing more and more on the recycling, more on the concept of circularity.
As I said in my sort of remarks, it's really quite difficult, but doesn't mean we're not gonna have a really good go at it. I think we are seen, I think BT, by people in the telco sectors, reasonably forward-thinking, but the sector itself is still seen as a slightly disappointing sector. I don't think we can solve it all, but we've got a plan. Does that make sense? I don't know. Does anyone want?
No. Just wanna, Sara, I don't know if you've got the experience of seeing other businesses in other sectors. I know you've got a reflection on BT and this sector.
Well, I do think that there's a very substantial opportunity to explain to people why digitization is part of a more sustainable future. I think it is fair to say that we have not pulled together all of the strands of that conversation in a way that makes the argument compelling. I do think we have many of the pieces of the jigsaw to do that. As we get further on this road and our ability to demonstrate what we've done ourselves gets better, it's easier to have that conversation with others. It's difficult to do at the beginning, you've got to earn your stripes. I think, you know, it's a year since we launched our Manifesto. We are into that journey now.
One of the challenges, I think, for those of us involved in the DIS Committee and the conversations inside the business is how do we start to bring the evidence of what we've done together to make the argument more compelling and more holistic and more cohesive. Because I really do think that for all these reasons, about lower energy, less traveling, you know, more remote. There are lots of things in here that actually telco can be part of the solution, not part of the problem. That's a story we've not yet pieced together, I think.
I've got some questions on the Webex, I think. We could go to the first ones of those, please. If you could just introduce yourself in advance of the question, please.
The next question is coming from Robert Grindle from Deutsche Bank. I will unmute you now, Robert, please go ahead.
Yeah, thank you. Thank you for the presentation. Philip, you highlighted that BT has more customers on social tariffs than all other operators in the U.K. According to Ofcom, take-up is low, less than 5% of eligible customers. What do you think the barriers are here to take up, and what more can BT do to help? Thank you.
Yeah. Look, I think there are lots of different barriers. Many of them are to do with awareness, but also, you know, being completely frank with you, the GBP 15 product has a relatively low speed. What you've got to remember here, which is as it should be, 'cause it's a loss maker for us. I think there are a number of factors. A, it's awareness, and B, it's actually appeal. People, albeit on very, very challenging situations financially, still want to have great connectivity. Your broadband connection or your mobile phone is very, very high up on the list of needs. Look, we're working really hard to communicate it as much as we possibly can.
As I said earlier, we're the vast majority of social tariffs, and we're gonna keep doing more. At the same time, you know, just, again, economically, you know, there has to be a balance between what the cost is and the volume of people who are on it. If for example, let's say another 1 million went on it for the whole country, the pricing's unlikely to stay at GBP 15, 'cause it's just not economic for the whole industry to do. That's why we're making the biggest contribution. I say again, you know, we're bigger than everybody else combined. That is a financial contribution we're making because we think it's the right thing to do, but it has to be proportionate to everything else we're doing. We watch it very carefully.
Could we have the next question, operator, please?
Absolutely. The next question is coming from Siyi He from Citi. I will unmute you, Si. Please go ahead.
Vendors. I wonder if you can update us on where are we with the Huawei swap out for the mobile business? We recently have the FCC now banning the Chinese vendor equipment. I wonder if there is any risk that U.K. government could take a more cautious stance on the Chinese vendors, which could apply the fixed side of the business? If that's the case, I'd appreciate it if you can give us your market share of the Chinese vendor in your fixed broadband, and also whether you have any contingent plans if, let's say, we have a ban on Huawei or ZTE on fixed. Thank you.
I'm gonna ask Howard to answer this one. Howard?
Yeah. Thank you for that, I'll address both the mobile and fixed question. First of all, we don't have any ZTE anywhere in the BT network. However, we do have Huawei. we've been working really closely, as many people in the room here know, with government and NCSC on the right timescales for Huawei. You'll remember that we spoke about a GBP 500 million extra cost back in January 2020. you know, we are spending that money. We're still within that envelope. Now if you think about... you know, and the good news here is that I would say finally the Designated Vendor Direction came out two months ago.
Actually, you know, where we had worked closely with DCMS on some requirements and clarifications in that, pretty much without exception, they were adopted into that legislation. The fundamental requirements really fall into the access network and the mobile core. The first requirement is that for both the fixed network, for both the FTTP network and for 5G, that by July of 2023, we need to have less than 35% of customers or households served by that, those networks. We're on track to meet both of those targets. There is associated with mobile a second 35% target, which is that our traffic routed, our 5G traffic routed via Huawei is sub 35%. We've already met that milestone. From an access network point of view, we're in good shape to meet the milestones there. There is a further requirement.
Again, on the access network, which is that Huawei is removed by December 2027. We have, again, that in our medium-term plan to, you know, slowly. Having got to the 35% continue to then reduce, the number of Huawei cell sites that we have down to 0 by that date. Then the only other remaining area is the mobile core. We now have, just over 6 million customers that we've migrated onto a new Ericsson core. The date has now been set as December 2023. We're on track to meet that. We have an earlier deadline for 5G customers, on the Huawei mobile core. Now in hand, now clear what we need to do, and it's great to have that clarity and to reassure that it's within the financial envelope that we quoted back in January 2020.
Thank you, Howard. I think we've got one more on the Webex. Operator, please.
Our next question is coming from Chris Lewis, from Lewis Insight. I will unmute you now. Chris, please go ahead.
On the issue of inclusion, in terms of the way you interact with your customers, much of the industry focuses on mobile first, digital first, and yet this is excluded for many of your disabled customers and elderly customers. Can you talk a bit about how you're building inclusion and accessibility into every way in which you interact with your customers going forward?
Mark, do you wanna have a go at the inclusion question?
Yeah, happy to. I mean, I think the opportunity we've got is to make sure that we have. I mentioned in my section the work that we're doing internally to raise awareness and understanding of the breadth of the inclusion agenda amongst our colleagues and making sure that we're building that into our product thinking, our design thinking, and in the way that we operate internally. Inevitably, the stronger that we are internally with that type of capability and appreciation and empathy, the better our products will be in the way that we interact. We have for many years provided services to the partially sighted, to the hard of hearing and so on. That's been a core part of Telco for some time.
Increasingly, as we develop new products and services through our digital capability, through the product and design thinking, as I referred to, our ambition is to strengthen and make far more intuitive the way that we interact with customers. Being able to facilitate that more in a digital channel share than a more analog way, in many ways supports that ambition. It's not enough on its own. You've gotta have a variety of offering, clearly.
Chris. Hi, Chris. It's Philip here. For those who don't know, Chris is visually impaired. I used to play football with him and amazing ability to hit a football despite seeing far less than I could. He's better than me. Anyway, Chris, I think, you know, to your point for how we're handling... If, if you're driving at bulk customers, you know, in the consumer division, how are we thinking about those people who may have challenges, whether it be visually or hearing or other situations? We do spend a lot of time. Very happy to show you some of the things we do on that. Actually, you know, some of the technology advances we've got, like, I mean, Digital Voice, for example, is really, really good at helping people with all kinds of hearing challenges.
For a whole range of different spectrums, you can adjust Digital Voice very, very specifically to tune into specific hearing profiles. For the visually impaired as well, we do an awful lot to make sure we are able to help people as much as we possibly can. If there's anything you see we're doing that could be improved, please tell us, Chris. Because, you know, I've been around call centers and seen what we do, and we have specialist people who are targeted for groups of customers who may not be dealt with in the normal way with our normal products. Chris, feel free to come and have a look at that at some stage. I'm not quite sure who the expert is in the company, but we do have a big team who do that.
Can I just-
Yeah.
Interrupt? She's the Chief HR Officer, just to say a couple of words just to conclude this answer.
Thanks, everyone. Thanks for the great question, Chris. I mean, I just want to say a few words about D&I more broadly. You all know we have some incredibly ambitious goals in the D&I space. We did a thorough review earlier this year on what do we need to do better in terms of how we achieve those goals. One of the key findings is that our commercial agenda is not informed enough by our D&I work. All the fabulous network groups, of which we've got 11, we're not really driving the commercial agenda with those network groups. One of our actions for the coming year is to ensure that the commercial business case for D&I is really understood, and we pull from the network groups how we inform our products, our developments, our services.
Very good. Thank you. Have we got any other questions?
Thanks a lot.
This gentleman here. Could we get the microphone to the back there? Thanks, Sash.
Thanks. It's Adam Fox-Rumley from HSBC. I had two quick questions, please. Within the presentation, you gave a few examples of recent contract wins where I think it was your emissions commitments that you said made the difference. I'd love to hear if you can be a little bit more specific on kind of how you were able to differentiate and what allowed you to win in there. The second question was maybe a bit broader. Are there specific challenges related to audit and reporting of a lot of these metrics? I mean, you mentioned a supply chain that goes to 100 countries, but you operate in 180 countries. Does the audit of these ESG metrics vary in any way beyond the standard audit that you have to go through? Thank you.
Sarwar, do you wanna start with the global question?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when it comes to the recent contract wins, I think I'd call out two specific areas, actually. First one is around our commitment to 100% renewable electricity globally. That includes for our networks and data centers. In that particular case, as part of the overall contract development process, there was a specific question around whether we supply 100% renewable electricity. That contributes to a customer's Scope 3 emissions. Taking that into account, has an impact in terms of the organization's overall net zero ambitions. That, for us, was a differentiator. Second example is actually looking at the broader scope of what customers are looking at, particularly in RFPs, is not just climate.
What we're seeing is a focus in other areas. In one of the contracts, there was a big focus on EcoVadis. Being able to provide an EcoVadis rating and where we stood in the ranking, because EcoVadis takes a step beyond climate. It looks at things such as ethics, human rights, and our policies around that. That's another example of what customers are looking for and where it really makes that big difference in the contract space.
On the audit question, I'm gonna get David Viles to just come and say a few words. David, there's a microphone just at the front here, David. Do you wanna just sorry, just introduce yourself for the folks in the room?
Yeah. Hi, everyone. I'm David Viles, and my job is as Director of Risk, Compliance, and Assurance for the company. Just a couple of comments really about the data and information that we put out there. We do spend a lot of time internally doing checks and balances on data that doesn't have to be externally audited. You mentioned number of countries, for example. That data is checked by our teams internally to make sure that it is fair, accurate, reasonable, and presented fairly. Obviously, external auditors do look at other data that we put out and check it's not inconsistent with their knowledge, but they're not currently required to go through a process of formal auditing some of that data. It is becoming much more popular for people to, if you like, ask their external auditors to conduct that activity.
I'm sure you've all been studying the base announcements about how data that goes along with financial statements will probably need further looking at and more detailed auditing. I think at the moment, we do a lot internally. We don't hire people externally to do it, but the general thrust is that other data, ESG-type data, will be more formally audited by our external auditors over time.
Very good, David. Have we got any other questions in the room? Lady down the front, just two seconds, we'll get the microphone to you.
Thank you.
Thanks, Gaia. Hey.
Thank you. Gaia from BlackRock. I have a question. Sometimes there's a disconnect between what is going on at the ground, talking about employees, and what is being reported to the board. The question is: How is the board, to what extent is the board aware and involved into employee satisfaction, culture, engagement? We've discussed a lot about diversity and inclusion, but I think culture and engagement is quite important.
Thank you.
Sara, you should do that.
Yeah.
I'll have a go after you.
Okay. Yeah. I think the first answer to your question is very. I mean, it's an organization of over 100,000 people, there is a very, very close interest taken from the board to what's happening throughout the business. We validate that in all sorts of different ways. I mean, Philip does colleague board sessions. Quite often, usually I sit in, it's a very direct conversation with colleagues about the organization. We have a particular director who takes a focus on that. We visit outlets. We watch the engagement scores very closely, not just at an overall level, we dig into those by division, by cohort.
Howard and I are participating in a disability network session on Friday, where we talk to the individual network about what they see as the priorities for them and how are we doing about delivering. I think the answer is we take a lot of interest. We do it both by formalized metrics that come up to us, but also we delve sort of down into the organization. There are some things that culturally I think the organization wants to do more of. I mean, it wants to move from a position where it's a relatively long-standing telco with a lot of old systems and processes to a modern technology company that has, you know, greater agility and smarter working.
That's a big journey for colleagues, so it's very important for the business commercials, but we have to take colleagues with us on that journey. There's a lot of touch points to how we measure along the, along the way. Having worked in a number of FTSE 100 businesses, many of whom actually being very focused on, I would say BT is in a very strong position in the, in the priority it gives to its colleagues, and their voice around the board.
Yeah, I just, I'd, I'm glad. I think that is true. I mean, you know, BT has lots of challenges, and Sara mentioned a few, which is, you know, the transition away from history to the future and the best proxy for that is fiber and 5G away from copper and 4G. Also the big technological changes that were implied by Mark's presentation in Digital. We've got lots of challenges to get to where we wanna get to in future. In terms of the ESG agenda, if you put that as a category, you know, we take it very seriously. I don't think transparency of reporting is any problem at all. It's what we're doing.
Honestly, I really believe, and as Sara says, you know, we have this colleague board which we set up three and a bit years ago. You know, Sabine and Debbie are on it with me. Sara attends. Another board member, you know, is sort of the sort of deputy chair of it. It gets us straight direct to the colleagues, and it rotates every two years in terms of people. We hear directly, and it's really good. It's really good. We obviously have our union partners, so we hear directly from them as well. The engagement is really strong. The communication channels are very strong. I do a what's called PJ Live with all staff, we do every quarter, roughly, is it?
Yeah. Well, we want you to do it once a month actually.
Yeah. Okay. Once a month. I get... Actually, it's a pleasure doing it now after Monday. I... It's okay. I think, you know, we never walk away from having direct conversations with our employees, and we have all the reporting you'd expect on engagement. I know what the engagement over the last year, for example, has changed dramatically down because of the pay challenges. It's actually making the change we wanna make rather than the reporting that I think is the real challenge. I know everyone's nodding. We know what we wanna do, remember, we've got a lot of great people, but we've got a lot of people who are finding it hard to embrace the changes that BT needs to make.
What I'm trying to say to you all today is in this area, the Manifesto, we've got some really clear thinking. We've got great policies and principles and philosophies and targets and plans, which we've gotta execute really well, and we've gotta take our people with us, and that is not easy, right? Have we got any other questions in the room? Maybe at the front here.
Hi, this is Pilar Vico from Credit Suisse. I have a couple of questions. The first one is, you were mentioning 100% renewable electricity, what is actually the exposure you have to the overall energy in terms of renewable? In terms of the Scope three reduction, there must be a big number of suppliers, how are you actually measuring that they are fulfilling all the requirements, and how do you actually track this, and how restricted you are there? Are you planning to just get some of them out if they are not fulfilling this process? Fiber and 5G are more efficient, the traffic has been growing. Do you have actually an estimate on how much it's actually reduced while you implicit this traffic growth in it?
I'm gonna ask Howard, I think, to do two bits of that. Howard, I think, do you wanna talk?
Three.
Why don't you have a go at all three and see if he answers. One and three. one and three. Then Scope three, someone? Okay.
Okay, good questions. First of all, in terms of renewables, I mean, clearly, you know, we buy 100% renewable electricity. Of course, some of that is through purchase of REGOs, which essentially then get invested back into that. However, what we've also been doing significantly over the past year and a half is increasing the number of power purchase agreements that we have in direct renewable sources. I mean, some may know that BT, for a long, quite a long time, we've had onshore wind, you know, both in Scotland and Wales and other parts of the country. That was an investment we made some time ago, representing 12% of our annual demand, something like that.
We've continued to increase the number and quantity of PPAs. I'm not gonna say the exact percentage because we're trying to negotiate some more right now, and so I don't want necessarily to give away the total amount that we're looking at there. Then clearly, what we do is we then buy in the spot market, either season ahead, month ahead, or indeed day ahead. If you look for FY 2023, the year we're in now, we are overall, 85% already purchased in the spot market. Fair to say some of that was loaded into H1, 'cause the market has been a bit more volatile looking into what we're using in, you know, what's known as the winter season in the energy market.
Of course there, we've now got the advantage of the government support scheme, at least between now and the end of March. Interestingly, so far in October and November, the price, the spot market price of energy has been well below GBP 211 in the government support scheme. It has changed this week. We've had three days of prices up at GBP 300. It's still great volatility there. You mean, all you need at the moment is a day like three days ago with virtually no wind, and at 5:00 P.M., the spot price for 30 minutes was GBP 1,000. Good that we are well hedged against that risk. Next year, we've got more work to do. We're at 50% hedged, as we've already mentioned.
This is why we're continuing to look at the PPA market. Good to see that we've had clarity now in the autumn statement on windfall tax, because that's meant that generators who are looking at offering PPAs, we think will shift a bit more of their output towards PPAs, because overall it could reduce the windfall tax burden on them. It's a good time for us to go in and look at adding to that portfolio for next year. We're working through that right now. I've forgot what the third question is now.
Five, five, fiber optic.
Oh, yeah. Five. Yes. I mean, the interesting thing about both FTTP and 5G is, you know, they are far more efficient at delivering GB, let's say. Of course, that efficiency actually improves as you get more and more customers off the older networks onto the FTTP and the 5G. I think I shared some statistics in the networks briefing that FTTC is about 2.4 watts per line, FTTP is 0.3 watts per line. A big efficiency if we can move customers across from one to another. Same with 4G to 5G. I'm particularly excited about 3G at the moment. One of my most interesting statistics is if you look at a radio mast, 2% of mobile data goes over the 3G infrastructure, yet it consumes 37% of the power.
The faster I can switch 3G infrastructure off, and we're aiming to do that, starting in January 2024, then we start to shift that power onto that, or the usage onto the newer electronics. As, interestingly, as demand goes up, you get a better and better efficiency. We have a great track record of reducing our consumption, in our planning, we continue to see that, particularly on the back of legacy, you know, legacy removal.
Sarwar, do you wanna just talk Scope three?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the Scope three question is a great one actually. There is a lot of complexity associated with collecting accurate data for reporting on Scope three. We do a couple of things. The first one is we're reporting to, or we use the methodology from the Greenhouse Gas Protocol to develop our Scope three emissions. We're also reporting to CDP our supply chain emissions on a spend basis. Any suppliers can request that data from us, and we report that back on an annual basis. We are trying to move more towards a sophisticated model, where we're working directly with our suppliers and partners to obtain the lifecycle assessment data for each of the devices that they supply to us.
You'll see, in my presentation, you'd have seen, a percentage of the emissions comes from the customers using our products. We rely heavily on the suppliers being able to perform the analysis, be able to give us the carbon footprint data, and we're crunching those numbers and starting to develop more accuracy around that. In the future, the example I gave with regards to the energy and carbon dashboard, it'll be very much based on suppliers providing that data in terms of what's going into the embodied emissions and beyond that. That will give us a much more accurate representative of what our overall emissions are within the supply chain. Hopefully that answered the question.
Carl, I think you had a follow-up or another.
Thank you. Carl from Berenberg again. Philip, I bet you would've thought it would've come a lot quicker, the question about kind of Monday's announcement, but you set yourself up for it two questions ago. I thought I'd have to follow up. Yeah, if you could make a couple of words about the agreement, and also, I suppose, what the final pieces of the jigsaw were. Secondly, I'd also like to ask, I suppose one stakeholder we've not talked about too much today, are politicians. Obviously we'll have a general election, some point in the next two years or so.
The Labour Party's policy on telecoms could involve changes to your pricing, on a more mass market basis, both at a retail and wholesale basis. I'd like to understand what are your relationships like with politicians, particularly of the Labour variety. Thank you.
Sure. Well, you asked for a couple of words on the Monday's announcement. All good.
On to the harder question then.
No, all joking aside. Look, it's obviously been a very difficult time for everybody at BT through the last, you know, I guess eight, nine months because nobody wanted the situation we found ourselves in where, you know, our people felt the right thing to do was to withdraw labor and go on strike. It's obviously impacted the company in a number of ways, right? Yeah, we lost a few customers. That I'm not that worried about. We'll get them back. It's not a problem. Service went down. We'll get that back. I'm not too worried about it. I am worried a bit about the divisiveness that it's created in the company. You know, just, again, you know me all well. I'm very, hopefully, transparent.
It's disappointing that we've had this sort of divisive occurrence in our company. We need to move forward now and sort of get back to connecting for good. Through COVID, the BT Group did extremely well. The colleague base were 100% behind the purpose and what we were trying to do. The driving change was easier when you've got people who are marching all behind you. We've had a little stutter in the year, which is why that's important to solve it, right? It's not about the money. I've not been, just so you know, not in a disagreement about the pay. We just couldn't get to the same place on it.
What I've been trying to do, Debbie's been leading the charge for us, is to find a way of talking to unions about transforming the business for the future. You'll see in the announcement we made, it's all about how we create a really bright future for BT that embraces all the challenges, but also takes advantage of the opportunities, and there are plenty. That does mean a lot of change, right? So, you know, people look at it from a cost-saving point of view, and it's in the, in the announcement about GBP 3 billion of cost savings. Yes, that has some implications for people and jobs, but it's much more about getting into the growth areas and doing the things that we wanna do, where we're delivering for customers and not trying to stay too much in the past.
That's the main message that I'm really pleased about, is that with CWU, and I spoke to Andy Kerr last night, and with Prospect, Mike Clancy, there is a good reset where we say, "Right, let's move forward now." And I'm more interested in what we do on the change agenda than what we're actually doing on pay, but I am gonna talk about pay. That's really, that's the really good news. On pay, I'm also really happy where we are because what we've done, I think, is we've looked after, you know, the people who need it most, right? We know our colleagues are struggling, you know, and as everybody is. I'm delighted that we've come up with something which
Effectively, you know, brings forward a pay award that would've happened in April to January. let's say, "Look, it's really fair. It combines with a very generous one before, at the time, and then let's review again in September." I think everybody can see a situation where they've done well out of that. And, you know, we can afford it in the envelope of delivering our long-standing target of 7.9 billion EBITDA, right? I repeat on that's to be able to have a shot of that still, given all the headwinds everyone knows we've had, I'm really pleased about. look, it's great that we've reached agreement. It's gonna go to a ballot. I'm hopeful that will get approved, and then we move on to a more brighter pitch, hopefully.
on Labour, Carl, I've kind of responsibility for the political engagement. I would say if you think back to 2019 where the leadership of the Labour Party going into that election was looking to nationalize parts of BT, I think we can say it fairly safely we're in a much better place with Labour than we were under previous management. I think there is, which is different to lots of businesses I've worked for, unanimity across the political parties about what we are playing a significant part in, which is the investment in digital infrastructure. All political parties of every persuasion in every part of this nation want investment in digital infrastructure. I think when you...
When they all want that, I think, we are in a much better place than we might be in certain other sectors where there is more divisiveness across political parties about what you do with certain places, certain industries. I think we are in a pretty different place to that. I think when we've had engagement in the last two weeks with Labour, when they really think through the implications for investment and what they want to see happen, it supports a leveling up agenda. It supports a regional agenda. It supports an environmental agenda. When you put all those pieces together, I think we feel in a pretty good place, actually, relatively with the political.
Can I add one thing again, Carl? I reassure you, Ed is absolutely right. We, you know, we are engaging with them, obviously. I mean, we all can see where the wind is heading. In the conversations I've had with them, they are exactly as Ed described. I think that, you know, that they can see what BT's role is in the country and how important it is in the U.K. I think we've got a good track record of engaging with policy makers well over the last few years and getting the assistance and help we need to do the right thing for the country and all our customers. At the end of the day, when we look at the social tariff, which is what you're getting at, there was a comment about that.
That is not a policy. You know, that was a few statements, and I've specifically had a conversation about that, and I was really encouraged about the way in which they were looking around, not the social tariff, the digital infrastructure. The last point is what's a social tariff as opposed to start there? I think there's lots to happen on the conversations, but so far, you know, given where we were-
Yeah
3.5 years ago, where we were gonna be nationalized, we're in good shape with the Labour Party for now.
Have we got any other questions in the room? If we haven't, Philip, anything you wanna say in conclusion?
No. I look, thank you. Thank you for coming. Thank you for joining online. I hope we've given you a sense of how we're thinking about this particular part of the very important strategy of the company. You know, it is not a separate entity. It really is embedded in the strategy of the Group across all the divisions. I just like to say, you know, the commitment of the board and the commitment of the ExCo is 100%. I don't have anybody when I look around, the people I deal with who are not sure about what we've shown you today.
It's really the, you know, getting 100,000 people marching the same direction and grappling with some of the really, really difficult issues, which are not only of BT's agenda, but the wider societal issues that we all face. You know, we're committed to it. The nice thing for me is I can see it as a plan integrated across the whole company, and we just gotta put our foot on the gas and do more of it. I really appreciate you taking the time, engaging on what is a topic that I think is really important. Thanks for coming. Thank you.
Thank you very much indeed. The IR team will pick up any further follow-up questions, won't you, Mark? Thank you very much. Thank you.