Developing our reporting and assurance

This year at MTR we are embarking on a journey to develop and improve our reporting and assurance. In terms of reporting, we have made a number of changes and improvements to our reporting in this, our third Sustainability Report. These include our first efforts at sustainability accounting and an inventory of our green house gas emissions.

We also conducted a review of our assurance arrangements and undertook to gain enhanced comfort over the quality of our reported sustainability information (qualitative and quantitative).

We have built on the relatively limited scope of the verification process that we commissioned last year, which involved limited testing of a sample of the information that they assured. We appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers who work to internationally recognised professional assurance standards that set out a framework for the nature and extent of the assurance work needed.

PricewaterhouseCoopers conducted a programme of interviews with management, reviewed documentation and carried out analytical review supplemented, where necessary, with data testing, in relation to all the information selected for assurance. They also reviewed the whole report to confirm that there are no inconsistencies with the findings of their work. This work is consistent with a limited assurance assignment as defined by the IFAC international standards.

The statements and data in the Report marked with the symbol are the subject of assurance work by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Please refer to the Assurance Statement in Section 10 for more information.

Going forward we plan to work proactively with our stakeholders and our assurance providers to:

• Identify the material aspects of our sustainability performance.

• Focus future target setting, reporting and assurance efforts on these areas in the coming years.

• Build up our reporting systems and controls to enhance the quality and credibility of our reported sustainability information further.