Responsible Business Report 2020

As a far-sighted and people-focused organisation, NATS has for many years provided an in-house Occupational Health Service with Aeromedical expertise to all our employees across the UK and international offices.

Our people have benefited from an embedded and dedicated team who provide advice to individuals and managers, and we work closely with our Quality, Health, Safety and Well-being colleagues.

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, our highest priority has been the health and safety of our workforce.

The challenge for the NATS Pandemic Working Group, which I co-chair, with representatives from all business areas, is to provide clear, practical advice to the Executive on reducing potential health risks to employees while maintaining a critical 24/7 operational service. Not only the immediate health concerns, but longer term as we adapt to seismic changes in the aviation industry, ways of working and daily life.

We are fortunate to have a strong network of responsible people who follow advice to look after themselves, their colleagues, families and the whole community.

To date we have had a very low case rate and we will do everything we can together to maintain this.

Our wellbeing has always been important to us but during this period it’s been at the forefront of everyone’s minds.

At the start of lockdown, since when all non-operational employees have been working from home, we have run weekly online Wellbeing Wednesday sessions giving people a chance to voice their concerns or simply say how they are feeling.

Each week our Human Factors and Quality, Health, Safety and Wellbeing teams have produced informative visual guides on a wide range of topics such as video call fatigue, men’s health, wearing a face covering, and provided advice and tips on the optimum desk set up and the importance of taking regular breaks.

We also compiled a Wellbeing Risk Profile at the beginning of lockdown, to help understand the various factors that could impact individuals’ wellbeing and the risk mitigation measures we needed to put in place.

And at our operational sites we have been on hand for our operational colleagues who have worked throughout, assisting with their health and wellbeing and reinforcing government guidelines.

NATS delivers world-leading services every single day thanks to a diverse workforce – including black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) people, foreign nationals, religious minorities and white minorities.

This year we established NATS’ multicultural employee network, globeAll, which aims to elevate the esteem of multicultural employees and their allies through networking and educational activities, and seeking to attract, engage and nurture multicultural talent. This is a resource that employees of all backgrounds can seek support from on multicultural inclusivity.

In our first six months we have attracted members from across NATS’ sites, business areas and seniorities; we have a programme of engagement with senior leaders on delivering practical change and supporting them with resources that increase awareness and confidence in multicultural inclusion.

Given the issues highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement this year, diversity and inclusion has rightly risen up the corporate agenda across the world, and we are excited about the opportunities to create a multiculturally inclusive workplace.

We have continued to focus on the new and existing diversity and inclusion challenges we face and how best to tackle them in the coming months and years. We have made progress in raising awareness, reviewing processes, enhancing our employee networks and encouraging debate about inclusion and diversity. However, there is still more that can be done to change our culture and demographic. 

Well before the pandemic we had committed to enabling agile working, empowering our people to work where, when and how they choose. While the pandemic has given this priority a kick start, we plan for this to be the new normal in future.

With a recruitment freeze in place, we are using this time to review and improve our recruitment and selection processes to ensure they are inclusive and fair, considering aspects such as unconscious bias, consistent assessments and scoring frameworks, how we promote people and, of course, our job adverts.

We have expanded our learning offering, including rolling out our virtual “inclusive teams” training which has been well received across the business. Our recent voluntary redundancy programme and restructuring gives us an opportunity to create more diverse management teams, and we have developed a set of principles which our business leaders are encouraged to use to help consider a more diverse group of talent for management positions.

This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity – we will never have another chance like this to use our innovation, our expertise and our flexibility to change and adapt to deliver lasting improvement. The pressures of our normal operation always constrain our ability to try out new things, but we have the chance to do that now. So, we’re looking at how to make the most of the opportunity of uniquely low traffic levels to investigate efficiency improvements and try out different procedures safely.

This is a truly exciting opportunity to see what we can do differently. The Government is clear on environmental priorities and that the aviation industry must start doing things differently, rather than just talking about it. NATS has made its own commitment through Sustainable Aviation to achieving net zero CO2 emissions for the industry and we are committed to building back better.

We announced in December 2019 our ambitions as a business to align with the UK’s net zero emissions target by 2050, with proximate goals for 2030 including a 35% reduction in emissions. Our strategy also includes applying the principles of sustainable consumption to our purchasing and use of natural resources, as well as ensuring our business practices contribute to the protection and enhancement of our natural world.

These goals cover aspects of our operations that are within our control. Our fourth goal addresses the collaborative challenge of playing our part in contributing to the net zero future for aviation through our influence on airspace CO2 emissions. The work undertaken in our contribution to the Sustainable Aviation Carbon Roadmap, as well as ongoing work within the coalition, is a key part of achieving this goal.

The roadmap concludes that together, air traffic management and operational improvements could equate to a saving of over 7% of UK aviation CO2 emissions by 2050, against a 2010 baseline.

However, this is only for UK departing international and all domestic flights, whereas we at NATS look at CO2 emissions from all flights within our airspace boundaries and have seen significant savings regarding how we manage arrivals.

Since 2008, we have made a saving of 7% in CO2 emissions on average per aircraft. We had originally set a commitment of 10% reduction by March 2020. However, this was revised when some of our airspace modernisation plans were delayed due to uncertainty around airspace change policy and increased concerns about the negative environmental and social impact from aircraft noise. While we missed our very challenging 10% target, I still think we can be really proud of this achievement, a huge amount of work was undertaken to try and help fill this gap.

Our relationship with the renewables industry is very positive, but that’s not always been the case. Back in 2000, wind farm developers and their plans were a big risk to our operation, as ours were to theirs. Turbines show up on radar and can be mistaken for aircraft, and they can also mask the presence of aircraft, with the obvious potential impact on safety. It was standard for us to object to windfarm applications to give us time to consider how - or if - we could deal with them. Developers were frustrated by our reluctance to agree to conditions that would secure planning permission.

As developments increased, spurred on by the government’s drive for green energy, we realised we needed to put more work into finding ways to mitigate the impact and that’s how we’ve worked together with the industry in recent years.

We’ve been working with radar manufacturers on systems that can almost eliminate false tracks and increase detection of aircraft where there are large concentrations of wind turbines, bringing successful co-existence a step closer to reality. We’re now seeing those being adopted and installed, such as at Edinburgh Airport where its new Terma radar can mitigate against the impact of the Tormywheel Wind Farm, allowing for the release of 34MW of clean energy. Similar radars are now in use at seven other UK airports for windfarm mitigation and NATS is now looking to install a new 3D Indra radar to release further MWs of renewable energy.

Over the last 10 years NATS has assisted and helped find solutions to enable over 5GW of Onshore power and over 8GW of Offshore power, more than enough to power greater London. This innovation and collaboration is key to working with the Renewable sector given the Government targets to have 40GW of offshore power by 2030 and 1 GW of floating offshore power by 2030.

Building on our activities across the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we undertook the Business in the Community (BitC) Responsible Business tracker this year, focusing on three categories:

• Net zero carbon
• Diversity and inclusion
• UN Sustainable Development Goals

BitC recognised the work we have done through our Responsible Business programme and helped us identify further opportunities to exceed our benchmark group average. Highlighted strengths from the tracker report included:

• Our commitment to reducing our own direct CO₂ and working with other aviation stakeholders to reduce airspace CO₂ emissions
• Engaging with colleagues across the business training and, in partnership with Trades Unions, agreeing a respect at work policy which shows our commitment to creating an inclusive and welcoming work environment
• Our awareness of the SDGs throughout our submission and supporting documentation was commended.

Since March, our major suppliers have played a significant role in helping support our actions to manage our finances and protect our business as we respond to the coronavirus pandemic. Their response has been a real testimony to the emphasis we put on building strong relationships and we have worked closely with suppliers, particularly small and medium enterprises, to ensure that our changing requirements don’t jeopardise their businesses.

Our value ‘we work together’ extends to our supply base and we have worked hard to put in place a Supplier Relationship Management programme and collaborative supply chain capability that is certified to the international standard for business collaboration (ISO 44001). In the coming months we will also be hosting a Q&A session with our major suppliers, as well as a series of workshop sessions for groups of suppliers that work across similar areas of our business.

At the start of 2020, our customers were anticipating record summer traffic figures. The impact of the pandemic is now continually changing the landscape for our customers. The decline in traffic from March had a devastating impact on airline revenues and fleet sizes, and consequently the need for job losses. The optimism of a small summer recovery in traffic was quickly supressed by quarantine rules and the impending second wave in Autumn.

In June, we met with our customers to discuss our interim Service and Investment Plan for 2020. We presented our response to the pandemic and this was well received by our customers. As the uncertainty of traffic recovery over the next few years continues, we are ensuring continued engagement on our future technology and airspace programmes. We conducted another engagement session with customers in late September to set-out our plans for consultation. Two further engagement workshops were held in October and November, which provided customers with options on our airspace and technology programmes, feedback from which will contribute to our next Service and Investment Plan submission to the CAA.

Our employees continue to support charities and causes they care about via our Payroll Giving scheme. 12% of employees donated £210,500 via the scheme and we’ve maintained our Gold quality mark award first received in 2017. Our Footprint Fund, a grant scheme for which employees nominate their chosen charities, also donated £31,000 to 66 local charitable groups. This funding supported projects such as Parkinson’s Disease research trials, maintenance for blood transport bikes to support the NHS, local hospices and palliative care units, a new library for a primary school, accommodation for the homeless and support for local Samaritans groups.

Charity Focus activities run by employees in our centres at Swanwick and Whiteley exceeded fundraising targets of £50,000 for Hampshire & Isle of Wight Air Ambulance and £70,000 for Cancer Research UK Southampton Research Centre respectively. We also donated £25,000 to Historic Croydon Airport to celebrate ATC100.

We continued to support Dreamflight through 2019 who offer once-in-a-lifetime trips to Disneyworld for children suffering from terminal illness. Since 2002 we’ve waived air traffic control fees and given them priority to low altitude routes helping the flight to avoid areas of turbulence.

Our employees have done some amazing volunteering over the last year, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our staff have helped the NHS with volunteering such as an emergency medical technician working alongside paramedics, delivering blood and other urgent medical consignments as part of SERV Wessex and using our peer support training to help NHS staff, as well as numerous local community groups.

Others have put their sewing talents to work by making kit bags and scrubs for the NHS and making masks to raise money for Naomi’s House Hospice. There has also been more unusual but equally important volunteering in the form of offering socially distanced beekeeping to help schools that remained open for key workers and vulnerable children, and providing extra fostering and training for Canine Partners, which transforms the lives of people with physical disabilities.

The very week before lockdown began, the NATS Jon Egging Trust (JET) [ensure link is inserted] volunteers held a Blue-Skies 2 session with young people from Robert May’s School, Odiham. Introducing some new leadership tasks to the group in their second year of the Trust really did test them and although some struggled with some of the tasks, they all enjoyed themselves and managed to create some amazing machines from the tools we gave them. Although our activities are paused currently, we are actively planning to resume just as soon as we are safely able to.

The pandemic has disrupted the life of every child in the UK, and for many who were already struggling at school before the pandemic, going back to school is a huge challenge. To help support students during this time, JET has launched a new online resource area on its website, with activities to inspire students and give them some light-hearted food for thought focused on life skills of the JET Blue Skies youth programme; Communication, Teamwork, Goal setting and Resilience.