Well, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Biffa plc's ESG webinar at the heart of the U.K. circular economy. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. First up, you'll be hearing from our CEO, Michael Topham, as well as several members of our executive and senior leadership team. After the presentation, we'll conduct a question and answer session through the webcast first, followed by the conference lines. To submit a question on the webcast page, please use the Ask a Question button, which can be found on the top left of your screen. If you'd like to ask a question over the phone, please press star one on your telephone keypad, and if you'd like to cancel your question, you can press star two at any time. Finally, I'd like to remind all participants that this call is being recorded and the recording will be available on our IR website later today. Without further ado, let's hand over to our CEO, Michael Topham, to begin the presentation. Michael, let's go over to you. Thanks very much, Helen, and good afternoon, everybody. Thank you to all of you for taking the time to dial into this webinar today. We've got a great attendance from customers, suppliers, investors and analysts and it's great to see such a broad range of stakeholders in Biffa listening in to this because we do have some really interesting and important topics to cover today. There are some new faces that some of you may not know. I imagine most of you from the investment or analyst community will know me. I'm Michael Topham, the Chief Executive of Biffa. I'm joined today by Roger Edwards, who's the Managing Director of our Municipal business, Gary Carvell, who's our Group Health and Safety Director, and Jane Pateman, who's our Group HR Director. Also with us is Richard Pike, our CFO, and he'll be available at the end to help ask your more difficult questions when you come in. I know what you analysts are like. We'll get into the detail of it. If you don't mind me, just to sort of indulge me for a moment, for those of you who do know as well, to just give a little bit of background as to who we are and what we do. We're a leader in U.K. sustainable waste management. We're a FTSE 250 business. We have revenues of about GBP 1.3 billion. We've been around for over 110 years. We're originally a business founded by the Biffa family, who were immigrants into London at the turn of the twentieth century from Sicily. We're now a team of 10,000 people across the country. Between us, we handle about 10 million tons of waste and recyclables every year. We've got a national presence, and we've also got a presence, a strong presence throughout the entire waste value chain. We organize ourselves into 3 divisions. Our collections business exists essentially to provide the most efficient low-carbon flexible collection services for waste and recyclables from businesses and from households. We then have a specialty services business, which is really a solutions business, serving customers with more complex waste needs, through the likes of redistribution of surplus products and more bespoke waste management services. Then we have our resources and energy business, which really is a treatment business, and it exists to maximize the recovery of resources and energy from waste materials. We're a business that combines purpose with profit. We sit at the heart of the circular economy. We're a business that supports sustainable manufacturing and sustainable consumption. That's really why we're here, and we do what we do because we see huge opportunity, but equally huge risk in waste, and a real urgent need to change the way people think about waste. That's our purpose. We try to do it right. We try to balance our ambitions to grow the business with the needs of our people and their safety, the needs of the planet, and the needs of other stakeholders, not least our customers. All of that's underpinned by a set of values which I think reinforce and sustain what is an exceptional team in our company. Our business model really reflects the waste hierarchy, and I appreciate not all of you will be waste nerds like me. With the triangle you see there is effectively the waste hierarchy, and it's that that's really driven all of waste regulation policy in the developed world in the last three decades or so. We have our efficient low carbon collections business I referred to earlier, supports the solutions that we then provide, hopefully to help move our customers' waste up that waste hierarchy and into ever better environmental outcomes. First and foremost, we try where we can to reduce waste, to stop it ever happening in the first place through redistribution services. Where we can't do that, we provide recycling services targeting the highest quality of recycling that can be done, which is closed loop food grade recycling. Where waste reduction and recycling can't be achieved, the next best thing is energy recovery, and we provide energy recovery services for that sort of waste, only then relying on safe landfill disposal for the more complex waste where those other alternative outcomes are not possible. The investments we've made as a business in the last few years, we believe uniquely align us as a business with the objectives of our customers. In simple terms, if we can move waste up that hierarchy, our customers win, both environmentally and financially, the planet wins, and we win as a business because we can add more value to the waste and we can hopefully drive a greater return for the company and for its investors. I'll now spend a bit of time on the four areas that have really been our focus of investment over the last few years, which is the reduction of waste, the recycling of waste, energy recovery, underpinned as I said by collection. I hope that when I go through them, it will bring to life some of those challenges and opportunities that we see and the impact that we're making. If we start off with surplus redistribution, the prevention of waste. There is. It's probably something that as consumers, none of us really are particularly aware of, but there is a huge amount of surplus produce in the system. And a lot of that surplus produce is fit for consumption, provided the right interventions happen in a timely manner, and it can be prevented from going to waste. We made an acquisition a year ago of a group called Company Shop Group, and that uniquely positions us as a waste business in actually being in the business of waste prevention. Company Shop is a business that's got a unique set of capabilities, very sophisticated business, and it partners with manufacturers and distributors of fast-moving consumer goods to identify where surplus happens and avoid it going to waste and redistributes it through a membership restricted retail model. It combines a commercial redistribution business, so giving a financial return to its supplier partners with a social enterprise, not-for-profit business that sits alongside it called Community Shop. What Community Shop does is it harnesses the value that exists in that surplus produce with the generous support of some of our big supplier partners, the likes of Ocado and Nestlé and others, and unlocks that value by then providing support to disadvantaged communities through a deeply discounted food store alongside a community cafe and a range of other support services. It's a really powerful model, and it's one that's self-sustaining through, as I said, the value that exists in the surplus that these people have. So far at the moment, Company Shop collectively as a group manages to stop about 30,000 tons of perfectly good consumable produce, mainly food and drink, but household goods as well, from going to waste. That's 30,000 tons of the sorts of things that we buy and consume in our house every year that otherwise would end up in the bin. That, in carbon terms, represents about 17,000 tons of CO2 saved, as well as supporting, as I said, some of the most disadvantaged communities in the country. If we move on to recycling, Biffa is a pioneer, a UK, in fact a global pioneer in closed loop food grade plastic recycling. We had a world first in recycling plastic milk bottles, HDPE milk bottles back into food grade plastic over a decade ago. As you'll all be aware, there's an urgent need to make plastic packaging more sustainable. There's a danger that people overly demonize plastic. Plastic is going to be an essential substrate as part of a circular economy because of the many properties it has to protect and preserve produce, but it has to become more sustainable. As a country, we have relied too much on export of plastic and also at the same time, downcycling of it. What we are focused on is UK food grade closed loop recycling, turning a plastic milk bottle or a plastic drinks bottle or food tray back into plastic capable of going back into that same product. If we can do that, not only can we preserve that raw material and save a lot in terms of CO2 emissions, but we can avoid having to export those jobs and those raw materials from the UK food system. There's really strong support for this now. There's whether it be the governments and regulators catching up with societal attitudes or not is a different debate, but either way, the government are really behind this. There's a plastics tax coming into force in on the first of April, so little under two months from now, which is a big financial incentive for the food industry to include recycled plastic in its packaging. There's also a tightening restrictions on export of plastic, and then there's huge commitments from the food and beverage sector in particular to not only reduce plastic but also to make sure that plastic packaging is recyclable and recycled. We think we've been biding our time in truth. We've wanted this to happen for about a decade, but the moment really is now, and we've really grown as a business, invested heavily into it. We've doubled the size of our HTP facility, and we're increasing it again. We've built a big PET recycling plant, which is now shipping food-grade PET into beverage bottles in the UK, and we also have a polypropylene recycling capability for food trays and the like. Huge commitment and a huge impact being made in that space. If we move on to energy recovery. Now, I hope it's clear from what I've said already that we are absolutely committed to and invested in waste reduction and also in recycling. It's very clear to us as a huge waste manager and responsible for disposal of hundreds, you know, 100,000 business customers and 2.5 million households that there's a lot of waste out there that still isn't capable of either being reduced or recycled. Until such time as we get to that endpoint, energy recovery is the next best thing for that type of waste. If we can use that waste as a fuel, we can avoid landfill and the very harmful methane emissions that come with that, and we can also by generating energy help to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels as a country in the meantime. Of course, as well for us as a big collector, it is our responsibility as part of the service we provide to make sure that we can find safe, secure, low carbon disposal for our customers' waste. To that end, we're investing in this space as well, we're investors in two energy from waste plants that are currently in construction, investing about GBP 75 million of capital in it. You'll see the picture on the slide there. That's our new Newhurst facility near Loughborough, just next to the M1 at junction 23, for any of you who know that area. We have another similar facility in construction, in North Cheshire, near Ellesmere Port. They will respectively be operational by 2023 and 2024. Once operational, they'll be providing enough electricity to power 170,000 households. Finally, waste collection. Now, it's, as I said from the outset, the unavoidable reality of waste, irrespective almost of what happens to it once it's in the bin, is it needs collecting. You'll be hearing from Roger Edwards shortly about the beginnings of our journey towards zero-emission vehicles, and that is happening. What we know is that's a long transition, and it's gonna take quite a bit of time, and it is essential in the meantime, for us as a country, to have the most low-carbon efficient collection system. Not only does that help the journey to net zero for the country, but it also helps improve air quality in urban areas, and it also helps with reducing traffic congestion. We're well on the way to creating the U.K.'s most efficient I&C waste collection network for industrial and commercial customers, and that's as a result of a multi-year strategy to consolidate the collection space. We've done many acquisitions, as well as grown our business organically. In doing those acquisitions, it's enabled us through the integration of the routing, to take hundreds of vehicles off the road and save thousands and thousands of vehicle miles, with all the benefits that come with that. Just to give you one example, we acquired a company called Weir Waste in Birmingham about three years ago. We were able to take out 24% of the combined fleet size of our Birmingham operations and the Weir Waste operations once we merged them together. That's, I think it was about 20 vehicles in total. Big, heavy emitting vehicles taken off the streets of a conurbation. There's huge environmental benefits as well as a good financial case for these acquisitions. That covers the four areas, key areas of investment for us. We've committed over GBP 400 million of capital into those four areas since 2019, and they're all part of what is an essential part of the big investment that's needed by the waste industry for it to play its part towards the journey to net zero. If I just talk a bit about our journey to net zero, and this really began for us two decades ago, and we in the last two decades have reduced our CO2 equivalent by about 70%. We've had great success. That's mainly been through this big shift that continues to this day to get waste out of landfill and into lower carbon forms of treatment and disposal. It's been a great success story, but there's still a long way to go. Our strategy, our sustainability strategy, which we launched 2 years ago, called Resourceful Responsibly, it's a ten-year strategy going out to 2030, and that includes a commitment for a further 50% reduction in our emissions through to 2030. That will be achieved by phasing out the purchase of diesel vehicles through sourcing all of our own electricity needs from renewable sources and further reducing the amount of what they call active waste, which is biodegradable waste into landfill sites, as well as a number of other key initiatives. That really sets us up well as a business to get to net zero, and we will come up with a further strategy, a more detailed implementation strategy for beyond then at the right time. What I will say, whilst there will be more to do after 2030, only 5% of our current emissions will require either as yet undeveloped technologies or offsets to get us to net zero. We think we've got a really, really clear deliverable path to net zero, and we're very focused on what we do in the next 10 years, which is when we're really gonna break the back of it. Now, we're well aware that there's more to sustainability than net zero, and for us, the materiality assessment we did a year ago was a very useful process, because it enabled us to get external input from you guys, to make sure that where we were thinking the priorities were and where you were well correlated, and therefore we're focusing our efforts on the right things. You'll see from this chart, we've mapped the material areas and particularly highlighted the 12 most material areas here. The rest of the whole of the detail is in our sustainability report and also in the appendices to these slides. Now I've just talked to four of them because they were four of our key investment areas. I'm now gonna be handing over to the team to cover a handful of other key issues, including zero emissions vehicles, safety, various people matters and also modern slavery, all of which are key issues that affect and are relevant to our business and our future success. The remainder of those twelve, to the extent they're not covered either by me or the guys, they are covered with some materials in the appendix, so you can have a look at those at your leisure. That's enough from me for now. I'll now hand over to Roger Edwards, our Managing Director of our Municipal Business. Good afternoon, everybody, and thank you very much for that, Michael. Yeah, as Michael said, we've got really ambitious decarbonization plans for our fleet of approaching sort of 2,400 of the HGV vehicles within the fleet to sort of 3,200 overall, as Michael said earlier. On that journey, we put a fleet of the first deployment of large-scale electric RCVs into our Manchester City Council contract. In collaboration with the city council, there's been over a GBP 10 million investment, both from the vehicle down in the infrastructure. This has really been a, I think, a groundbreaking path for the industry. That is the first large-scale deployment. It's, you know, these vehicles, the diesel vehicles currently only do around 3 miles to the gallon. As Michael said earlier, they do burn a lot of diesel. This will save us over 3 million liters, but it only represents about 1% of the entire fleet. There is still a long way to go, but I think when you're breaking new ground with anything, you also learn very quickly about what are the other benefits that you don't necessarily realize before you start, you know, running these in terms of any sort of scale. We've really seen the associated benefits around, you know, driving styles. The motors act as a natural speed retarder, and therefore, we've seen a huge reduction in brake wear, for example. We expected less oil consumption, but, you know, not just the economic benefits, but the environmental benefits of, you know, reducing consumption of brake wear is just one example. We're continuing to develop the electric rollout. We've got trial vehicles in both our municipal and our commercial operations, and this is really, I think, to continue to push the message to customers to prove the concept to customers still. There still remains, I think, range anxiety probably with electric vehicles. But we, you know, we've proved with our vehicles in Manchester, which have been running for more than 18 months now, conclusively that this technology does work. However, it's fair to say, I think at the moment, the economics don't really support the widescale rollout and adoption of electric vehicles yet. Although the situation is improving as we see more maturity in the supply chain. We also think that, you know, through either legislative changes or that of certainly in the metropolitan boroughs, you know, the ultra-low emissions zones coming in, which will naturally drive the economics towards low emission vehicles. Electric certainly is at the forefront at the moment. Having said that, we don't think that electric will necessarily be the solution for everything in the longer term. We are currently reviewing the opportunities with biomethane. As some of you may be aware, we have a large anaerobic digestion network along with our methane gas produced from our landfill sites. We have the opportunity to look at real closed loop opportunities, you know, to produce compressed natural gas and fuel our vehicles from that. We also think that particularly as the waste and resources strategy gets delivered and looks at mandating food waste collections from household the available feedstock, and therefore, a supply of biomethane will increase. We think that's you know, we're well-positioned with that with all of our facilities currently having you know, grid connections as well. Alongside that, we're also looking at the opportunities with hydrogen. This is possibly, I would say slightly further down the timescale, but we currently have a planning and permitting application in for our site just outside of Horsham, which some of you may know. I'm looking to produce around 850 kilos a day of hydrogen there, which I think it's fair to say the technology around the fuel cells, hydrogen fuel cells into refuse collection vehicles is not really yet a mature stage for us to deploy a full-scale opportunity. We're very much at the forefront of all of these technologies. We really see the opportunity, as Michael said, to you know to meet our ambition of not buying further diesel vehicles by 2030 is an ambitious target. We think we're well on the way, and we think we're well positioned as you know to take advantage as the technology improves. I think it's fair to say we think we will end up with probably a combination of the three technologies here to satisfy the needs of our customers going forward. With that, I'll pass over to Gary. Thanks very much, Rog. Welcome everybody. One of the things that for our industry was a positive benefit of the lockdown, if such a thing exists, is that for the first time in a long time, our industry was being recognized as a utility that's essential to daily life. And our people performed in some really difficult circumstances over a prolonged period. During that period, they really did perform amazingly well. They undertook a very difficult job in very difficult circumstances, and we are collectively really proud of the contribution that they made to the whole national effort. We can't ignore the fact that there are hazards and risks that are inherent to the waste industry. For example, on any given working day, there are many of our people working out of our line of sight, and that could mean that they're working on public roads or also working on customer spaces. That gives us particular challenges when it comes to managing those risks and those hazards. As a responsible business, we are committed to keep reducing instances of workplace harm, and we've done this consistently since 2012. As things stand, our LTI rate, our lost time injury rate, that's the number of injuries per number of worked hours, it's among the lowest in the industry, and it's half of what it was 10 years ago. That's a success. We're really proud of that, but it's come through 10 years of hard work. It's also come through 10 years of investment. We currently spend circa half a million GBP every year on health and safety training to make sure our people have got the skills they need to do their job safely. We've also spent circa GBP 3 million on equipping our vehicles with CCTV, and that CCTV has proved really useful in helping to raise standards of health and safety among the team. The other thing as well that we benefit from is purposeful leadership. As a leadership team, we are committed to reduce harm in the business, and we see that manifest itself through the things that we do as a leadership team on a daily basis. Now, Michael would have said already, and hopefully many of you will be aware, that Biffa's purpose is to change the way that people think about waste. I also have a secondary purpose here, and that is to change the way that people think about the people who collect the waste, because not everybody appreciates the work that we do. I'm in particular thinking here about those impatient motorists that we put into the DROPS category. What does DROPS stand for? It stands for Driving Recklessly On Pavements. We do see on a fairly regular basis, and more than I'd like to see, instances where impatient motorists decide that waiting two or three minutes to get past an RCV is too high a price to pay, and instead they'd rather drive on the pavement and put our people at risk. We've worked really hard over the last two years or so with key stakeholders. We've raised awareness with our customers, we've also engaged with local police forces, and we've run external press campaigns. This sits alongside delivering training to our own people so that they're able to stay alert to the risk and also able to deescalate situations. We like to think that because of, as a collective output of that, all of that effort, we've seen a circa 30% reduction in these instances in the last two years, and we're really proud of that. Now, there's another important issue associated with the work that we do that touches on members of the public, and we call this people in bins. It might sound obvious what that is, but let me just explain the dynamics here. In the... At the end of a night, certainly on a cold winter's night, to the homeless or to the reveller that's missed the last train or the last bus, our waste containers can look like beds. They can look like a warm and dry place to spend the evening. But the outcome for these people can be, as I'm sure you can imagine, catastrophic. We've worked, and we continue to work on a strategic partnership level with charities such as St Mungo's and StreetLink. What we've also done, we've also invested in training our people and the technology I mentioned earlier and looking at further technology to control access to our waste containers. Again, collectively, as a result of that effort, and we've worked across the industry on both of these issues with our peers, we've seen a 60% reduction in recorded cases of people in bins. It's a real success story, but there's still clearly more to do. Now, we are undoubtedly a people business. Michael's already said there are 10,000 people in the business, and that's 10,000 families that I owe a duty of care to. In our resourceful, responsible strategy, we've set out our commitment to care for those people. Because when it comes to their health and safety, we believe care is just as important as compliance. Because we want, we need our people to be and to feel safer together. Excuse me. Now, we want to try and improve outcomes across the business. Now, for us to do that, we believe that engagement is key because I don't believe that in terms of health and safety, people are a problem to control. I believe that our people are a solution to the problems that we face on a day-to-day basis. That's where our Safer Together Pact comes in. You may be able to see it behind me. Now, we developed the pact, the contract, if you will, alongside our people, and it came on the back of a significant engagement exercise, and it describes the health and safety culture that everybody in Biffa ascribes to. This is the way that we want things in Biffa to be. Next for us comes the step on that we're now describing as let's act on the pact. How do we bring this to life further so it helps us with our longer-term goals? Now, we are clearly in a hazardous industry. I have mentioned that already. In order for us to deliver consistent outcomes in a high-hazard, high-risk industry, we do need management systems. Now, I'm delighted to say that ours meets the rigorous international standard known as ISO 45001, and that's externally certified by NQA as a certifying body on a regular basis. Also for good governance, we need plenty of assurance that the systems are delivering the outcomes that we want. I'm even more pleased to say that only recently, the British Safety Council conducted a health and safety audit on Biffa, and they awarded us five stars out of five, and that's based on outcomes and also effort by the management team and the rest of the employees. They awarded us a score of 93% out of 100, which we are absolutely delighted with. However, I'm leveraging that so to make sure that the business keeps pushing. You may have seen in our sustainability strategy that we've set a very stretching target to reduce our lost time injury rate even further. We have a mission, and that mission is to continually reduce both the likelihood and the severity of workplace harm in Biffa. My plan to do that is to focus on three things, setting ever higher standards for us to achieve, to keep investing in the tools that we need to keep improving, and to keep on actively engaging and caring for our people. We believe that's the strategy that's gonna get us to where we need to be. Thanks very much for that. Thank you for your time. I'm now gonna hand over to Jane. Thanks, Gary, and good afternoon, everybody. You gave me a good intro there, Gary, to talk about people. I want to talk about some of the challenges and the changing landscape that we're facing at the moment, and then some of our responses to that. The labor market is probably the most dynamic we've seen for a number of years, and we probably all agree with that. Gary talked about ours being a people business, and it really is. We have a large directly employed workforce of over 10,000 people now, and 75% of those are front line. The vast majority of our frontline workforce is also unionized, and we have a couple of large collective agreements. Along with that there's a well-publicized shortage of HGV drivers, bringing with it pressures on pay and also the inflationary pressures that we're facing today. Add to that higher levels of absence due to the pandemic, and you can see that we've had some challenges. Alongside that, employee expectations are changing. They want more than pay and benefits. Flexibility and support for well-being is becoming more important, as well as what type of culture you have and joining a business with a purpose. For Biffa, we're also ever-growing, and we have the ongoing challenge to ensure we integrate acquired businesses well with the constraints around that, and that includes things like TUPE and embedding people into our culture. I'll move on now to talk about some of the relevant aspects of our people strategy. In terms to the response to the challenges in the moment, the pandemic is a good example of how we responded quickly to support our people. We introduced enhanced sick pay to ensure that colleagues were able to do the right thing and stay off when necessary without suffering financial hardship. Talking about how we're responding to that changing landscape. The market remains challenging, and we expect it to do so for some time to come. We've got a really good track record of industrial relations, but pay negotiations, unsurprisingly, are challenging. It's important we get the right balance between rewarding our people and remaining competitive and securing the right skills that we need for the future. We've declared our intent to become a Living Wage employer, and we're making really good progress. Last year, we introduced our own Biffa Minimum Wage, which is above national living wage rates. This year, we're going to increase that again to ensure that everyone in our business is paid above national living wage and to move closer to those Living Wage Foundation rates. Those below Living Wage Foundation are those employed largely in our municipal business that work on local authority contracts. All our new bids include a Living Wage Foundation rate option. In addition, we need to ensure our wider workforce terms and conditions enable us to attract and retain new talent and the skills that the organization needs for the future. Worth noting is the good progress we've made on our diversity in meeting our targets. We've met that Hampton-Alexander target for the board and direct reports to the executive team. We still have works to do in that area, and we're focused on making further improvements. We have an active Women in Waste group, and we continue to work at ensuring we have an environment with inclusivity at the heart of it. This includes ensuring our policy framework reflects this, and we've recently introduced attractive family-friendly policies with some innovative little twists in there, such as first birthday and first day of school off as paid leave for both parents. Engagement is really important to us and has doubled over the last 10 years. We're above the national average now, but we want to get to the top quartile. We're very active on the employee communications front. We've got our own employee communications app called Biffa Beat, and we've got a 70% take up. That really entails people using their own personal devices on the front line to sign into it. We think that's a good result. We also set up our Biffa Involvement Group last year, called the BIG Group, to engage more and more frontline colleagues and to get them involved in the business. They helped us with the development of our values and vastly changed the end output, which we're absolutely delighted with. We're really proud too of our well-being offering. We have a program called Energy that focuses on all aspects of well-being, from nutrition, to exercise, to mental health. In addition to that, we've introduced our Smarter Working program, supporting flexible working across the business. We engage with our local communities too, with various fundraising at local and national level. We sponsor WasteAid, a charity that supports and educates on waste management in less developed countries. There's more detail of that in the appendix. I now want to talk about modern day slavery, the risks around that and the responses. MDS, Modern Day Slavery, was the most highly rated in the materiality assessment. It's a real risk facing businesses like ours, particularly where we have unskilled labor, for example, in our MRFs. There's no room for complacency here. We've been working closely with Hope for Justice since 2015, and we're a founding member. Despite how active we are, we became involved in Operation Fort, led by the West Midlands Police back in 2016. Although no traffickers were found to have worked on Biffa premises, it is possible that some victims did. Not only are we creating awareness within our own business, we are really promoting it with suppliers both inside and outside our industry. We even have trucks with anti-slavery messaging in cities across the UK, and we sponsor the Ride for Freedom campaign. In Biffa, we have training programs, management awareness training, and we've also introduced in our policy, we've amended our policy to include support for potential victims of trafficking. We've introduced Freedom Champions who are trained to spot the signs and be a safe point of contact for anyone who has any concerns. Our goal, of course, is to maintain zero tolerance, but also to play a key role in promoting the issue outside of Biffa. I'm gonna hand back to Michael now. Thank you. Thanks, Jane, and also Roger and Gary. I think there are areas that, you know, probably don't get the attention that they deserve from stakeholders, so I'm glad that we've had the opportunity to talk to you about them. Now, before I wrap up, I just want to talk a little bit about how we've set ourselves up around all of this. It's all very well to have a nice plan, but I just wanna give you some reassurance about how seriously we're taking it. I mean, from a governance perspective, we're now well established with a board sustainability committee and an executive sustainability committee that are tasked with, you know, the monitoring and the development of the plans respectively. We've got our ten-year strategy that I referred to earlier, our 2020 to 2030 strategy. We've made sure that we've got complete alignment between our investment strategy and our sustainability strategy, and I hope that was clear in what I said earlier. The four big areas of investment are effectively four key planks to our sustainability strategy. We've ensured that our incentives are aligned from top to bottom, all the way through the management structure with them, the balanced plan that I talked about earlier. Finally, our financing now is almost entirely sustainability-linked. Some of you may have seen the communication yesterday about the private placement issuance, which now means all of our core areas of debt financing have got embedded sustainability targets within them. I should say across all of those things I've just talked about, none of those were in place three years ago. I think we've come a long way and hopefully got this really well embedded into the way we're funded and the way we act. I guess no presentation on ESG would be complete without a slide full of a load of logos, and we're no exception. I should say, I mean, I think we are very well covered. We've done a lot of work on this area. We've got good alignment on reporting, good set of accreditations. The things I'd probably draw your attention to most on this slide is the improved ratings that you can see there on the right-hand side of the slide, which are a testament really to not only the actions that we've put in place, the plans we have, but also the reporting and the disclosure around it. I think we're in a good place, but there's always more to do. That's it really for me. I think we have, you know, we've got a really important role to play, and I hope that comes across. We take our responsibilities really seriously. We're investing at pace because I think all of these big challenges are big opportunities for us as a business. We're in a great space and there's some, you know, we can do really well if we make the right calls and invest wisely. We're really determined to build on the strong track record we have in terms of emissions reductions in particular, but also some of those other trends. Really equally determined to do right by our people and the communities that we operate within. That's it, conscious that we need to make time for questions. That's the end of the presentation. I'll now hand back to Helen and we'll open it up to questions. Thank you. That's great. Thanks, Michael. First of all, we're gonna turn to the webcast in just a moment. For those of you on the conference line, as a reminder, if you do have a question, if you just press star one on your telephone keypad, we'll come to you after the webcast questions. Okay, the first couple are coming over to you, Michael, and both of them are from Richard Fowler from Raymond James. The first question is about food grade plastic recycling. Richard asks: Can you give us some more detail on where your stock of product comes from? I'll just pause there and allow you to answer that one before I ask the second question. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Yeah. I mean, we're almost completely self-supplied in our Biffa Polymers business from the rest of Biffa. That could be, in some cases, it's either plastic that's been fully collected and processed all the way through. We're almost doing the full chain from your doorstep all the way back to the plastic going into the dairy or whatever. In some cases, it may be collected by other operators, and then we're doing the sorting, separating the plastics from the glass and the metals and such like before we then take the plastic into our polymer reprocessing facility. It's one of the great advantages we have as part of the scale of the business is that control of feedstock that gives us the sureties with which we can invest. The output goes typically to either big blow molding packaging businesses, so ALPLA would be one. It's a big international group. Or some of the big brands or the big dairies themselves secure the controlled material, and then they issue it to their packaging partners. We've got a good end-to-end, you know, secure supply chain. Well, thanks, Michael. Richard's second question is around improvements in sustainability. The question is: Would you agree that improvements in sustainability while producing positive outcomes and potentially even some cost savings will, in the round, lead to an increase in costs? If so, how are you able to pass on these increased costs? I mean, I suppose at one level that's true, but I just don't really see this as a headwind for us. I see it as more of a tailwind. Roger gave an example of, you know, when you'll get something like a regulation around ultra-low emission zones coming into a city, that forces the industry to respond. Of course, it may put more cost into the services we provide, and it may also put more complexity into it, but that's a service that customers will therefore pay for. It's the same goes for exporting. Too much plastic was sent to China for too many years because the environmental standards and what have you over there were cheaper, and they could compete to take material away. Those days are over now, and there's a commitment to that, you know, dealing with our own waste at home, and that just creates opportunity for us. You know, and for us, outside of that space in the commercial space. We know from the partnerships we have with our big corporate customers that they want quality, they want transparency, they want to know that you're dealing with modern-day slavery, you're dealing with safety, you're dealing with vehicle emissions, and they're prepared to pay for that. Thanks, Michael. Jane, I'm coming over to you next. Again, a question from Richard Fowler from Raymond James. Can you tell us what percentage of our workforce is unionized? Hi, Richard. Yeah, thanks for that question. I suppose there's two answers to that. How many do we think are actual members and you know what part of the organization is unionized? In terms of the percentage unionized, we're looking at about 80% of our organization is subject to trade union agreements. For the membership, that's more difficult to tell. We don't really have a lot of information, but we think that about 50% of the population that's unionized are actually union members. Great. Thanks, Jane. Richard. We've got Richard Pike, CFO on the line. I'm gonna come over to you next, Richard. This is a question from James Beard at Numis about CM. Can you give us an update on customer acceptance testing progress at CM, given that we are less than two months from the introduction of the plastic packaging tax? Hi, Jane. I'm not gonna give a full trading update today, James, in terms of, you know, various aspects going on because we've got a scheduled trading update on the ninth of March, but our plans are progressing in line with our expectations. Great. Thank you, Richard. Michael- Can I just add one comment to that? Some people will have seen our press release, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, about our partnership with Esterform, which is a packaging company making beverage bottles, and such like. There's some public evidence around the progress we're making. You know, as of now, we're sending food-grade plastic to Esterform. They, in turn, are making carbonated beverages for the likes of Tesco, and they're on the shelves in supermarkets. So you can read into that what you will, but you know, we've certainly achieved that sort of level of status. Well, thank you. Michael, I'm coming over to you next for a question around Veolia and Suez from Colin Smith at Arden Partners, who asks, "Were you surprised that the CMA referred Veolia and Suez for phase two investigation? How do you see the potential outcomes affecting your competitive position? I'm probably not surprised because they're two very big, well-regarded businesses. I think you have to divide the industry into different subsectors and look at different customer sets. I think in the commercial space, the combination of Veolia, Suez is probably not a particular concern. For big municipal authorities who are procuring long-term, complicated treatment contracts, Veolia and Suez are, you know, two big operators, as are we, and maybe there's some concern there around a reduction in competition. I'm not entirely surprised, and I'm sure they'll get to some sort of outcome on it, whether there may have to be some measures. You know, I think they'll get it done eventually. Thanks, Michael. Roger, I'm coming over to you next, for a question about our municipal division. It might be that a couple of other speakers want to dip in on this as well. This is a question from Verity Mitchell, who's one of our analysts, from HSBC, who asks, "I'm interested in the relationship with the municipalities. It seems that the ERCV was a policy for Manchester which might not have delivered the lowest cost, given that you're not rolling these out to your I&C business. A couple of questions here: Can you compete more sustainably here and still be commercially successful?" And the second question is: "Also, given your commitment to pay more than the living wage and your preference to use ERCVs. I think the first point there to state really is that Manchester City Council is a very proactive partner with us, really wanted to demonstrate their commitment to a lot of their you know their commitment to carbon reduction, and therefore, effectively, we're supportive of you know moving ahead with this. It wasn't necessarily a policy decision. It was proof of concept with us. They took the decision, the strategic decision, this was the right way for them to go. We're looking at you know continuing to look at further vehicles on that contract and others. Not necessarily policy, but I think all of our local authority partners who pretty much have all signed up to the climate emergency will be looking at ways to, you know, reduce their carbon outputs. As I said, the sustainability, the financial sustainability, I think will improve, RCVs or other technologies over time. Sorry, the second question was around? Given your commitment to pay more than the living wage and your preference to use ERCVs. Our preference is ultimately driven by the council in terms of ERCVs. We don't want to make ourselves commercially unsustainable and if a client isn't ready to make that transition yet, then we won't necessarily force that upon them. Clearly, we want to remain competitive. In terms of being ultimately a Living Wage Foundation employer, we're trying to work with local authorities to get them to recognize the value of paying a sustainable wage and really trying to advise clients and influence clients prior to their tender documents coming out, so it doesn't put us at a commercial disadvantage. If I can just add to that. I mean, it for us, it's not only the wrong thing to do, but it's bad business to get into a trap of paying unsustainably low wages to drivers on behalf of our municipal client. We need to when we're gonna be bidding for new contracts or even to rewin existing contracts. We will insist on there being a reset to a realistic level to make sure that the workforce is on a sustainable basis from a pay perspective. Because otherwise we'll be the ones who are left with the wage risk. It helps nobody in the long run. It'll make it difficult for us to provide the service and of course make the contracts more commercially challenged. That's clear. We've had situations where we've effectively refused to bid because the authorities have not been prepared to make that shift. Brilliant. Thank you both. The next question comes from Ole Henrik Bang-Andreasen, and I do hope I've pronounced your name correctly, and sincere apologies if I haven't. The question is about the export of waste, and so I'm gonna come over to you next, Michael. What do you expect in terms of new flow on the PRN from next year? Do you expect it to be harder to export waste? And what will this mean for investments in the U.K. waste industry, and how are you positioned to benefit from this? I think we're very well positioned to benefit from it, in particular in plastics, where we've got U.K. leading plastic recycling capabilities. The more difficult export gets, the better for us. I think that's the trend we're seeing. There's a lot of complexity around regulatory change that's coming. For those of you who don't know, there's a legislation called Extended Producer Responsibility coming in. It's been delayed actually, but it will be coming in certainly in the next probably two to three years, which will put more cost onto the people who put the packaging onto the market, such as the retailers and the big brands, to help ultimately fund the recycling of that packaging. That will replace the existing PRN system. One of the flaws of the PRN system is that it doesn't discriminate between export and domestic reprocessing, and there's been many cases where it has sort of as an unintended consequence. It's almost ended up making export an easier measure. Certainly one of the positions we've given in the various consultations to government is to say, "You've got to fix that. You've got to make sure that there's a level playing field. You've got to make sure that, you know, that that policy supports your overall direction of travel in terms of making sure more waste gets processed here at home, so we can keep control of those raw materials and those jobs. Thank you. We're gonna stay with you for a moment, Michael, for another question from Verity at HSBC about energy from waste. Viridor are looking at carbon capture on their energy from waste facilities. Is this something you are looking at to reduce your emissions? Yeah, I mean, I think it will become over time it'll become an essential part of energy from waste. We're obviously an investor. We're not the actual operator of the facilities that we're developing. That'll be Covanta will be operating them on our behalf as an investor. But you know, yes, it will become a key feature of it. Also there'll be certain locations will be better suited to it initially. So we're quite fortunate, we believe, in the case of Protos because it's based by Ellesmere Port and it will probably be relatively easily accessible to the network there to access the carbon capture and storage under the Mersey Basin. That could be one of the pioneering areas and that creates great opportunity for that facility. Then as the technology improves, it'll undoubtedly be rolled out to all of the energy from waste facilities in the country. Thanks, Michael. Jane, I'm gonna come back to you for a question on temps, and this comes from Béryl Bouvier di Nota from OFI AM, who asks: Can you please disclose if you have any temps at any particular time of the year? Do you face difficulty to increase workflow like drivers, for example? Yeah, we do use agency temps sometimes just for sort of temporary fill-ins where we may have people off sick or so on. Obviously, we have used agency temps while we've had the shortage of drivers. We also do temp to perm from time to time as well. We use it as a flexible workforce, but not as, you know, a sort of part of our kind of permanent workforce. Thanks, Jane. Richard, I'm gonna come back to you for a question around polymers and pricing. Do you have long-term agreements with polymers customers? If so, is pricing at pre-agreed levels or at market prices? In the majority of the polymers business over the last few years, we've moved essentially to a cost-plus model. There are multi-year agreements with our various customers. Our longer established facility in Redcar, near Middlesbrough, where we process significant amounts of HDPE, which is essentially our plastic milk bottles back into recycled pellets that go back into plastic milk bottles. Those relationships have been in place now for several years on a cost-plus basis, and we supply into 85% of the dairies in the U.K. On the PET side, which we've more recently commissioned and operating, and this answers earlier question about customer acceptance is coming through. This is where customers are working through their own approval process to actually accept those materials as being appropriate for their intended purposes. We will have the same model basically. As new customers come on, they will be on a cost-plus basis as well. Thanks, Richard. That question was from Oliver Saunders from BlackRock. Thanks for that, Oliver. The final question I've got here at the moment on the webcast comes from Martin Young at Investec. I'm just gonna stay with you for a moment, Richard. To what extent do you have timing differences between when you are exposed to input cost pressures and when you can pass these through to the customer base? Do you have scope to raise prices outside of your normal cycle? Thanks, Martin. There's inevitable, you know, time differences. I mean, obviously we've had, you know, driver pay issues earlier in the year. We've had ongoing increases in inflation across the course of the year, and we're not pricing up every single week. I mean, we did price up to our customers at the start of January for some of the customer base. We further price increase coming through in April to a further number of customers, and we'll see how things progress during the course of the year. We've got decent pricing flexibility, but inevitably there's always some degree of time lag as we talked about at the half year and in this regard. Thanks, Richard. That's the end of the webcast and questions for now. If I could just pass over to Jenny, our operator, to tell us if there's any questions on the conference line, please. Okay. We'll take our first question, and that's from Michael Harlow of BNP Paribas. Please go ahead. Everyone, thank you so much for the presentation. That was very, very useful and very interesting. I have a question regarding a piece of news flow from the U.S. market, namely the listing of that integrated online waste management platform called Rubicon. I hope I'm pronouncing it right. I was wondering if you could give me your view on that. Is it something that could happen in the U.K.? Do you see this as being potentially disruptive? Is there no risk whatsoever? I hope you don't mind me asking a not easy question. Thank you. Hi, Michael. Yeah, thanks. I mean, we're well aware of Rubicon. We've watched them with interest for several years now. I mean, really, I think it's effectively a tech-led broker business model, and there's been brokers in the waste space in the U.K. for decades. It's also a slightly more enhanced ERP type system for, in particular, kind of municipal collections. We thought long and hard about that question. A lot of people ask us, you know, "Is there a disruption gonna come? Is there gonna be an Uber of waste? Will you guys, as the owners and operators of trucks, get sort of, you know, disintermediated?" We've looked hard at that many times, and we're very, very clear in our mind that nothing trumps really, really well-established networks and scheduled routes with good route density. It means that we can fill up the trucks really quickly. We can do it on routes and on schedules that suit the customers because they know when we're gonna come. And it just works. That's what we're committed to. We provide really good commitments around all the things we've talked about today, actually, around safety, around emissions, around modern day slavery. You know, if you've got a red truck turning up, picking up your bins across the country from Biffa, that's what you get. If you go to something where it's just a tech business pinging an order to somebody and you don't know who is picking it up, you lose all of that traceability and all that surety. Yeah, I don't wanna be too dismissive of them or wish them well, but it's not something that we're lying awake worrying about at night. Thank you very much, Michael, for your answer. Much appreciated. There are no further questions on the conference line. Okay. Michael, we have just had one further question from Verity. If you don't, we have got two minutes to spare. Verity. Come on, then. Thanks very much. It's about anaerobic digestion, so I think it's coming to you, Michael. For anaerobic digestion, do you have capacity to take more food waste or you have to invest more? What is the level of capacity usage currently across your fleet? We're relatively full actually, but the market overall could sustain more volume. It was a market that was probably slightly overbuilt a decade ago in the expectation that more municipalities would roll out food waste collections. They never got given the money to do it, and only about half the households in the U.K. have food waste collections and not that many businesses. Quite a lot, but not that many. The market will definitely be able to absorb a fair bit more, and that will indirectly help us 'cause it'll enable us to shrink the radius of where we're bringing the food waste from, and it'll help drive up prices. Now, I know I've been saying that for a few years, and it hasn't happened yet, but I do think it needs the government strategy that I talked about earlier and the I didn't mention it specifically, but they're gonna mandate the collection of food waste from all households and all businesses across the country, and I think that really will provide the stimulus for it. Then in time, hopefully, we can add more capacity into the network, us and others. Yeah, hopefully long-term, things will be relatively positive for that space. Thanks, Michael. That's it on the web conference. Great. Well, we're bang on the hour, so that worked beautifully. That's what you get with Biffa, you know, and all over it. Thank you very much to Jane, to Gary and Roger for their contribution. I hope you found that useful. It's certainly been great for us to talk about some of the topics that we feel so passionately about. Grateful to all of you for your ongoing support in whatever form of stakeholder you are in business, but in our business. Thank you very much and have a good day. All the best.