Introduction by Jeremy Darroch, Chief Executive

At Sky, we know that making a positive contribution to UK life is a vital component of long-term, sustainable business success.

Our approach to responsibility includes doing the right thing for customers, for example by providing tools to help them watch tv and use the internet safely, making our products available to everyone; and providing responsible programming. Our people are the bedrock of our success, so we want to make sure we do the right thing for them by helping them perform to the best of their ability, and make sure they can be proud to work for Sky.

Customers, employees and partners all need to trust that we are doing the right thing by them in our day to day business.

Increasingly, they also expect us to contribute more broadly. So, as well as taking our responsibilities seriously in all our business operations, we're also focused on three areas which we think can have the biggest positive impact:

• helping to create a healthy environment;
• encouraging participation in sport; and
• bringing more of the arts to more people.

We're well on the way to building Europe's most sustainable broadcasting facility. And, this year, we put our set top box auto-standby feature into all customer homes. This simple step should save customers around £20 million off their energy bills and 90,000 tonnes of carbon. We’re also inspiring action through our three year partnership with Global Action Plan.

We joined up with British Cycling in a five year partnership and, together, we committed to get one million more people cycling regularly within five years through Skyride.

Separately, we also extended our work with the Youth Sports Trust, making Sky Sports Living for Sport available to every secondary school in the UK.

Through our Sky Arts channels, we doubled our output of arts programming to 36 hours a day. And we broadened our support of the arts off screen, including a major new partnership with Artichoke to bring the arts to the streets.

We've taken steps forward in every area this year. But at Sky, we're always hungry to go further and do better, so watch this space.