For us, corporate responsibility is all about living our values, making a difference and showing the way to better business. Our priorities are to respect our environment, support our community, behave with integrity towards our clients, intermediaries and suppliers and offer our people a great place to work.

At Grant Thornton, we volunteer our individual and collective time, skills and expertise to charitable and community organisations. Our current charity sponsorship is with Cancer Research UK and by the end of 2012 we hope to have raised over £125,000 to help them in their work to beat cancer. We also support global causes with an annual Overseas Volunteer Programme. Last year saw three projects: in the Himalayas, Jaipur and the Galapagos Islands.

And we’re pretty active environmentally too. As part of our commitment to being a responsible business, we have measured aspects of our environmental footprint, and have targets for improvement. This year we aim to further reduce our use of paper by 10 percent, reduce car emissions from business travel by 10 percent and to purchase at least 50 percent of our stationery from green suppliers.

In addition, we’ve implemented a series of waste management strategies that promote the reduction of waste and increased recycling – and wherever possible, we also purchase reclaimed and reclaimable products.