Materiality looks at why, and at what point, issues are important to the organisation and its stakeholders by determining their relevance and significance. A material issue is an issue that will influence the decisions, actions and performance of an organisation or its stakeholders.
It’s important to us that we cover these issues in our reporting process – so to help us we carried out a materiality test. This process was designed to gather information and feed into an analysis framework that reflects best practice guidance and criteria for AA1000 AS and GRI G3 reporting standards.
A level of priority was then populated into a matrix. This informed the content of both the CR sections of our Annual Report and our Corporate Responsibility Report.
Materiality Matrix for United Utilities Reporting in 2009