Our sustainability approach has three pillars:
Progress within these pillars is driven by our diverse portfolio of companies who know their people, their markets and their customers best.
1. Drive growth in sustainability
We seek organic and acquisition growth opportunities driven by our purpose, long-term growth drivers and evolving sustainability demands that aim to increase and broaden the benefits enabled by our products and services.
2. Support our people
We aim to improve the lives of employees, suppliers and community members.
3. Protect our environment
We aim to reduce our environmental footprint in our own operations and wider value chains.
For our companies, our three sustainability pillars together translate into a challenge to “do more good” and “do less harm”.
Drive growth in sustainability
At Halma, sustainability has always been at the core of our purpose-driven strategy for growth.
Our sustainable growth is anchored in our continued focus on acquiring and growing companies in safety, environmental and healthcare markets that are addressing real-world problems enabling their customers to provide safer environments, protect life-critical resources, and deliver better healthcare.
We believe that continuing to encourage our companies to identify and pursue sustainability-related opportunities to grow their products and markets will allow us to accelerate our progress and broaden the benefits that our companies already enable through their products and services. See impact examples and metrics for examples and metrics relating to our impact.
Find out more about how we are driving growth in sustainability in our Annual Report and Accounts.Support our people
Our purpose and cultural DNA drives our second sustainability pillar to support our people. Within this pillar, we have a key focus area of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Key focus area:
Diversity, equity and inclusion
Relevant SDGs:
Employees and diversity, equity and inclusion
Our DNA puts people at the heart of what we do. Our inclusive policies and our focus on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) aim to allow our employees to thrive.
Increasing diversity, equity and inclusion significantly benefits our global societies and is fundamental to achieving our purpose. It is therefore our current key focus area. As a group, we are working towards achieving targets in DEI, the first of which is around gender balance on our company boards (see key target below). We continue to see strong gender balance at the group, Executive Board and Board levels.
The sustainability section of our Annual Report and Accounts also sets out our plans for reporting additional ethnicity data and updates on the progress we have made in this area.
Key metrics:
33%
Gender balance on company boards
(Target: 40-60% by 2030)1
18%
Senior management from under-represented ethnic groups
(Target: 20% by 2027)2
0.07
Accident frequency
(Target: annual 0.02)
- This includes companies that have been in the portfolio for longer than three years as at 31 March 2025.
- This is based on the Halma definition of ethnic diversity. See page 59 of the Annual Report and Accounts.
Communities and society
Our suppliers are a key part of our value chain, and we expect them to act in line with our Code of Conduct and our DNA. We are encouraging our companies to work in partnership with their suppliers to deliver positive outcomes for their customers and workforce, including increasing engagement on supply chain due diligence and Scope 3 decarbonisation.
We are proud of the work we do in our communities. Our companies drive their own community engagement programmes, and our global fundraising campaigns build on the benefits our products deliver and provide our products to underprivileged communities.
Halma Group makes global community investments through our global charitable campaigns. These campaigns align with our purpose within the focus areas of safer, cleaner and healthier. They also align with our strategy, by enabling us to both utilise our products and showcase how our companies make a positive impact and are finding solutions to some of the problems facing the world today.
In 2019, we completed Halma’s first global charitable campaign, Gift of Sight. This group-wide initiative, within the 'healthier' area, delivered equipment to medical teams in Ghana in order for them to perform sight-restoration surgery in the local community. The campaign not only raised over US$200,000 for the Himalayan Cataract Project, but Halma also provided their volunteers with the tools and training to spot dangerous conditions like glaucoma before it is too late, supporting them to save the sight of thousands.
In 2020, Halma launched Water for Life in partnership with WaterAid to help raise awareness of the daily challenges that millions of people face in accessing clean, safe water.
Through the campaign we focused on a network of villages in northern India, where the groundwater is contaminated with arsenic, which is slowly poisoning the local population. Halma has six water companies in the group: HWM, Palintest, Sensorex, Minicam, Hydreka and UV Group. They are all focused on solving different parts of the global water challenge. One of them, Palintest, makes specialist water testing technology that can detect contaminants in water, including arsenic.
Over the next two years, Palintest donated its portable testing kits and over 18,000 arsenic tests to the campaign. Halma raised over £400,000 to support the building of new water infrastructure and training for local volunteers.
Through our partnership with WaterAid, we have transformed the lives of over 10,000 people. In addition to giving them access to safe, clean water, our campaign trained 1,800 community volunteers in water quality management, so they can continue to keep their water supply safe for generations to come.
Read more about our Water for Life campaign.
Outside of our global campaigns, Halma companies also support a variety of charities most relevant to their businesses and proactively support community engagement. See our ESG data supplement for further details.
The responsible sourcing of materials is a focus area for Halma during our transition to more circular manufacturing and business practices. We recognise that conflict minerals are a key issue of concern for our stakeholders. Our companies are responsible for managing their own supply chains, which includes complying with conflict mineral due diligence requests from their customers where applicable, supported by Group guidance within the Conflict Minerals policy. Historically, we have not collated data on these policies or procedures centrally. Additional information on our Conflict Minerals policy can be found in the Our policies and procedures section of our website.
In 2020, we undertook a comprehensive risk assessment exercise that mapped potential modern slavery risks in our business and supply chain, and covered over £500m of annual procurement expenditure from the year ended 31 March 2019 (representing over 96% of expenditure excluding intercompany payments, employee expenses, tax and sales commissions) across over 3,500 suppliers.
Each of our companies is responsible for managing modern slavery risk within their own supply chains and may take varying approaches, such as supplier due diligence, questionnaires and the use of terms and conditions, according to their specific circumstances. For example, BEA, one of our largest companies, visits and audits key suppliers, with whom they have ongoing business, between every four months and two years depending on total spend, to review working and labour conditions, the working environment and worker safety.
Additional information can be found in our Annual Report and Accounts, as well as the our policies and procedures section and our Modern Slavery Statement on our website.
Our operating companies have a strong focus on product quality and safety. For the year to 31 March 2025, based on available data reported by our companies, we estimate that approximately 67% of the Group’s sites, contributing approximately 75% of revenue, were covered by an ISO 9001 quality management accreditation or an ISO 13485 certificate (specific to medical devices).
Protect our environment
We are focused on our third pillar – to protect our environment – both because it is the right thing for us to do, and because it will support our future growth. Within this pillar, we have a key focus area of sustainable product design and reducing emissions.
Key focus area:
Sustainable product design and reducing emissions
Relevant SDGs:
Sustainable product design and reducing emissions
As a Group, most of our environmental footprint comes from our wider value chain, embedded in the design of our products and services rather than our operations. This means that while we are fully committed to reducing our operational emissions and impacts, we place even greater importance on supporting our companies to think beyond this through activities such as sustainable design, supply chain engagement, and climate-related opportunities that support their customers’ transitions.
Commitments and progress
Our companies have well established Scope 1 & 2 emissions reduction plans to support our Group targets. We have made good progress towards these targets, by the end of FY23 we had already exceeded our target to reduce Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 42% by 2030.
In addition, we achieved our 2025 target to reach 80% renewable electricity across the Group, and our companies are now expected to maintain this.
We have also set an ambition to reach Net Zero for all Scopes by 2050 and have an interim target to reduce Scope 3 emissions intensity by 66% from 2025 to 2035.
Our disclosures against the TCFD recommendations in our Annual Report and Accounts give an overview of our approach and progress.
See our Sustainability Review for more information.
| Scope 1 & 2 reduction from 2020 baseline (Target: 42% by 2030 and net zero by 2040) |
64% |
| Renewable electricity (Target: 80% by 2025) |
86% |
| Energy productivity improvement from 2022 baseline (Target: cumulative 12% by 2025) |
26% |
We recognise that all of our activities have an environmental impact. Our key impacts have been identified as emissions to air and water, water and energy consumption, and waste production, and since 2005 we have reported annual data at a Group level on greenhouse gas emissions, total water consumption, and total solid and liquid waste production. Please see our ESG Data Supplement.
Our environmental impact within our operations is relatively low compared to other manufacturers, due to our fairly low capital-intensity manufacturing processes and operations that are geographically close to our end markets. However, these are a small part of our environmental impacts within our broader value chain. Within our own operations we encourage our companies to improve energy efficiency, reduce water, waste, emissions and use materials more efficiently. Beyond this we are encouraging our companies and their suppliers to concentrate on sustainable product design and supply chain engagement to reduce emissions.
All Group companies are encouraged to undertake ISO 14001 accreditation, where warranted, and will do so again in 2025. For 2025, the estimate was 19% of sites, contributing to 29% of revenue (2023: 20% sites, 22% revenue).
We regularly conduct a high-level analysis of our operations in water scarce areas. We have identified 33 sites which operate in areas of ‘extremely high (>80%)’ or ‘high (40-80%)’ baseline water stress, according to the WWF Water Risk Filter tool and World Resources Institute’s Water Aqueduct water risk atlas. Sites were defined as manufacturing, testing or R&D sites, or Hubs and Group Head Offices employing more than 50 people. Together, these sites withdrew approximately 42,663m3 of water in the 2025 financial year, around 41% of Halma’s total water withdrawal.
While our total water withdrawal is low compared to peers, water conservation is a key issue for some of our stakeholders and a higher profile issue for Halma due to our water analysis and treatment companies. Companies in high water stress areas are expected to take measures to reduce water consumption, for example by installing water efficient taps and low-flow toilets, monitoring water usage and setting usage targets.
