Introduction

To be a successful business, it’s essential to be a responsible business, so we work hard to understand what’s most important to our stakeholders and to put corporate responsibility right at the heart of the way we work.

Standard Life plc 2009 Corporate Responsibility Report: 'Investing for our future'.  This is our fifth corporate responsibility report describing our corporate responsibility approach and performance during the financial year January - December 2009.  The report covers our multi-national activities, and performance data is presented for the group unless otherwise stated. The activities of our joint ventures are not included in this report.

In this report we describe our approach to corporate responsibility and how we govern and manage CR.  We report in detail on our CR priorities: Trust and Responsible Investment; Wealth and Well-being; Supporting Our People; Our Community Impacts and Our Environment Impacts. We have included new sections this year on how we engage our stakeholders and our process for determining material issues.  The online report provides more detailed information, all our key performance data and more in depth information on our approach to engagement, materiality and each of our material issues.

Consistent with last year we have presented a short summary of our corporate responsibility performance in the Annual Report and Accounts.  For an overview of our approach, activities and key performance information we have produced a short, printed summary report, which is available to download.

See ‘using this report’ for more information about navigating and using this report.  We also provide information about the scope of our reporting and how we decide what to include.

We invite you to have a look at our performance and our suggestions for the future, and tell us what you think.

Using This Report

We know that corporate responsibility is important to our stakeholders; however we think we can do better at communicating why it is relevant to our business, what we do, and help our stakeholders find the information they need.

Our online report contains a lot of information about our corporate responsibility approach and performance.

We appreciate that everyone’s interests differ and most people will only want to visit certain sections of the website. We have provided a number of different ways for you to navigate the report and help you find what you are looking for.

"We welcome the inclusion of clear and detailed accounts of stakeholder engagement activities"

Corporate Citizenship
7 April 2010
www.corporate-citizenship.com