About

Team size: 30

Major legal advisers: Allen & Overy, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, Eversheds Sutherland, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Owen White, Pinsent Masons, Towerhouse

The aviation industry has faced intense public scrutiny for its sizeable carbon footprint in recent years. Movements such as flygskam – a Swedish word that translates to ‘flight shaming’ – are encouraging people to avoid air travel, while the head of industry body the International Air Transport Association, Alexandre de Juniac, in 2019 conceded the sector is under ‘considerable pressure’.

At Europe’s busiest airport, Heathrow, GC Carol Hui in 2017 saw her remit expanded upon being appointed chief of staff to include the communications and sustainability departments. Heathrow’s sustainability and environment director, Matthew Gorman, reports directly to Hui, with sustainability a core focus of the airport’s Heathrow 2.0 strategy. ‘Our chief executive takes it very seriously, and the whole executive and board are involved,’ Hui comments. ‘It is an important thing not just facing the airport, but aviation.’

The key tenets of the 35 goals that make up that 2.0 strategy include: becoming a carbon neutral airport in 2020; providing 10,000 apprenticeships by 2030; increasing the proportion of passenger airport journeys using public transport from 40% to 50% in the same timeframe; and complying with London Living Wage standards for direct suppliers by 2020. In doing so, the airport wants to become a great place to work and to live nearby, and help create a thriving sustainable economy.

The airport claims that emissions it can control, such as the energy to heat and light its building, account for just 1% of the total carbon impact Heathrow has. As such, it has turned to investing in research and ideas for incentivising improvement, such as providing a year’s free landing charges for electric aircraft.

‘We’re trying to do things a lot quicker and earlier because a lot of the issues are not so much about the airport infrastructure, it’s about carbon emissions from planes,’ Hui says. ‘So we’re trying to lend our voice to specific areas that are tangible and achievable and after doing a lot of analysis, we think sustainable aviation fuels are the way to go. During that transition, we’re also talking about carbon removal and offsetting and have invested in peatlands restoration to help absorb carbon. Ideally, we want to get to the nirvana position of carbon zero, but in the meantime, the reality is people still want to fly and aviation needs to be a force for good.’

Hui is also credited with revamping the legal department since her arrival in 2009. There was no formal panel before she took the role, but she quickly reduced reliance on external lawyers to keep the majority of work in-house. The airport recently slimmed down its legal panel from nine to seven firms and restructured it from 11 sub-panels to a main general approved list. Hui led the review, with the panel effective for three years from 1 January 2019.

At one of those approved firms, Eversheds Sutherland partner Tom Bray comments: ‘The internal working relationships between the legal function and the business have improved hugely. They have also introduced cross-panel collaboration in a meaningful way, which has led to benefits for the in-house function and the panel firms combined.’