Chief Executive's statement

The last year has been a challenging one for all businesses faced with lockdown restrictions as a result of COVID-19. As well as ensuring the health, safety and wellbeing of our colleagues, customers and subcontract workers, we have continued with our commitment to operating Bellway in a responsible, and ethical way, while at the same time building attractive, desirable and sustainable developments in which customers want to live.

As one of the UK’s largest homebuilders, we have an important role to play in addressing the national housing shortage. While the past year has seen a drop in homes constructed across the industry due to lockdown and COVID-19 secure working practices being adopted on our sites, we remain committed to building high quality homes and communities to allow as many people as possible to buy their own home.

Bellway continue to operate from 22 Divisions covering the main population centres across England, Scotland and Wales and our average direct employees have grown by 4.7% during 2019/20. When we include indirect and induced employment across our sub-contractors and suppliers, we estimate that despite the disruption of the past year, between 19,700 and 23,400 jobs were supported as a result of our operations.

The hard work, dedication and skill of all those who work with Bellway has been instrumental allowing Bellway to successfully navigate the challenges that COVID-19 has presented:

  • We retained 5-star homebuilder status from the Home Builder Federation for the fourth consecutive year, demonstrating our commitment to customer service.
  • 44 Bellway site managers were recognised in the NHBC Pride in the Job awards.
  • We continued to support our partnership with Cancer Research UK and increased our fundraising and donation total to £1.6 million.

We continue to set ourselves a range of CR targets and 2019/20 saw some notable successes as we continue to embed CR within our business:

  • Continued to reduce our carbon emissions per employee through the introduction of additional green energy supplied into the business.
  • Maintained our office waste diverted from landfill at above 54%.
  • Continued our focus on our successful waste recycling programme on our sites, increasing our waste diversion rate to 99.1% (2019 – 98.4%).
  • Achieved our HBF 5-star homebuilder status for the fourth year running.
  • Improved our RIDDOR seven-day reportable incident rate to 203.12 incidents per 100,000 site operatives (2019 – 324.87), the fourth year in a row we have reduced this rate.
  • Continued our partnership with Cancer Research UK, increasing our 4-year total fundraising and donation total to £1.6 million.

We remain committed to improving our CR credentials as we continue to grow our business in a sustainable manner. If you have any comments about our approach to CR we would welcome your feedback.

Jason Honeyman

Chief Executive

bellway4good@bellway.co.uk