Sustainability Strategy   

This sustainability strategy outlines how Crowe UK (“Crowe”) will deliver the ambitions set out in its sustainability policy. The strategy sets out at a high-level the sustainability implications arising from Crowe’s values for responsible business practices in the areas of environmental stewardship, social responsibility as well as governance, ethics, and compliance.

This strategy is designed to be implemented consistently across all areas of Crowe’s operations, ensuring that every team aligns with the same overarching goals and principles.

Delivering on our commitment

At Crowe, we are committed to building a sustainable business and this strategy describes how we ensure we deliver on this commitment over the medium term.

The Executive has set a sustainability ambition for the firm to ensure that we actively contribute to addressing environmental and social challenges, demonstrating our commitment to responsible business practices. This also ensures that we are appropriately aligned with the expectations of our key stakeholders, including our people and our clients. We are therefore aiming to be in the upper second quartile of sustainability performance for our accounting and professional service peer organisations.

This strategic direction sets the tone and agenda for our sustainability programme and action plans, which we monitor and report on through our governance arrangements and as part of our annual Sustainability Report.

Seven action areas

We have grouped the activity arising from the strategy into different themes to help us manage and communicate our progress clearly.

• Our people: Our people are at the core of our business. We are committed to recruiting and developing diverse talent and building an increasingly equitable and inclusive culture to help all our people thrive.
• Our environment: We are committed to protect the environment and minimise the damage that our business could bring to our ecosystem. We seek to ensure we have a positive environmental impact, preserving our planet for future generations.
• Our clients: We provide practical and actionable sustainability solutions and assurance that empower our clients in their sustainability journeys.
• Our supply chain: We collaborate with our suppliers and vendors to understand how they manage our external value chain on our behalf and to ensure their sustainability objectives are aligned with ours.
• Our social value: We apply our expertise to create lasting social impact - supporting social mobility, empowering communities, and fostering inclusive, sustainable growth in the places where we live and work.
• Our governance: Our sustainable governance framework ensures that every commitment we make is backed by clear accountability, robust oversight, and measurable delivery.
• Our disclosures: We are committed to transparent reporting, regularly sharing our progress with stakeholders and holding ourselves accountable through open, measurable disclosures. 

Our goal is to continue to build diverse and inclusive teams of talented people, where everyone in the firm has the opportunity to develop and progress in their careers, while delivering high quality services to our clients. We ensure our people learn and grow their skills, knowledge, and behaviours, within a culture that promotes quality, inclusion and wellbeing, creating an environment where everyone can thrive.

Our firmwide approach to Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (ED&I) is to:

• create a truly inclusive organisation and celebrate the benefits that diverse teams bring us, as a firm, and as individuals. We believe more diverse teams make better decisions for our clients and our business.
• have a zero-tolerance approach to eliminate discrimination, harassment, and victimisation for all our people, as well as the wider communities we work with, advance equality of opportunity, tackle prejudice, and promote understanding and education.

We are committed to supporting employee wellbeing through a flexible and inclusive approach that enables individuals to thrive both personally and professionally. Our programmes promote agility, flexibility, balance, motivation, progression, recognition, and fairness, creating an environment where people can work in ways that suit their needs, build meaningful networks, and be inspired by real role models.

We also invest in our people through a comprehensive learning and development offering that spans all grades and areas of the business. This includes technical training, management development training, and sector-specific programmes. We recognise our responsibility to help individuals maximise their potential while contributing to the continued growth and success of the firm.

Over the next two years, we will:

• improve our people-related data management processes, ensuring access to high quality data, insights and metrics
• enhance the investments in specific areas, including talent management
• review, evolve and update our Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and its support of the people culture within the business
• continue to drive all of our ED&I initiatives setting clear strategic objectives, goals and measurable actions for each.

We take our environmental performance very seriously through the following actions:

• committing to reduce our carbon footprint in line with our Science Based Targets initiative emission reduction targets
• reducing our waste and landfill by encouraging recycling and reuse in our offices
• ensuring environmental and energy efficiency issues are addressed in relevant decision-making processes (including procurement and office selection)
• ensuring all our people are aware of, and educated to understand, the impact of their activities on the environment.

Our carbon management strategy involves: 

• monitoring and reporting on our current GHG emissions on an annual basis 
• minimising our emissions by improving operational efficiencies and investing in innovative technologies and approaches to reduce our resource consumption 
• minimising unnecessary travel by encouraging our people to adopt new technologies to collaborate with colleagues and clients remotely
• collaborating with our suppliers to understand the opportunities to reduce our Scope 3 greenhouse gas emissions.

Over the next two years, we will:

• implement emission-reduction activities to ensure we remain on track to achieve our 2030 carbon emission targets, as per our commitment to the Science Based Targets initiative
• improve accuracy and consistency of the data analysed by reviewing our reporting process and obtaining external assurance on our emissions data.

Our clients rely on our professional insight to navigate a wide range of strategic business challenges. As the sustainability landscape evolves rapidly, driven by shifting regulations and stakeholder expectations, we remain committed to providing expert sustainability advice and assurance. To meet this demand, we continue to invest in growing a multidisciplinary team that delivers tailored consulting solutions.

Over the next two years, we will:

• continue to educate our clients on the need to take action on sustainability issues and support them in addressing UK and international sustainability-related regulatory requirements
• increase the share of total firm’s revenue generated from sustainability-related services, particularly from independent assurance, reflecting our commitment to embedding sustainability at the core of our business growth.

We understand that as a professional services firm, that our environmental and social footprint is significantly influenced by the businesses we choose to partner with and we recognise we have a duty to ensure that they have similar standards and values, complying with relevant laws and regulations. As such, we engage with our suppliers and vendors to understand their sustainability maturity and their alignment with our sustainability objectives.

We are continuously enhancing the maturity of our supplier due diligence processes to ensure they reflect a comprehensive view of risk. Our assessments consider a broad range of factors, including, but not limited to, financial viability, financial crime controls, labour practices, and environmental performance. We ask key suppliers to complete a questionnaire to provide accurate information on their sustainability performance, and we engage with them directly to ensure they are able to meet their commitments and align with our standards.

Over the next two years, we will:

• engage with the top 25% of suppliers, in terms of their materiality from an emissions perspective, to understand their decarbonisation plans and enhancing their capture of sustainability performance data
• put in place supply chain performance metrics for the top 25% of suppliers (ranked by materiality from an emission perspective).

We seek to use our relationships and reach for the mutual benefit of our clients, our people, and the communities in which we operate.

To enhance our social value, we are committed to fostering social mobility and reducing inequality by raising aspirations, promoting inclusion, and widening participation. We achieve this by:

• partnering with schools, colleges, and universities to deliver impactful outreach programmes, including mentoring, career coaching, and enrichment experiences for individuals from underrepresented and disadvantaged backgrounds
• providing inclusive access to professional pathways through structured work experience, ‘Insight Weeks’, and apprenticeship programmes. removing financial and social barriers to participation
• embedding inclusive recruitment practices that promote equity and ensure a level playing field for candidates from all socio-economic backgrounds
• collaborating across the professional services sector to share knowledge, drive change, and expand access to opportunity for those from non-traditional routes
• empowering communities through volunteering and pro bono work, including firmwide initiatives and tailored advisory support for charities, helping to build capacity and resilience in the non profit sector
• championing local engagement through office-led projects that support vulnerable groups, aligning with our ED&I networks and recognising the intersectionality between socio-economic background and other identity factors.

We recognise that when our people contribute their time and expertise, both the individuals and the communities they support benefit. Therefore, we continue to invest in volunteering programmes, offering paid time off and structured opportunities to give back.

Over the next two years, we will:

• calculate and disclose our social value, ensuring the approach used is aligned with well-recognised industry standards and guidelines
• implement a volunteering policy across the firm to support employee participation in community initiatives
• recruit, develop, and retain a higher number of employees from low socio-economic backgrounds to ensure our workforce better reflects the diversity of society and build our strategies, goals and actions arising from our participation in the 2025 Purpose Coalition project for ‘Breaking Down Barriers in Accountancy’. 

As a professional practices firm, quality, integrity, ethical business practices, culture, behaviours and acting in the public interest are fundamental to everything we do. They guide our decisions and underpin our commitment to responsible business. We adhere rigorously to professional codes of conduct, regulatory standards and continuous improvement in quality, maintain full compliance with legal and regulatory requirements, adhere to the Audit Firm Governance Code focusing on acting in the public interest and follow our internal ethics and risk management frameworks.

Our Executive plays an active role in overseeing our sustainability and quality programmes, receiving quarterly updates to monitor progress against our strategic commitments, peer benchmarks, and action plans. This governance ensures accountability and alignment with our broader business objectives.

The Head of Sustainability is responsible for providing regular updates to the Executive, ensuring transparency, and enabling informed decision making as we deliver on the goals set out in this strategy.

We have a Supervisory Board which ensures the firm is run as intended and receives updates on the progress made in our sustainability programme.

Over the next two years, we will:

• formalise data-related processes and approaches to ensure consistency across all sustainability initiatives and different reporting requirements
• continuously review our Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboard to ensure it better reflects our sustainability objectives, culture and behaviours and it facilitates regular reporting to the Executive and the Supervisory Board
• support our network of sustainability champions in continuing to nurture a culture of sustainability throughout the firm. 

We recognise that our reputation depends not only on the quality of our services but also on how we operate as a business. The transparency of our public disclosures reflects our ongoing commitment to sustainability and responsible business practices.

Over the next two years, we will:

• continue to enhance our external sustainability disclosures to ensure we meet our key stakeholders’ expectations, including our clients and our people
• continue to disclose our annual Sustainability Report, summarising our overall performance
• obtain relevant external sustainability accreditation, in alignment with our sustainability objectives and our business, and obtain independent assurance over some of our sustainability disclosures.

Strategy approval and review

The Crowe UK Executive approved this strategy in July 2025 and will review its appropriateness on a biennial basis.

Disclaimer

As is usual in such cases, this document is given without assumption of legal liability on the part of the writer or this firm.