The nature of our business means that we do not have a large direct impact on the environment but we believe that we can make a difference by minimising the impacts of our operations and raising awareness of environmental issues.

Nationwide’s Environmental Management System (EMS), which covers our core business operations, identifies our most significant environmental impacts and their causes and defines how these issues are managed. We align environmental risks with our corporate operational risk process. We aim to:

• set energy efficiency targets in order to reduce our carbon footprint
• develop Key Performance Indicators for environmental management
• align our EMS with the ISO 14001 environmental standard

Following Nationwide’s successful merger with Portman, effective from 28 August 2007, we are a significantly larger organisation. We will continue to manage the environmental impacts of our enlarged Society and will report on this in our 2007/08 report.