During 2007, Bradford & Bingley grew its community programme by 10% to £1,850,616 (2006: £1,687,011) as we continued our investment into the communities in which we live and work. This is the seventh consecutive year we have invested over £1 million and the second time we have invested in excess of £1.5 million.
We believe it is important to have a community programme that is relevant to Bradford & Bingley as a business, and so, we continue to have preventing and alleviating the causes of homelessness as our main corporate area of support. We have also used the increase in our community programme this year to launch a number of schemes supporting personal finance education in schools and with parents as a second area of corporate support.
Bradford & Bingley invests heavily in the West Yorkshire region, specifically in Bradford and the Aire Valley, where our Head Office is based. We support a wider range of community projects in West Yorkshire, including a number of grass roots and community sports projects run by the major professional sports clubs in the area.
Supporting our staff is also important to us, we have two schemes that are available to our staff across the country to support their choice of charities – matched fundraising and matched payroll giving.