Caring for the community

We are committed to being a good neighbour to our local community and our “caring for the community” philosophy involves being part of local and regional communities. Our involvement takes the form of sponsoring a variety of local charities and fund raising events, promoting our own campaigns which focus on the three themes of youth sport, education and the environment, and maintaining open communication channels and good working relationships with the region’s key opinion formers.

Sponsorship in the community

During 2007, we gave financial support of £121,108 in total across a range of charitable and non-charitable causes. Of that total, charitable donations amounted to £73,754 (2006: £45,872).

Some £12,000 of the total donations were made under the direction of our sponsorship team, across a range of activities within a 20-mile radius of the power station.

Each month the team meets to consider requests received for charitable donations and community sponsorship and makes awards against our criteria of furthering community, environmental and sporting interests.

An example of the good causes supported through the sponsorship team in 2007, is the Sherburn-in-Elmet Youth Drop-in, a scheme aimed at 11–19 year-olds in the village. The Drop-in is held every Friday evening and has proved hugely successful in encouraging local youths to take part in a range of activities including arts and crafts, drama and music. Our donation was put to good use through the purchase of new arts and crafts materials.

Drax also operates a “£ for £” matching scheme, under which we match, £ for £, any monies raised for charity by employees. During 2007, approximately £42,518 of the total donations made were through this scheme.

For the third year running, we ran a scheme to encourage and reward good safety performance during the planned outage periods. Through the scheme £500 is donated for every seven days that goes by without an injury requiring more than first aid treatment, in total £7,500 was raised during the two outages. Employees and the outage contractor, Doosan Babcock, were each asked to nominate charities to receive a share of the total.

In December 2007, Drax staff responded to a request to raise money for a very special and deserving cause. Marni Smyth, a 13 year-old girl who lives with her family in a nearby village, was born with spinal muscular atrophy. Marni wakes every hour at night and has to call out to her parents to be turned in her bed. Through a variety of initiatives we raised just under £7,000 to purchase a special bed which can be programmed to alter the air pressure in the mattress and turn Marni in her sleep, which will mean an uninterrupted night’s sleep for her and her parents.

Other sponsorship activities included a £15,000 donation to the Selby Abbey Restoration Appeal. The donation, used to sponsor two fundraising concerts, one of which was held in October 2007, and the second to be held in July 2008, allows all proceeds raised from the concerts to go to the Appeal as the restoration work enters its seventh and final phase.

Education in the community

Our “Cricket in the Community” initiative launched in May 2006 has continued to prove popular with local schools. We now boast four England and Wales Cricket Board (“ECB”) qualified coaches on our staff, who together with England ladies’ cricketer, Katherine Brunt took cricket coaching to schools in the local area as part of our support for education and to promote sports learning as part of the National Curriculum.

Strengthening our links with the game of cricket, we launched the Drax Cup, the region’s first-ever cricket competition for teams of girls and boys under the age of nine.

A total of 86 primary schools across Yorkshire took part in the knock-out tournament organised by The Yorkshire County Cricket Club (“Yorkshire CCC”) in conjunction with The Yorkshire Cricket Board and The Yorkshire Schools’ Cricket Association. The semi-finals and final were played at Headingley Carnegie Stadium, the home of Yorkshire CCC and a long-standing venue for test matches and one-day internationals. The trophy, crafted from recycled boiler tube from a Drax boiler, was presented to the winning school, Wheatlands Primary School, Redcar by Darren Gough, Yorkshire CCC captain and ex-England international.

“Art in the Community”, a new initiative designed to encourage and develop art appreciation, was launched in September 2007. Primary and secondary schools in the area were invited to enter and have the chance to share in prize money totalling over £2,500. The prize money for the winning artists was matched with a donation to their schools.

Visitors to Drax

In October 2007, the Minister of State for Energy, Malcolm Wicks MP, officially opened the new Drax Visitor Centre. The Minister joined pupils from Dringhouses Primary School, York to be part of the first group to tour the new exhibition. The new facility uses large format graphics, multimedia presentations and interactive models to explain the electricity generation process. Visitors can also discover fun facts about the power station and its pioneering environmental projects.

Thousands of visitors are welcomed to the power station every year. The appeal of discovering more about how power is produced and the sheer scale of the site and its associated activities attracts schools and colleges as well as business organisations and associations. During 2007, we played host to some 5,750 visitors.