Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Biffa's half year results presentation for fiscal year 2022. The results will be presented by Michael Topham, Chief Executive Officer, and Richard Pike, Chief Financial Officer. The presentation will last around 30 minutes, with time at the end for questions. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session through the phone lines, and instructions will follow at that time. Participants can also submit questions through the webcast page using the Ask a Question button. I would like to advise all parties. This conference is being recorded. I will now hand over to the CEO, Michael Topham, to open the presentation. Please go ahead. Thank you very much and good morning, everybody. Thanks for taking the time to join us this morning for this presentation of our results for the first half of the year. It's the 26 weeks to the 24th of September. The usual format today, a quick overview from me before Richard takes us through the results, and then I'll pick up on giving an update on where we are strategically before we open up to your questions. If we move on to the summary slide, please. We're really pleased with the first half of the year that we've just been through. I'm sorry, I haven't seen. Can we have Slide 4 please for the summary. Slide 5. Thank you very much. We're really pleased with the first half of the year we've just had. It's been a really strong recovery from the pandemic, and we've restored our profitability. Our adjusted profitability for the first half is almost exactly the same as it was two years ago, which I think is a great achievement considering where we were when we started this half of the year. The building blocks are in place for us to now resume that long-term trajectory of profitable growth that we've had since we listed the business five years ago. Now, the last few months, as we all know, hasn't been without its challenges. I think we've certainly not been immune from those challenges, but I think we've dealt with them very well. While we're not out of the woods, we've certainly seen a good degree of stabilization in some of the supply chains that we depend on in our business in the last few weeks. Also, front of mind for everybody, I'm sure, will be the question as to what extent inflation is affecting our business. Again, we're not immune from inflation in our business. What I would say is we've got a very good degree of pricing flexibility across most of our business models, and that gives us the ability to mitigate that. Again, we'll talk about that a little later on. Those of you who follow us closely will know we've got a very busy growth agenda, and we've made some big significant commitments into our four key growth areas. We've continued that pace over the course of the first half of this year. During the last six months, we've invested over GBP 150 million. That was mainly on the transaction that we announced and completed with Viridor, as well as some other investments. Indeed, we've now invested GBP 340 million in those growth areas since our capital markets day a couple of years ago. Which I'll remind you, at that point, we set out an ambition to invest GBP 250 million. We've substantially overperformed in that in a shorter period of time and done that during the pandemic. It's been a busy but quite transformational period for us. I'm particularly proud of the progress we continue to make on our sustainability strategy. We have a great plan, very ambitious, but I think what sets it apart from many that you would see is it's very, very actionable, and very integrated into what we do as a business. We're getting on with making it happen. We've had some notable successes in the last few months, which I'll pick up on later as well. If we wrap all of that up together, the confidence around the profitability that we delivered in the first half and the platform for growth in the second half, strong performance in terms of cash and debt, which Richard will take us through, all of that leads us to a place where we're very, very happy to confirm our full year guidance and also the timing is right now to restate our dividend, which we're doing with an interim dividend of GBP 0.022. With that, I will hand over to Richard to go through the results in a little more detail. Richard, you're just on mute. If you could just unmute your line, please. I do apologize. Thanks, Michael. Good morning, everybody. Can we move to Slide 7, please? Thank you. Just reiterating Michael's introductory comment, it's difficult not to be pleased with the first half performance and how we've recovered from the pandemic. As I'll draw out in the next few slides, I&C volumes have recovered really strongly. Most of the business is back to sort of FY 2020 levels. Later in the presentation, Michael will talk about how we're feeling about the various growth projects that we've invested. As expected, the collections performance has offset the reducing contribution from landfill gas and the inert areas of the business. You can start to see the feed through of our growth investments in the numbers, albeit there's still much to come in terms of delivery of the acquisition synergies and the contribution from the Company Shop and Polymers areas of our business. All in all, we're feeling really confident about the delivery of the full year forecast. I should note here that we've taken GBP 62 million of adjusting items through the numbers in the first half. In particular, we have a GBP 25 million impairment of Company Shop's goodwill. I'll come back to that in a couple of slides just to explain the reasons. Coupled with our profit performance, we've had really strong cash performance during the period, particularly down to cash collections, and this has led to leverage being below the levels that we flagged at the time of the Viridor acquisition. Again, I'll come back to that a bit later. The confidence, as Michael said, from the recent performance, coupled with our forward projections, has resulted in us reintroducing an interim dividend at this point and committing to paying a progressive dividend moving forward. Next slide, please. Touching on collections first. Basically, the key things I want to draw out are in terms of volumes, if you recall that, you know, as recently as March, we were down 80% of financial year 2020 levels when we went into lockdown. We're really pleased with how those volumes have come back, and we exited the quarter, sorry, the half at around 103% of FY 2020 levels. The underlying business is in great shape, and I'll expand on that in the next slide. The acquisition integrations in both areas. Sorry, please go back a slide. Acquisition integrations are both on plan, but the municipal business is also in good shape, despite facing the same sort of supply chain issues that the I&C business is facing. Next slide, please. Looking here, the left-hand slide shows you actually how we've progressed in terms of volumes. I'll come back to this in a second. Just touching on, you know, the factors that are playing into, you know, how the business is performing, why I believe it's in great shape. You can see two bullet points. We've had a really strong period in terms of key account wins and renewals. We have had, as Michael said, you know, significant supply chain challenges during the period, particularly in terms of driver pay. But we've dealt with that, and those costs are in the room rate of our members. We'll be implementing price increases in the second half to offset those cost increases. It's fair to say that, you know, we have struggled with service, compared to our normal very high levels. Our customers have been very understanding, to be fair. As you can see on the slide, our churn levels are very low, and actually lower than where they were in FY 2020. Coming back to the volumes, what you can see here is that recovery from the 80% levels in March steadily through the first quarter, and then we remained relatively stable from May onwards at around 102, 103% of FY 2020 levels. What you can also see on the dotted line is actually how strongly we're performing versus last year, you know, in terms of comparative period. Next slide, please. Coming on specialist services. The legacy Viridor specialist services business has been renamed Industrial Services, and that business continues to go from strength to strength, and particularly noticeable at the key account wins this year. As if probably not more notable, some really key retentions during the period. The Company Shop hasn't had a strong period financially. It's still suffering from the after effects of COVID, and that business has been impacted by supply chain with footfall levels, basket size, and inevitably margin. We have seen positive signs in recent months in terms of improvement in active member levels, but we've still got plenty to do over the coming months to get business performance where we want it to be. As a result of this underperformance, we've had to book an impairment charge. You can see on the slide, about GBP 25 million. This has been required under the accounting standard IAS 36. Although this is actually at odds with our view in terms of the potential of the business, the accounting standard doesn't allow us to take any account of our store rollout plan, which, as you know, is key to you know, basically our plans for that business. We're not allowed to differentiate between temporary or permanent impairments. Next slide, please. Finally, in terms of running around the businesses that come to resource and energy, and I'm gonna touch on three things really here. Firstly, in recycling, I should say that the Redcar business continues to perform really strongly. We commissioned the new investments in Seaham and Washington in line with plans. The only fly in the ointment is that in respect of our recycled PET production, although production is great and the product quality is exceptional, it's taken longer than we expected to go through the customer approvals process for these new products that our customers are incorporating into their bottles. As a result of which our recycled PET sales of pellet have been lower in the period and hence we've had lower profitability. On the flip side, if you look at the MRFs, they're doing fantastically well. We've had really strong operational performance during the period, and that coupled with elevated quantity prices mean the MRFs have returned to profit at an EBITDA level. Next area I just wanna touch on is in waste. As you know, we closed our largest landfill site in Northeast London in May of this year. Despite that, volumes have held up really well. We've been able to implement price increases and the performance of that side of the business is ahead of where our expectations were. We're actually now transporting nearly 1,000 tons per day from our new rail hub in Barking up to Lincolnshire, and that's actually facilitating much more construction-related waste product being retained within the Viridor landfill portfolio. The final thing I just wanted to touch on was landfill gas. It's performed in line with expectations. I just wanted to touch on the fact that we've fixed our prices in full for the second half at around GBP 61 per MWh. Next slide, please. Final couple of slides from me, and I'm gonna cover these relatively briefly. I touched on this in the first slide. Very pleased with cash performance, particularly in terms of cash collections in the first half. As you know, we managed our receivables base very strongly during the COVID impacted period, and continued to do that since. As a result of that, next slide please, our leverage is lower than where we flagged when we did the Viridor deal. If you recall, on a bank covenant basis, I said I thought we'd be around 2.6x-2.7x geared, and actually we've exited the first half at around 2.4x. The only other things I want to say is we've continued to make further progress in our broader funding strategy. As I said earlier in the year, we've done our debut issuance in the private placement market and raised GBP 150 million together with MetLife and Pricoa. We've converted our bank revolving credit facility to a sustainability linked instrument, and we've also changed the covenants in that revolving credit facility to a post IFRS 16 basis, which essentially adds 1x turn to all of our covenants. On that note, I'll hand back to Michael. Thank you very much, Richard. If we move to Slide 15 please. I hope you recognize this slide, but I thought it was a useful start point just to put things into context. This is a slide that we showed at our year-end, and it seeks to just put the services infrastructure that we're providing into the context of the waste hierarchy and really what we're trying to deliver for our customers. In simple terms, our objective is to try to help our customers to provide better solutions for their waste, which is effectively moving waste up this waste hierarchy. In doing so, it helps them deliver on their environmental performance, and that's a really important part of their sustainability objectives. It helps them save money, and it also, as you can see from the numbers on the right, helps drive a greater contribution into Biffa, because of the increasing complexity of the services we provide. It starts at the top with redistribution, and this is effectively waste prevention. This is helping partners to avoid waste from happening in the first place, and finding alternative outlets for it. For waste that can't be avoided, the primary focus must be recycling, and in that, we focus predominantly on closed loop recycling, which helps to deliver a circular economy for packaging in particular. As we move down, for waste that can't be either avoided or recycled, the next best thing is energy from waste. The science is very clear on that. It helps reduce the dependence on fossil fuels, providing the source of energy generation as well as an essential sanitary service and essentially helps to get rid of that type of waste. Then finally, and only finally, if none of those solutions are available, do we provide landfill services. That really is focused around waste which is neither reusable, recyclable, nor does it have energy value, which means it's mainly construction-related. It's contaminated soils, process residues and such like. All of this is supported on the left-hand side of this chart you see by the most efficient low-carbon collection operation that there is in the U.K.. That's the framework and that's what we're trying to achieve. As we can move waste up the hierarchy, we can have that triple benefit of a financial return to our customers and environmental improvement, and also driving shareholder value for the group. If we move to the next slide, this just seeks to put that into context as to what we've done to bring that into reality over the last couple of years. We've successfully identified and deployed capital into those four areas of reduce, recycle, recover, and collect. As you can see in the numbers, it adds up to a total capital commitment of about GBP 420 million, and that's since the capital market study referred to, which is just a couple of years ago. As I said earlier, we've invested just over GBP 150 million in the period, and we've taken a total commitment of GBP 340 million. We're well on the way to delivering this plan. The difference between the 340 and the 420 is about GBP 80 million still to spend. That's predominantly on our equity contributions into the energy from waste plants that we're building and also for some more plastics development. They're the main capital commitment still to come as part of this plan. If we move on to Slide 17, I just want to delve into more detail as to the progress we're making on each of those four areas. If we start at the top of the hierarchy, top left, we've got in waste reduction. It's in the Company Shop business. Now, Richard explained the trading performance has not been as we would hope, but what I would say is there's some very encouraging signs in recent weeks, and our long-term view of the business remains extremely positive. It's got a unique and compelling business model, which fits really well with what we're trying to achieve for our partners. Delighted with the business. But yeah, no denying that the trading performance is not exactly as we would have hoped in these early months, but it's been quite disrupted by the recovery period from COVID, changing shopping habits and also challenges in that supply chain. I guess you know the evidence of our commitment is in the ongoing store rollout program. There we see the opening of the Dudley store just after we bought the business in March, Southampton during the summer. We've got another store opening in a couple of weeks' time in South Yardley in Birmingham. Continuing that rollout program at pace. As well as that, delighted that we've been able to open another Community Shop. That's the social enterprise business, which supports some of the most economically deprived communities in the U.K. and we're pleased to be able to open up that facility, principally in partnership with Ocado and along with the housing association in the North West. That's in Halton in the Wirral. That's been a great milestone for the business. Really promising business, really delighted with it and great plans for the future, but certainly not quite where we were hoping for things to be in terms of trading just yet. Moving on to plastic recycling in that Biffa Polymers business. As Richard said, really good progress in the last six months. The two sites that we were building through the pandemic, so that's the Seaham PET plant, that's food grade PET, and the Washington plant, which is predominantly focused on post-consumer polypropylene packaging, so things like yogurt pots, food trays and such like. Both of them fully commissioned, both operating as we would have hoped. Washington now is effectively in full commercial production and is on business plan. As Richard said, Seaham's just taking a little bit longer. We're at very, very advanced stages now on product acceptance. We've got commercial terms agreed with all of our key partners that we're gonna be providing the food grade material into. In case you weren't aware, the Plastic Packaging Tax comes into force in April. That's certainly focusing the minds both on us and our partners to make sure that we've got an established supply chain there, which will help our partners to deliver on their ambitions and also to avoid having to pay the Plastic Packaging Tax. Excuse me. The next project we announced in our polymers business was to further extend our high density polyethylene business. That's predominantly milk bottles. We've got two lines operational, which as Richard mentioned, have performed really well, and are very, very stable assets. They're based in Redcar. We announced that our third line would be in Washington, and we've had the opportunity come available to us in recent months actually to locate that third line also in Redcar. Some land has become available adjacent to our existing operations, so we've changed tack. We're now building it adjacent, which has got a whole raft of operational benefits, so we're pleased about that. It does mean, though, because of the required civils investment, they're just gonna put a little few months on the program. It'll now be more like the end of FY 2023 that it'll be ready. A few months delay, but for very good reason. That program is now up and running and a big focus for the team. As I said before at year-end, there's lots of other things that we're interested in the polymer business, looking at other types of plastic and also looking at expanding our capabilities in those core areas, in particular potentially to support the advent of deposit return schemes which are coming throughout the U.K. and will provide an increased supply of material. Lots more to come and very pleased with the progress in our polymer business. Moving to the third layer of the hierarchy to energy recovery. Just to remind you, this is our investments in two joint ventures with Covanta Green, which itself is a joint venture between Covanta, the U.S. energy from waste business, and the Green Investment Group, which is a division of Macquarie. We're building in Newhurst, which is just next to the M1 in Leicestershire. If you're aware of it and you're driving up the M1 at junction 23, you'll see our plant, which is right adjacent to the M1. It's looking fantastic. I think on the front page of this deck you'll see the latest picture of it. The picture you see there is Protos, which is the other plant which is in North Cheshire near Runcorn. It is, it's about a year behind, so that's just starting to get above ground, but again, making great progress. Really pleased so far with the construction projects. As everyone will know, these are long-term projects, they're complex and, we're certainly not complacent, but so far so good. Excuse me. In terms of, you know, the outlook for these as operational assets or as business assets, there's some pleasing developments and trends. I guess first one to say is that we're seeing strong demand from third parties to help secure the uncommitted element of the waste supply. Just to remind you, Biffa will provide 60%-70% of the waste for these assets and the rest is to be secured in the marketplace. There's good demand from prospective local authority customers and also from other waste partners. They're principally some longer-standing construction and demolition waste partners that we've worked with for many years. Nothing to announce yet, but certainly some good encouraging conversations there, and we're looking to get that capacity buttoned up relatively soon and certainly ahead of operations. Another thing that we are actively looking at and have got, I suppose, increasing confidence around is the ability to increase the capacity of the plants. That's actually the consented capacity. It wouldn't have any associated CapEx, so it potentially represents an upside for those facilities if we're able to do it. It's not certain yet. There will be consents to be achieved. We think that there's a good degree of confidence we'll get that. Again, hopefully a good upside for us. Then the final thing is we're all obviously aware of what the energy market is looking like at the moment, and it's not just the short-term market. The long-term forward market considerably strengthened and should that persist when these facilities become open, that will also represent a potential upside. Lots to be positive about on those facilities and it can't come soon enough the day when we're able to get them operational and start providing a disposal point for our non-recyclable waste. Finally, last but by no means least, in collections and in particular our M&A strategy for collections, it's been a very busy period. We concluded the Viridor transaction at the end of August. You'll be aware that we also did a relatively significant regional transaction at Simply Waste Solutions about a year ago, in October last year. Between the two of those businesses, that brings into our I&C business around about GBP 100 million in revenue, so that represents about a 20% increase in the size of our I&C business. The name of the game here for these transactions is integration. It's about getting them into our platform, into our network, onto our systems, rerouting trucks, closing down duplicate locations where they're not needed, and so on. That's a big undertaking. We're good at it. We've got a good track record of it, but there's a lot of work involved. In the case of Viridor, just to remind you, the transaction brings about GBP 85 million of revenues, over 20,000 customers, across 15 depots. We're targeting about GBP 10 million worth of synergies. It's very early days. It was only first of September that the Viridor team joined Biffa, so early days, but really pleased with the progress. Integration is progressing at pace and is going well. The response from the Viridor team has been excellent. So far, so good. Simply Waste, very much the same. Just to remind you, this is around about GBP 30 million in revenue, predominantly West London and Thames Valley. The business has traded very well. Very pleased with its performance, not least given the London bias of the business, and you know, certainly more hit than other areas geographically by lockdowns, but a really good, strong performance for the business. We took the decision to delay the integration once we knew the Viridor transaction was happening, and now its integration is taking place effectively as part of a bigger integration program alongside Viridor. But again, it is looking good. And similarly, absolutely super team that responded really well to coming into Biffa. Finally, and I know it's always a question that will be asked, given that we've had a strong track record in the business, is what does the pipeline look like? When are you gonna do the next deal? We do keep reminding people it's not that easy, and we do need to do these integrations well. What I will say is, you know, our appetite for further acquisitions is undiminished. As we made clear at year-end, these two transactions together are a big undertaking. It's important we get them right. There is a good pipeline of opportunities, and as soon as we feel ready, it shouldn't be too long, we will start to look again at future opportunities. Hopefully that gives you a good flavor of how we're feeling about those four key areas. It's been a really busy period, and there's lots and lots of progress. I think, overall, I'd say very pleased with the half year report card. If we move on to Slide 18, I just wanna touch on a few other bits which they're in danger of going unmentioned. You know, it's quite right that the investment-led growth warrants the focus and attention and a big focus on that. Just some really good news stories around some of the both organic growth in the business and also some of the more innovative things that we're looking at. I just wanna give you just a bit of a flavor about some were mentioned earlier by Richard. Again, we have a very impressive list of new wins in the corporate I&C sector. I won't read them all out, but you see some good names there. A testament to our reputation and leadership position, our national coverage, which drives not only service quality, but also efficiency and the most sustainable model, and also our leading provision of management information and sustainability agenda. I just think we are the absolute go-to partner, you know, at the corporate level for I&C customers, and that's proven out by that list of wins. Similarly, municipal, really pleased with how we've performed, as Richard said, through the pandemic, but also the more recent months with some of the supply chain challenges, and a really strong reputation there, and pleased that we've been able to win a new contract, which is a joint contract between Stratford-upon-Avon and Warwick Council. That's a good major contract that we'll be mobilizing next year. In the innovation space, there's lots of things we're looking at, lots of, as you'd imagine, digital things, which are kind of potentially can really add something to the way our sector works. We've made a decision to put a modest seed investment into one particular startup. It's GBP 0.6 million, so not a particularly big investment, but it's a business called LoveJunk, which is a digital marketplace. It's an app-led marketplace which seeks to connect producers of waste. It's more kind of one-off, unexpected, reactive waste. It's things that households would do or it's things that may be capable of refurbishment or reuse, tries to connect them with the best possible, either waste disposal or upcycler that that are available. There's some potential synergies with the Biffa network in terms of disposal outlets and such like. It's also a great opportunity for us to learn a bit more in that space, as to how we can use that kind of asset-light marketplace model in waste. An interesting development for us. Moving on to Slide 19. As I said at the outset, we're really passionate about sustainability strategy. The whole team at Biffa is really committed to delivering it and to making a difference. I think we understand the importance of waste as a sector to helping to tackle climate change and in particular, Biffa's role within that sector as the leading name, as one of the biggest businesses in the sector. You know, I said it a lot before, but waste has got the potential to cause great harm, but equally the potential to be part of the solution, if done right. I hope we've made that clear in all the things that we're doing and where we're investing. It goes beyond that. It's not just about investing in infrastructure. It's about how we run our business, making sure we're a good neighbor, we're a good employer, and we're a good member of the communities that we operate within. I'm not gonna go through the whole plan again and certainly not repeat the points on there that are related to investment. There's a couple, just a couple of things which I thought were quite interesting and maybe often don't get the focus they should. They're both on our landfill site. Just wanted to give a little bit more detail about what we've done in East London. We operated a landfill site in Hertfordshire for many years. It was a big site called Westmill. For those of you who play golf at Hanbury Manor, you might be glad to see the back of us because it was adjacent to the golf course there. It was a big landfill site, but predominantly most of its customers, certainly in the last decade, most of its customers were construction waste companies that were mainly based in London and mainly based in East London. We've got hundreds and hundreds of thousands of vehicle movements out of London up into Hertfordshire to dispose of waste. With the end of that site, it's full, has actually come a great opportunity, which is actually to provide a better solution, not only for our customers but for all those communities that are affected by that supply chain. We've worked... It's been a three-year program for us to work with Network Rail and with our freight partner, GB Railfreight, to open up a rail hub in Barking, East London, which once we can get the waste onto the rail network, that then effectively connects it up with our Rail-link landfill site, which is in North Lincolnshire. Quite a big distance, but using the rail network in the dead of night when it doesn't affect you know, commuter lines and getting vehicles off the road. Every night now we load 1,000 tons of contaminated inert waste. This is waste that may be contaminated with hydrocarbons. It may have asbestos in it. It may be process residues. As I said earlier, in the context of the waste hierarchy, there's nothing we can do with it and actually safe burial is the best place for it. 1,000 tons gets loaded onto the train. The train goes through the night and goes into our landfill site. That's about 50 big bulk haulage vehicle movements that used to go from London up to Hertfordshire, now avoided. Vehicles off the road, less traffic impact, reduced carbon, a better solution for everyone all around. Really pleased with that. It's been a long-term project with lots and lots of hurdles to get over, but now it's up and running. I think it'll be a really resilient offer. The other thing just to mention in the context of landfill is, it was interesting at COP26, there was definitely a lot of noise made about methane. It's an often overlooked part of the tackling climate change. You know, we're very, very focused right now on carbon dioxide, but methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas. Landfill, if not managed right, is a potential source of methane and that's the reason that biodegradable waste should not and almost now does not go into landfill. Nonetheless, we do have methane emissions from the landfill site. That's what powers our landfill gas business. It's both a financial objective for us, but also more importantly an environmental objective to maximize the capture of the methane through the active management of the sites. There's an industry commitment by the U.K.'s waste sector to get to an 85% capture rate. I think it's by the end of the decade. I'll double-check that. Anyway, I'm pleased to be able to report that thanks to all the effort of our teams, we're actually at that target already. We believe we're at an industry-leading level now of an 85% capture rate. Not only does that therefore reduce our emissions, we know we're doing our bit for helping to tackle that aspect of climate change, but it also is one of the reasons why our landfill gas electricity generation has not dropped by as much as we previously said that it might do. Proud to be playing our part, and as I said, a nice, you know, happy coincidence of a financial return as well as a good environmental return. I won't go on. There's lots of other things within our sustainability strategy. I urge you to have a look at it and read our report, our first year report, which we published earlier this year. But you know, we're very committed to it and there's lots for us to get on with and do. Okay. That's that. If we just move to the last slide, which is Slide 20, please. Just to recap, and this is just a repeat of what I said. I should say actually before I get to the bottom left picture, that's the receiving end of the rail hub. That's the boys with their toys there, ready to unload 1,000 tons every day up at Lincolnshire. Yeah, we get excited about that sort of thing here at Biffa. Yeah, a really good half year for us, as I said, really delighted to restore profitability to where it was two years ago. I think that's no mean feat considering where we were six months ago. Pleased with the way we got through the supply chain challenges. Well positioned to mitigate the inflation pressures we're seeing, and pleased with the progress we're making strategically and in terms of our sustainability strategy. Finally, of course, delighted to have been able to restore our dividend. I'll pause at that point and hand over to questions. This may be said already, but if we could try to stick to the usual drill of limiting your questions to two at a time. We'll have an opportunity to come back round to you if you have more questions. Richard and I struggle with more than two at a time. Thank you. We will now open the floor to questions, starting with the phone lines. If you wish to ask a question, please key star one on your telephone. If you then decide to withdraw the question, simply key star two. We have no questions on the phone until now. I'll be astonished if our analysts don't have any questions. Are we sure that they're able to connect? Oh, they are. Actually we have received two questions on the line, and the first one is coming from Verity Mitchell from HSBC. Please go ahead. I only have one. Yes. We were pressing buttons and nothing's happening, but I think we're fine now. I just wanted to ask about, well, a few things, but just a couple to start with. One is about inert waste. Would you say you're very much the market leader in this field? Clearly it will continue to be a good business line. Then the second one is just about, you said that you've got spare financial capacity. How do you think about that on a year-on-year basis? Obviously, you're investing in some start-ups, but how should we think about that capacity? Thank you. I'll take the first and Richard will help me out with the second. Yeah, I think that's fair to say. I think if we go back maybe 10 or 15 years, or certainly 10 years, I think within Biffa, we took probably more of a long-term view of trying to reposition the landfill business. At that point, it went from being a primary disposal of all waste to something which would be, you know, consigned to the history books. We always took a slightly different view, which is it would have an enduring role to play, but it would be more niche and it would be more focused around those streams of waste where there's no better solution. It's been a migration, and I think we've successfully done that. We have a far lower proportion of the waste we take into our landfill sites, which is, in theory, capable of either being recycled or used for energy recovery. We've a kind of structural deficit or structural decline that is yet to play out in our landfill business is a lot lower. We've, you know, whether it's through necessity or otherwise, we kind of woken up to the idea of the rail network and how that can provide a solution as there are fewer and fewer sites. Probably partly because we had one site already that was rail linked, it provided the entry point for it. It's been hard work. I mean, to find the appropriate sites to get them secured through Network Rail, to get the infrastructure developed, to get the rail on it. It's been a multi-year project. Yeah, I mean, bowling advance, I think I've created something that's quite leading there. In terms of total opportunities in that market, it shouldn't be a particularly growth area. I mean, there should always be, where possible, attempts to try and find better solutions for waste where possible. We just have a firm view that a lot of that waste, there's no better solution for it. I think it will continue. Sorry, go on. Morning, Verity. In terms of, you know, our financial headroom, if you like, our capital allocation, we're committed to sort of investing in the four areas that Michael talked about. As he said, you know, of the GBP 420 million that we committed to over the last 18 months, we've now incurred around about GBP 340 million of that. We have another GBP 80 million or so to spend over the next year to 18 months or a year to couple of years. That's primarily in the sort of plastics and any EFW areas. As we look forward, there's definitely gonna be lots more opportunity in M&A, you know, and as we sort of integrate the current businesses into the portfolio, we'll start to raise our eyes up again and look at where opportunity is in that area. Over and above what we've committed to in plastics, we think, you know, once we've bedded in Simply, there'll be opportunities to build another recycled PET plant. We'll have to think about that in the context of the DRS schemes that are coming, you know, into Scotland and the rest of the U.K. over the next couple of years. We've said previously that, you know, we're not planning to build out several more EFWs. You know, there might be an opportunity for us to invest more, but we think the opportunity there is more in terms of getting great long-term offtake agreements for our waste into plants that are being built out. We see, you know, Company Shop Group just as a starting point for expansion in the reuse space and, you know, still early days, but we think there's lots of things there. We're gonna do all that as well as paying a progressive dividend. That, that's the sort of starting point. You know, in terms of things we've talked about before, we see lots of other opportunities to go forward as well. We're exploring solar on our landfill sites, and we're looking at hydrogen opportunities. There's the opportunity to convert, you know, renewable gases into, potentially, into biomethane. I mean, to be honest, we're certainly not short of opportunities, and we'll be looking to place our bets on the things that we believe will take us forward most strongly. Question comes from Martin Young, from Investec Bank Public Limited Company. Please go ahead. Yeah. Hi there. I too have the problem with pressing the buttons and nothing really happening, but I'm here now, which is good. Hope everyone's okay. I'll ask the two questions, please. The first one relates to, you know, the bits of the business that have exceeded the expectations and the bits of the business that have come up short, which, as you have elaborated, net out to you being able to confirm guidance for FY 2022. When I think about those moving onwards into FY 2023 and beyond, presumably see them hit the ground running in FY 2023. That should be back on plan. I would imagine that CSG doesn't miraculously go back to pre-pandemic footfall levels overnight, so that still remains a challenge. Do you believe that what you've seen in I&C and what you've seen around elevated recycling levels, recycling price levels, is enough to offset any drag at CSG? Looking forward, 2023 and beyond is okay, in your mind. The second question is around the progressive dividend. Just want to get a little bit of a feeling whether we are going to be at that sort of interim representing 32% of the full year dividend as it used to do, for your company. Whether we're looking at a payout ratio of about 35%, you know, of adjusted underlying earnings as a way to think about where the divvy can go going forward. Thanks. Thanks, Martin. I'll probably pick up both of those. I think your first question was more of a statement, wasn't it, really? And generally, you know, your views in terms of actually direction of travel, I think are there and thereabouts. As soon as we get the customer acceptance in, which we expect to get in the second half of this year rather than the start of next year, we expect that to pick up. Basically our customers need 30%, at least 30% inclusion of recycled material to avoid the GBP 200 tax. If they have 29%, they pay a GBP 200 tax. We're very confident in terms of that moving forward and very confident in the quality. I think you're also right in terms of CSG, you know, it's not going to just bounce back immediately. We have got a clear plan to actually improve margins and get footfall back in place and moving forward, and we're seeing encouraging signs over the last three months. There's that. The integration of the acquisitions, you know, that's obviously a large number in terms of drop through to the bottom line. Both Simply and Viridor are moving forward very well. You know, we're confident in terms of the forecasts that are in the marketplace in terms of the consensus position. On the dividend, you know, sort of, you know, I don't want to commit us as a board immediately to say exactly what we're paying because that will depend on the outturn of the year. As we've said, we're confident in terms of our forecast. We would expect it to pay out in line with what we were doing before. Obviously, it will depend on other opportunities just to make sure we get the right balance. Certainly for this year, I think your assumptions are there and thereabouts, and we'd expect to sort of, you know, progressively increase that dividend year on year as we move forward. Okay. Thank you. Now we will hand over to the webcast questions. Please, can you read the first question? Sure. Good morning, everyone. We have quite a few questions on the webcast. Starting off with James Beard from Numis, who has a question around Company Shop and a question around driver pay. The first question is, are you able to, or do you have plans to expand the target CSG demographic to try to improve footfall? The question around driver pay is, what is the average HGV driver pay rise that you've had to print through? I think it's important to recognize that Company Shop is a membership restricted business model. That's important for the supplier partners and also their primary retail customers. There's a relationship there where the brands are supportive of surplus being distributed through a Company Shop on the basis it's a membership restricted model. To open up Company Shop more broadly wouldn't be consistent with that. Membership has been expanded over time and for example, people working in charitable sectors and such like and also key workers during the pandemic. I think the way to expand the demographic is it's more geographic reach rather than the breadth of who can become members. Driver pay, it wouldn't really be appropriate to talk about exact percentages, but some pretty significant increases and responding to the market. I think we've done that right, actually. We've given the right level of increases on a permanent basis. We've given the right level of temporary enhancements. It's been interesting actually that a lot of the very eye-catching rates that are advertised by some businesses are not always what they seem. It's not just been about pay, actually. This is about proposition as well and about the way we recruit. You know, we have had quite a lot of cases of people in the last few months who've left us and then come back pretty quickly because all was not quite what it seemed. In particular in logistics, a key attraction of us is that we offer almost for everybody a regular roster, effectively regular days, and people will be home at night. It's not always the case in logistics where it can be any five days from seven, you don't know where you'll be sleeping at night and such like. There's certain attractions to our offer. It's worked. Like I said, I wouldn't wanna be complacent about it. You know, this is not in the past. You know, things happen very quickly, you know, in May, June time, and it was very difficult over the course of summer. We've definitely seen some signs of stabilization since then. Can I just add a couple of things there as well, James. Just, Michael was talking about Company Shop, you know, and the sort of people who can come and shop in the stores. We've recently, as Michael mentioned, sort of obtained approval for charity workers to be added to that membership list. To just put it in scale, there's about 1.2 million nurses in the U.K. and about 900,000 charity workers. We see that as quite a big opportunity actually for the business. Just on driver pay. The overall cost of driver pay increases is around GBP 10-11 million. That's the sort of number that's been factored into our run-rate profitability. It's factored into our forecasts. You know, as I mentioned, we'll be recovering that in price increases that we put through in the second half. Thanks, guys. The next question comes from Richard Alderman at BTIG, on the same theme of HGV driver pay. I think you might have already answered part of this question, but I'll read it in full. Can you talk through the salary inflation pressures with HGV drivers? How much have you had to raise pay in order to retain and hire? Have you seen any specific issues with Viridor drivers versus original Biffa drivers? You mentioned some slippage in service levels. Is that an issue, and has it cost you customers? I think the first half of the question, you said, everything I'll say on that. On Viridor, no. I mean, that, I think, you know, we're really pleased, as I said earlier, with all of the team that we inherited from Viridor. No specific issues around pay. In fact, actually a slightly inflationary environment was given a better chance to harmonize terms and handle less favorable conditions, actually. It's enabled us to recover that a bit quicker than we may otherwise done. I'm sorry, what was the last bit of the question, Helen? It was just on our service levels. Yeah. I think I mentioned it from the outset how customer churn is lower than where it was in FY 2020. Just to put some numbers around customer service success rates, really quite interesting. We operate our own record of first time service success in our I&C business, so this is confirming every job we're doing, you know, it comes out of the in-cab device confirming the job is done. We normally benchmark about 98%, and we always strive for 100%, but 98% is a sensible kind of, you know, outside of the pandemic, sort of figure. We dropped to about 94%. That is, you know, 94% doesn't sound too bad, but that's a tripling in our failure rate. That's why we got quite a bit of noise. We did get some frustration from customers. It's incredible though, how understanding people were because it very quickly became, you know, nationwide news. You know, shelves were empty. Nando's weren't getting their chicken, and if we couldn't always get to their bins in time, then people were very understanding. As Richard said, now can we say for certain that we haven't lost a single customer because of that? Of course not. If we look at the overall stats, our actual SME customer churn is lower at 7% annualized this half of the year than it was two years ago. There's certainly, I think we've stood up well there. I should say that the service stats then in the last month or so recovered up to about 96%, and in fact is touching 97% now. That's the sort of numeric representation of what I said earlier around the recovery that we're seeing and the stabilization. Thanks, Michael. The next question comes in three parts. It's around Company Shop. I think the first part you have answered, but in the interest of transparency, I'll read the full question. This comes from Peter Kesser at One Investments. Can you please explain what you are doing in Company Shop to improve the member recruitment and continuing engagement with existing members? You mentioned some element of supply chain impacting product availability. Can you please explain how you maintain the offer in a post-pandemic shortage of grocery goods on the shelf environment in the UK? Lastly, given the performance of pandemic era unit openings, what is different about the current openings to give you confidence on our performance? Right. It's getting a bit detailed. I mean, there's a lot happening in terms of membership recruitment. I think actually in a way, the first part and the third part of that question are connected. The past successes in Company Shop around membership recruitment have involved a lot of work in the community. A lot of people, boots on the ground in the relevant places, whether that be food manufacturing facilities, hospitals, other key working, you know, locations to really get people engaged in the idea that Company Shop is opening up in the town and recruit members and then really spend the time doing that. Then when people come to pick up their membership card for the first time, spending time with them in the store, educating them around what the offer means and really getting that traction. That if we go back to stores that were opened in the pre-pandemic era, it was obviously before our ownership, that really is what worked. What the newer stores have not benefited from is exactly that they opened during the pandemic, and while on the face of it they opened relatively well, they didn't really get the depth of engagement because there was just a limitation. It was almost entirely digitally recruited with a membership, and so being able to go and spend time in hospitals and practices and what have you, and get that face-to-face contact. That's also part of the answer to the question. The third part of the question is why is it now different? If we look at Southampton that we opened this summer, we were more or less back to what the team were doing pre-pandemic. As a consequence, as a fact, the store had opened with a far higher level of members than those did. There's definitely effectively a relaunch process to go through on some of those stores that were opened during the pandemic. Then the second part of the question was about supply chain challenges. I mean, just to put it, I guess simply, if you're in the food manufacturing space and you're trying to support your primary customers in getting stuff onto the shelves, maybe managing the surplus is. When in such a fraught, difficult situation, it's just maybe not been quite such a priority. It's just been a little bit harder for the Company Shop team to maybe access some of that. A key part of identifying surplus, a key part of the offer, effectively, to the supplier partners is to be physically present and to be able to see where surplus is happening, do what they call the waste walks, which is finding out where in the process those opportunities arise. That's been restricted through the pandemic. You know, this is all point-in-time stuff. This is gonna settle down. We're gonna get back to the point where the logistics supply chains are working normally, and the manufacturers will then be as focused as they were in the past on surplus and on making sure they minimize their waste and also maximize the return from that. That's why we're very confident about it. It's just a transitional point and that, you know, we know what all those building blocks are to get us back to where we need to be. Brill. Thanks, Michael. The next question comes from Callum Mathewson at Berenberg, and we're staying on the theme of Company Shop Group. Morning. Thank you for the presentation so far. I wanted to ask about the Company Shop write-down in the context of being able to include the store rollout in your VIU calculation. Could you give us a sense of what future expectations are for CSG after this write-down, i.e., what is the operating profit that you now expect from the business in two to three years' time, including the planned store rollouts? We're not backing away from our planned commitments. We expect to recover performance, and that's primarily, as we touched on, about getting the membership levels up, the active members in particular, you know, those that come and shop time and again, and recovering the margin, which will be about how we source the material and the linkage between the material source and the selling price of that material. As we're not where we want to be, we've got a bit of a job to do that in the short term. There's nothing about this business model that's changed in terms of what we believe in. You know, we have a long track record of sourcing product successfully, very long-standing relationships with manufacturing suppliers and retail suppliers of material. We've actually got lots of opportunity in terms of non-food and beverage, so we've actually recently signed up a number of home products, we have clothing labels as well as other areas. Things will improve. You know, with our membership base is you know, sort of in the forties and fifties rather than younger. You know, imagine lots of people are still nervous and still shielding to some degree. If they're only going out once a week to shop, they're probably gonna go to you know, a full retail store outlet to get their food rather than coming to a surplus store. All these things we believe are temporary. We will you know, drive the performance forward. We'd expect to get back to sort of margin similar levels to where we talked about when we bought the business. There's obviously gonna be a delay in that because we're underperforming at the moment and, you know, it'll take a period of time to gradually progress back to where we were. The accounting standard is just very prescriptive. IAS 36 has been around for a long time. I think the accounting profession's interpreting it slightly more strictly at the moment than in the past. The reality is you're not allowed to include future CapEx in your projections. You know, as you know, the store rollout is a key part of why we bought this business. We've rolled out three this year. We plan to roll out another six or so in the next couple of years. Always thought there was opportunity beyond that. You know, not being able to include that store rollout in our projections definitely plays into why we've got the impairment. I should say there's nothing about that impairment that reflects our view of the value of the business. We think we bought what we expected to buy. We're in a slightly difficult time because of the macro environment, but we'll be able to get this back and this will be a great part of the business portfolio moving forward. Thanks, Richard. We've got one final question on the webcast and then one final question on the phone line. If you're happy to carry on for a couple of minutes yet, Michael's nodding. Fantastic. The last question on the webcast comes from Richard Alderman again at BTIG, and it's about price increases. You talk about price increases in H2. Can you say what percentage of collection contracts have inflation-linked contracts, and do those increases typically come in on the first of January? What sort of opportunity do you see for raising gate fees for commercial waste volumes? So, um- Almost every element of our I&C business has got flexibility to increase prices. As you'd expect, some of our larger corporate customers have got an agreed formula, some sort of CPI type formula. On the majority, almost all of our SME business, it's effectively gives us the flexibility to implement price increases, as and when appropriate. You know, we're confident we've got good flexibility. Not quite so sure about the last part, I mean, waste gate fees. I mean, to the extent there's inflation in waste disposal costs, then gate fees absolutely would go up. I mean, that tends to be more of a spot type market really. There's not quite so much inflation in there actually, because predominantly waste disposal is going to energy from waste and where there's cost inflation in energy from waste, that will be mitigated by inflation in the energy revenue from it. Our inflationary pressures are more around operating costs, manpower, vehicles, consumables like tires, and of course fuel. It's less so much in waste disposal itself. Thanks, Michael. I think our final question is from Verity on the phone line. If I could just ask the operator to open up Verity's line so she can ask the final question. Thank you. Verity's line is now open. Oh, great. Sorry, just a quick last one. Just in terms of the drop-down from the integration, can you just really quickly run through how the stages of integration of these businesses, things like rebranding and the point at which incremental drop-down of the synergies, how that works? Thank you. The integration is effectively two phases. The first is to get the businesses onto our systems so that transactions all go through our platform. That enables us to support all the back office transactions through our shared service functions. That's progressing really well. We're probably slightly faster than we initially anticipated. We've now done three waves. I mean, we're doing, you know, a bunch of sites at the time, but we, you know, we did some immediately, some at the first of October, some at the first of November. We're doing some at the first of December. That's going quite well. We may have them all on our system by Christmas. Maybe some will be after Christmas. The next job after that is all the rerouting, and the physical sort of efficiencies that drop out of that. That will take time. We'll focus it where the biggest opportunities are and also where the biggest need is. One thing I should say, there is a bit of a happy coincidence, actually, that bringing together the operations and the rerouting effectively helps to take some of the pressure off in terms of the labor side of things. Where we've been running with shortages of drivers, by fast-tracking some of that integration actually it helps to free up capacity and then that helps to take some of the operational pressure off the business. You know, we've said before it's a 12-18 month program. I'm hoping it's at the shorter end of that, frankly. You know, let's see how it goes and we'll report back, as things progress. Can I just ask a follow-up about the branding? You've got very strong branding, obviously, and you know, Viridor trucks are still driving around with the Viridor branding on. I mean, do you repaint the trucks with the brand, or do you just wait and replace them? Yeah, no, we've got an obligation to rebrand and obviously the Viridor business, you know, endures and that's their brand. We've got an obligation to do that. It's a sensible program that we've done many times before where vehicles are newer and it warrants a full re-livery of the vehicle, we'll make that investment. Where they're older, we'll do a slightly more cost-effective one, which is effectively to just change the logos. We wouldn't repaint the entire truck. Similarly with bins, as they come through our refurbishment centers, they'll get fully refurbished and repainted. In the meantime, there'll be more superficial brand changes. We've done that many times before and you know, we're well on with it already. Thanks. Okay. I think we're probably out of time, and I think that's probably the end of the questions. Thank you again for joining, taking the time and as ever for your questions and have a good day. Thanks very much.