5 in 5 goal highlights - year one of five

Our '5 in 5' goals](https://about.virginmedia.com/sustainability/our-goals.php), which we launched in 2014, are our biggest and boldest set of sustainability goals yet. They sit alongside Virgin Media's ambitious growth plans and will ensure we grow responsibly and sustainability, while doing more good with digital.

One year on from the launch of our 5 in 5 sustainability goals, here are some of my performance highlights from 2015:  

More inclusive – we’ve improved female representation at A-C level from 30% to 32%, created a company-wide Inclusion Circle to drive the agenda forward and made great progress in raising awareness of and removing the barriers to disability in the workplace. We know we need to do more to create the awareness and tools for our managers to recruit for diversity and tackle unconscious bias - that will be a key focus for the remainder of 2016 and 2017.

Better products – We’ve developed a product scorecard to measure and improve the sustainability performance of our products and we've started to embed it within the project delivery process with Liberty Global. This has been a personal highlight for me and I’m really excited about sharing our first product scorecard results for our latest WiFi hub very soon. Developing the scorecard however is the easy bit, embedding it into the way we develop products with our key manufacturing partners will be a big challenge and the focus for the next 18 months.

Lower impact – We reduced our carbon footprint by 6.1% last year – our biggest ever reduction – this has been achieved through energy efficiency projects and an impressive reduction in truck rolls – we’ve taken over 800,000 journeys off the road. It was a challenge to achieve some of our other fleet efficiency targets but after seeing year-on-year improvements we firmly committed to continuing to bring down the average emissions of the car fleet and improve the miles per gallon in our vans.

Boosting business – Holding our first ever PowerUp digital skills event for small business owners and increasing the number of Virgin Media Pioneers to 9,280. Seeing the positive feedback we received from the small business owners who attended the PowerUp event in Manchester gave us all the extra incentive to provide further opportunities through Virgin Media Pioneers. We’ve already made great progress on this in 2016 with the recent makeover of the Virgin Media Pioneers website.

Transforming lives - We launched our two year £1m partnership with Scope and since the launch over £130,000 has been raised through employee fundraising, 1,720 bags of stock have been donated, over 250 employees have signed up to a sporting challenge. In addition, three projects have launched to find innovative solutions to challenges disabled people face.

You can find all of our performance in 2015, in detail, here.

While the performance snapshot above is for 2015, I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you some of progress to date in 2016. Here are some of the highlights:

• Launched a new LGBT employee network, celebrated Deaf Awareness Week and over 500 people attended live disability awareness training provided by Beans Training.
• Turned on our first ever onsite renewable energy project by installing solar panels at our hub site in Bristol.
• We will shortly be announcing the product scorecard results for the Superhub 3.0
• Completed a makeover of the Virgin Media Pioneers website for our community of 9,280 small business owners and entrepreneurs  and launched the #PowerUp campaign to shake up the business world for the better
• Celebrated the one year anniversary of our partnership with Scope with another charity week

Check out our latest Goals roadmap to find out what we’re focused on for 2016 and beyond.