Overview

Our Commitment to Sustainability

“We combine strong business performance with a dedication to sustainability, ensuring our spaces foster community growth and business success while contributing to a sustainable future.” 

Being a sustainable organisation remains fundamental to Safestore's business. We are committed to operating responsibly, valuing our customers, engaging our colleagues, supporting our communities, and mitigating our environmental impact. We are dedicated to ensuring that our actions reflect our long term commitment to creating shared value for our stakeholders, while also protecting the environment for future generations.

Our sustainability focus

As the UK’s largest self storage provider, with a significant presence across Western Europe, we recognise our responsibility to lead by example. We are committed to making continuous, incremental changes that benefit our colleagues, suppliers, customers, and the broader community. Our strategy revolves around four key pillars that guide our actions:

• Our people: we know our people as individuals and show respect for each other, enabling everyone to have a voice so that they can bring their full, unique selves to work. We focus on offering simple, practical wellbeing initiatives, to support our colleagues to lead healthier and happier lives. This includes health benefits, career development opportunities, and promoting work-life balance.
• Our customers: we focus on delivering a seamless and sustainable customer experience by offering digital tools to enhance convenience, as well as flexible storage solutions that support both residential and business customers in their own sustainability efforts.
• Our community: we remain committed to supporting the communities in which we operate. Through partnerships with local charities, educational institutions, and community groups, we provide not just storage solutions, but tangible benefits that foster local economic growth and societal wellbeing.
• Our environment: reducing our environmental impact is a core priority. We continue to improve energy efficiency across our sites, invest in renewable energy, and adhere to sustainable construction practices. By driving progress towards our net zero goals, we are playing our part in tackling climate change.

As part of our ongoing commitment to improvement, we are proud to share several key achievements and targets met in the past year, including:

• Introduction of renewable energy: We have begun transitioning our UK facilities to renewable energy sources, aiming for 100% renewable electricity by 2025.
• Expansion of diversity initiatives: Following our first Diversity Pay Gap Report in 2022, we have greater strategic focus on equality, diversity, and inclusion resulting in exceptional Investors in People survey results on this topic.
• Enhanced waste management: We have increased our commitment to reducing waste, achieving a 99.9% diversion of construction waste from landfill, and introducing new recycling programmes in all UK stores.
• Progress on operational net zero goals: We are on track with our net zero targets, having reduced operational GHG emissions by 15.2% in 2024. We remain committed to further reductions as part of our 2025 and 2028 goals.

Our sustainability strategy

Our sustainability strategy is anchored around the pillars of our people, customers, community, and environment. These pillars provide us with a structured yet flexible framework that allows us to address key material issues identified through engagement with our stakeholders, including investors, colleagues, customers, and suppliers.

We periodically review our sustainability strategy to ensure alignment with our corporate goals and the UN Global Compact principles. We have identified key sustainability issues through stakeholder engagement, focusing on areas that matter most to our business and stakeholders.

Once finalised, these indicators and supplemental information can be downloaded from Report and Presentations section on our website.

Delivering our sustainability strategy

Safestore’s approach to sustainability is embedded across every level of the organisation, from our Board and executive leadership to day-to-day operations. This year, our key areas of focus have included:

• Engaging our workforce to deliver exceptional service and foster a great workplace.
• Strengthening ties with local charities and communities.
• Partnering with suppliers which share our commitment to sustainability.
• Minimising our environmental footprint through responsible resource management.
• Upholding the standards of the Self Storage Association.

Sustainability achievements and highlights for 2024

Platinum	we were again awarded the prestigious Investors in People Platinum accreditation
4.6+	customer satisfaction rating in all markets
Gold	rating in the 2024 EPRA Sustainability BPR awards
6	additional UK stores no longer using gas
99.9%	of construction waste diverted away from landfill in the UK
15.2%	reduction in market-based operational GHG intensity