London,  6th November: Royal Dutch Shell plc (“Shell”) has joined forces with energy sector leaders Enel and Centrica to back efforts to eliminate the exclusion of disabled people worldwide, by joining disability inclusion campaign The Valuable 500. The campaign encourages global business leaders to recognise the value of the world’s 1.3 billion disabled people.

Shell, Centrica, Enel, MARUI GROUP and Mitsui Chemicals, Inc. are among a further 15 new companies today to commit to the campaign, bringing the total to 165. This follows the announcement in October that the Confederation of British Industry and 17 Indian companies had joined The Valuable 500. Businesses from 20 countries have now signed up.

Launched at the World Economic Forum’s Annual Summit this year, The Valuable 500 seeks 500 global businesses to place disability inclusion on their board agenda as the first step to full inclusion for disabled people in business.

The campaign recently published an open letter, signed by 30 high-profile business leaders, in four national papers calling for disability inclusion in business. This coincided with The Valuable 500 founder Caroline Casey’s call to action at the One Young World summit in London in October.

The news today also comes with 75 days before the next Annual Summit in Davos, marking one year since the launch of The Valuable 500. 165 companies from 20 countries have now signed up, including from Japan, India, Australia, Bahrain, Denmark, Egypt, the USA and Switzerland. At least another 150 are expected to become members in the coming months.

The campaign will return to the main stage at Davos next year, where founder Caroline Casey will unveil a report looking at the progress of the initiative and those global businesses signed up to becoming inclusive of disabled people, and to host a press conference.

We are delighted to welcome Shell, Centrica and Enel as members of the Valuable 500. This is a significant moment for the energy sector, and it is fantastic to see such a strong response in this area to our call to action. We welcome their commitment to disability inclusion in business and encourage other companies in this sector who have a platform to speak to the business community to follow their lead.

We are also thrilled to welcome 2 Japanese companies, MARUI GROUP and Mitsui Chemicals, Inc. who have become the first companies in Japan to sign up to our campaign. This is hugely significant and we welcome their commitment to put disability on the board agenda and show leadership on this important issue on the global stage.

However, more must be done. We need to take note of the $8 trillion market opportunity of the world’s 1.3 billion disabled people and commit to disability inclusion in business. We urge business leaders around the world to put this on their board agendas and take much needed action.

Caroline Casey, founder of The Valuable 500,

 

Disability inclusion is central to Shell’s approach to finding the best people and getting the most from our employees. We are proud to have prioritised this issue and to join The Valuable 500, which will help us continue to play an important part in truly diversifying the energy sector. We are proud to have prioritised this issue and to help lead the way in truly diversifying the energy sector.

However, we know there is still much to be done, and as we work towards this ourselves we also strongly encourage other companies to make this issue a priority.

Royal Dutch Shell Chief Executive Officer Ben van Beurden

 

The integration of disability in Board agendas, alongside business actions, is a fundamental prerequisite for companies that want to be truly inclusive. This is one of the key principles of ‘Valuable 500’ and it is perfectly in line with Enel’s global policy on diversity and inclusion. Based on non-discrimination, equal opportunities and equal dignity of diversity of all kinds, as well as work-life balance, Enel’s global diversity and inclusion policy was launched in 2015 and since then has been implemented through specific actions, including those on disability, aimed at valuing diversity throughout the organisation. Looking ahead, we commit to further strengthen the integration of disability and overall diversity issues in the work of our Board of Directors, with the aim to maximise the social and economic value that can be generated by this enhanced attention.

Maria Patrizia Grieco, Enel Chairman

 

We’re proud to support The Valuable 500 initiative and champion disability inclusion throughout Centrica. It’s important that we can welcome and support colleagues who reflect the full diversity of the societies in which we work and the customers we serve. Employing a diverse range of talent also helps us to think differently and support our customers’ changing needs. Our employee networks, including our Disability and Wellness Network already provide a vital source of support and advice to our colleagues as well as promoting a broader culture of inclusiveness and innovation, but we also know that we can improve and there is still more work to be done.

Iain Conn, CEO of Centrica

 

MARUI GROUP envisions a world in which we have transcended all dichotomies to build a flourishing and inclusive society that offers happiness to all. A society cannot be said to be happy if happiness is only provided to certain groups. Only when happiness is available to all can society truly flourish.

Since its founding in 1931, MARUI GROUP has continued to evolve its unique business model merging retailing and finance to reflect the changes in the times and in customers, all the while being guided by the co-creation philosophy that “creditability should be built together with customers.” Today, the concept of inclusion—integrating and including individuals that had previously been excluded—infuses our quest to help shape the future. We believe that expanding the intersection between the interests of all people through inclusion is a shortcut to the realization of a flourishing and inclusive society that offers happiness to all. Inclusion is both a philosophy and a strategy, a key principle for transcending dichotomies to resolve social issues while increasing corporate value.

Hiroshi Aoi, President, Chief Executive Officer & Representative Director of MARUI GROUP

 

We at Mitsui Chemicals, Inc. have positioned three values, “Diversity,” “Challenge” and “One Team” as our core values. We believe that our participation in the Valuable 500 will help us accelerate our endeavor to “make the most of diversity and create a workplace where each employee has a positive attitude towards the work,” a goal which is included in our core values.

Tsutomu Tannowa, President & Chief Executive Officer of Mitsui Chemicals, Inc.

 

Global businesses signed up to The Valuable 500 include Sainsbury’s, Unilever, Microsoft, Bank of England, KPMG, EY, O2 (Telefonica UK) and Virgin Media.

These companies and leaders are taking a number of steps to support disability inclusion and equality throughout their businesses – reflecting a groundswell of corporate appetite to drive action on disability inclusion in business.

Enel, for example, is evaluating the extension by 2022 of the Pedius App for deaf people in all the countries where it operates. In 2018, Enel was the first energy utility to introduce Pedius for employees and customers in Italy and, in 2019, for customers in Peru and, through its Spanish subsidiary Endesa, also in Spain. The App aims to facilitate communication by using “speech to text” recognition and synthesis that converts a text message into an artificial voice and, likewise, the voice into a text message. The App also allows deaf Enel staff to contact their IT helpdesk and to participate in Skype meetings through the generation of subtitles.

In addition to Pedius, the Group has launched other initiatives aimed at the inclusion of its disabled customers, including bills in braille as well as accessible web sites and documents allowing for the creation of value for all stakeholders by improving user experience.

The Valuable 500 campaign seeks to tackle the trend for businesses to claim they are diverse, but exclude disability from their definition of diversity, following research by EY commissioned by #valuable found disability is still woefully absent from the majority of board level discussions globally – with the majority (56%) of global senior executives rarely or never discussing disability on their leadership agendas.

Today, over one billion people across the world live with some form of disability – 15% of the global population, or 1 in 7 people – but their value is routinely ignored by business, equivalent to disregarding a potential market the size of US, Brazil, Indonesia and Pakistan combined.

Along with their friends, families and communities, the one billion disabled people worldwide also hold a disposable annual income of $8 trillion a year, equating to an opportunity that business cannot afford to ignore. Of those one billion, 80% of disabilities are acquired later life, and our ageing global population means the prevalence of disability is on the rise.

#valuable is a catalyst for an inclusion revolution that exists to position disability equally on the global business leadership agenda. It is spearheaded by award-winning activist, social entrepreneur and Binc founder Caroline Casey, who is registered blind.

Media contacts.

Eloise Keightley, Seven Hills.

Richard Poston, Director of Communications, the Valuable 500.

Notes to Editors.

Applying for Membership of The Valuable 500.

To apply to be a Valuable 500 business, please apply via the contact form below.

Membership of The Valuable 500 includes:

By becoming a member of The Valuable 500, you agree to:

About #valuable.

Launched by Binc, #valuable is a campaign working to ensure businesses globally recognise the value of the one billion people around the world living with a disability. We believe that building a global society that recognises the value of the 1 billion people living with a disability starts with business. We’re on a mission to make sure businesses across the world recognise the value of the one billion people living with a disability.

Binc was founded by social entrepreneur and activist Caroline Casey in 2015, with a mission to ignite a historic global movement for a new age of business inclusion. Binc is capitalising on Caroline Casey’s 18-year track record of success engaging over 450 organisations and working with 500,000 business leaders. Binc fundamentally believes that inclusive business creates inclusive societies and is initiating a new approach to business that genuinely includes the 1 billion people living in the world with a disability. Binc is the founding team behind valuable, an ambitious global campaign to put inclusivity on top of the business agenda around the world in 2019. Binc is using a tried and tested formula that has worked in the past for gender, race and LGBT to leverage the exponential rise of The Diversity and Inclusion Agenda.

About Shell.

Shell is a global group of energy and petrochemical companies, with an average of 86,000 employees in over 70 countries. They are headquartered in The Hague, the Netherlands. Shell UK employs around 6,000 people in the UK and provides 10% of the UK’s oil and gas.

About ENEL.

Enel is a multinational power company and a leading integrated player in the global power, gas and renewables markets. It is the largest European utility by market capitalisation and ordinary EBITDA, and is present in over 30 countries worldwide, producing energy with around 90 GW of managed capacity. Enel distributes electricity through a network of over 2.2 million kilometres, and with around 73 million business and household end users globally, the Group has the largest customer base among its European peers. Enel’s renewables arm Enel Green Power already manages over 43 GW of wind, solar, geothermal and hydropower plants in Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania.

About Centrica.

Centrica is a leading international energy services and solutions provider, supplying energy, services and solutions to over 26 million customer accounts across the world through brands including British Gas, with 29,000 employees globally. Centrica’s purpose is to satisfy the changing needs of its customers, and support the transition to a lower carbon future. Centrica’s published aims are to reduce emissions in line with the Paris climate goals by 2030 and develop a path to net zero by 2050.

Definition of disability:

#valuable uses the definition provided by the UN Convention on Rights of Persons with disabilities, which defines a person living with a disability as ‘those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others.’

Disability and the Sustainable Development Goals

The need to advance disability inclusion around the globe is essential to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Disability or ‘persons with disabilities’ are specifically referenced 11 times in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with a further six references to ‘persons in vulnerable situations’. Principally with reference to: promoting inclusive economic growth that allows disabled people to fully access the job market and guaranteeing equal and accessible education through the creation of inclusive environments.