Corporate Social Responsibility

UCB has published its second Corporate and Social Responsibility (CSR) report in March 2011, as part of the Annual Report 2010.

Operating in a caring and socially responsible manner, especially when it comes to improving the lives of people with severe diseases through innovative therapies and support programmes, has been one of the distinguishing characteristics of UCB over many years.

We are driven by a passion to make a genuine difference in the lives of patients and their families in a caring and socially responsible manner.

We do this by:

• Involving patients and caregivers first-hand in all facets of our business - patient centricity
• Respecting employees and providing an environment where people can express their talents
• Complying with strict regulations governing the biopharma world
• Working towards a green planet through the use of clean technologies.

We hold ourselves accountable for social, environmental and economic progress, i.e. valuing corporate performance beyond finance

• Define KPIs/benchmarks according to Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines and assured by external auditors
• Formalise and strengthen commitment to CSR performance.

Patients

• Involving patients from the early stage of research and innovation through to the commercialisation of safe and high quality medication
• Supporting patient communities in developing programmes where they can share their experience with others to help demystify diseases.

People

• Recognising and rewarding performance and talent
• Empowering employees to make a difference for the benefit of the patient
• Accompanying our staff through our transformation into a lean biopharmaceutical company
• Valuing and fostering diversity: 71 nationalities and a balanced percentage of women (48%)
• Aiming at zero accidents: health & safety at work - a priority!

Ethics

• Meeting the high standards of compliance, integrity and ethical business conduct
• Responsibly ‘replacing, reducing, refining’ the use of animal models in the laboratory
• Reducing the utilisation of human tissue
• Disclosing balanced and accurate information on hypothesis-testing clinical studies
• Committing to high standards of corporate governance.

Planet

• Investing in green chemistry and optimising waste management
• Minimising energy consumption and opting for renewable sources of energy
• Assessing any risk of soil pollution and complying with remediation obligations of historical pollution
• Considering our environmental & social responsibilities across the entire lifecycle of the services and items purchased.

We welcome any suggestions or comments you might have, please email us at csr@ucb.com