CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY
AT RELX

Our businesses and our unique contributions

• Risk provides essential insight to protect people and industry
• Scientific, Technical & Medical contributes to advancing human welfare and economic progress through its science and health information tools and analytics
• Legal is committed to advancing the rule of law through legal information and analytics and its core business operations
• Exhibitions fosters communities, enhancing productivity and efficiency

RISK

LexisNexis Risk Solutions (LNRS) products and services align with SDG 16 (Peace, Justice And Strong Institutions) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), among others. Our products and services help citizens access vital government benefits, protect society by detecting and preventing fraud across a range of business sectors and at US government levels, and help law enforcement keep communities safe. We have established data privacy principles, governance structures and control programmes designed to ensure data privacy requirements are met and personally identifiable information is protected, and individuals’ privacy concerns are addressed across all jurisdictions where we operate. We work with established privacy advocacy groups, federal and state legislators and other interested parties and always operate within relevant legal, regulatory, ethical and best practice frameworks.

In 2022 Risk combined Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a host of complex fraud signals to better predict when an online banking user is about to send a payment to a fraudster. Following trials with two major UK banks, there was a 120% increase in detection of in-progress Authorised Push Payment fraud among online banking customers. In 2022, LexisNexis Financial Crime Digital Intelligence, a financial crime compliance solution that leverages digital identity data to transform compliance workflows, was recognized with Aite-Novarica Group’s 2022 Anti-Money Laundering Impact Award which recognises organisations and vendors for new and disruptive financial crime solutions that most effectively and efficiently counter escalating financial crime threats.

The ADAM programme was developed and donated by LNRS in 2000 to help the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) find missing children. ADAM technology, which is still maintained and enhanced by LNRS employees, distributes missing child alert posters to law enforcement, hospitals, retail, businesses and the public within specific geographic search areas. In 2022, ADAM distributed 1.5m poster alerts on over 1,880 missing child cases that helped NCMEC resolve over 1,300 missing child cases.

Scientific, Technical & Medical

Elsevier plays an important role in advancing human welfare and economic progress through its science and health information, which spurs innovation and enables critical decision-making. Among others, Elsevier makes a significant contribution to SDG 3 (Good Health And Well-Being), SDG 5 (Gender Equality), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) and SDG13 (Climate Action).

To broaden access to its content, Elsevier supports programmes in places where resources are often scarce. Among them is Research4Life, a partnership with UN agencies and over 200 publishers; we provide core and cutting-edge scientific information to researchers in 125 low and middle-income countries. As a founding partner and leading contributor, Elsevier provides around 15% of the material available in Research4Life, encompassing approximately 5,000 journals and 30,000 e-books.

In 2022, there were over 1.5m Research4Life downloads from ScienceDirect. In serving the global scientific research community, Elsevier published over 600,000 articles in 2022.

In 2022, the Elsevier Foundation advanced Research4Life’s new Country Connectors initiative which aims to heighten awareness and use of Research4Life content, building communities of users by establishing national focal points in Bhutan, Eswatini, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Tanzania. Connectors are creating tailored networking, information skills building and promotion, empowering users to drive change in their communities.

To bridge the clinical practice gap in low-income countries, the Elsevier Foundation continued its partnership with Amref HealthAfrica’s LEAP programme which scales mobile learning for healthcare workers in Ethiopia. Elsevier data scientists are working with long-standing partner, Datakind, to build predictive analytics capacity to help Amref understand how their platform engages learners and health outcomes.

SSRN is Elsevier’s preprint and early-stage research platform. It enables researchers around the world to openly share their work so that it’s freely available to others in their field and the wider research community, promoting discussion, collaboration and the exchange of ideas. In 2022 SSRN exceeded 1m papers on the platform and over 200m content downloads.

Legal

LexisNexis Legal & Professional (LNL&P) advances SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) through its products and services that promote the Rule of Law. The LNL&P global legal and news database contains 144bn documents and records providing transparency of the law in more than 150 countries, with some 1.2m new legal documents added daily.

Through its content, data and analytics, LNL&P supports the four components of the Rule of Law: transparency of law, equality under the law, independent judiciaries and accessible legal remedy.

Legal has partnered with the International Bar Association (IBA) on the eyeWitness to Atrocities App, which allows human rights defenders to document and report human rights abuses in a secure and verifiable way so information can be used as admissible evidence in relevant forums such as the International Criminal Court of Justice. LNL&P utilises its premium data hosting capabilities to provide a secure repository for the information collected, with over 40,000 photos and videos uploaded to date, including over 20,000 relating to allegations of Human Rights abuses and crimes against humanity in Ukraine. In 2022, we provided support for the creation of a Ukrainian language version of the app. Learn more here:

In 2022, Legal, in partnership with the LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation (LNROLF) and the Ukrainian National Bar Association, developed the LexisNexis Legal Aid Portal – Ukraine. The portal allows law firms and corporations to offer legal jobs and complimentary legal assistance to Ukrainian lawyers, enabling them to receive help from anywhere in the world.

Legal launched a new ESG tracker in 2022 that leverages Nexis Newsdesk to allow users to explore ESG trends and conduct customisable searches. It includes a search bar delivering the top 15 ESG-related news stories sourced in real time, drawing on nearly 100,000 news sources written in over 90 languages. The ESG tracker allows users to create comparisons between their ESG efforts and those of competitors.

Exhibitions

RX events strengthen communities and supports the SDGs, including SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) and SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities). In addition, RX events support SDG 13 (Climate Action) by allowing customers to conduct business more efficiently in a single setting, avoiding the need to travel and expend more emissions in order to see customers individually.

RX saw a strong return to face-to-face events in 2022. According to RX’s 2022 Customer Mindset Tracking Study, face-to-face business remains a key priority for customers looking to rebuild supply chains, renew their order books, and grow their businesses in a post/late Covid-19 world. 75% of small and medium enterprises which have been hardest hit by the absence of live marketplaces over the past two years, said trade events offered them something that they cannot get elsewhere. Returning customers also took advantage of new RX digital and data analysis tools to source business solutions and suppliers, capture more leads, and analyse and improve their event performance.

In 2022, as part of its five-year, $1m commitment to racial equity, RX supported two new charity partners: The Research in Color Foundation, a US-based, non-profit organisation which seeks to diversify economics through mentoring and financial support; and the GO Foundation in Australia, which creates opportunities for indigenous youth through educational scholarships, cultural connection days and mentoring.

At the 2022 MIPTV television market, RX France presented its third annual MIP SDG Award which honours media companies for their contribution to delivering the SDGs. The 2022 award was presented to Association of Commercial Television and VOD Services in Europe, in recognition of its work combatting the spread of online disinformation. Junk Kouture received the first MIP SDG Innovation Award for encouraging young people to create high fashion from recycled materials. The event also features the MIPCOM Diversify TV Excellence Awards, now in their sixth year, to honour the most compelling creators, characters and stories promoting diversity and inclusion on-screen. Among them were Pour toi Flora, a Radio Canada drama that explores the legacy of the trauma inflicted on Canada’s indigenous communities and Exceptional, a teen drama about a girl with autism, from Israel’s Kan 11.

Building on the success of its US programme for guests with disabilities, ReedPop introduced an accessibility programme at MCM Comic Con London for the first time in 2022 to ensure all fans had an equally rewarding experience. This included special assistance stickers and carer passes, special assistance lanes for entry to the venue, show floor and main stages, and British Sign Language interpreters for selected panels. The team also provided a dedicated ‘Reset Room’, staffed by volunteers from the mental health charity Gaming the Mind, for anyone feeling anxious, overstimulated or simply needing time out. Learn more here.

across RELX

Recognising that across RELX we have products, services, tools and events that advance the UN’s 17 SDGs, we created the free RELX SDG Resource Centre in 2017 to advance awareness, knowledge and implementation. Since 2017, we have made over 1,500 journal articles and book chapters free to access via the RELX SDG Resource Centre which would have otherwise cost over £3m to make open access.

We held our annual RELX SDG Inspiration Day in the year with a focus on SDG16, Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions, giving thought leaders, corporate representatives, investors, governments, and NGOs a common platform to discuss challenges and opportunities for collaboration. Keynote speakers included former Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, and legendary musician and political activist, Sir Bob Geldof. Learn more here:

2022 marked the twelfth year of the RELX Environmental Challenge, focused on providing improved and sustainable access to water and sanitation where it is presently at risk. The $50,000 first prize winner was Caminos de Agua, a US charity operating in Mexico which develops low-cost, community run groundwater treatment systems that remove arsenic and fluoride from community water supplies. The $25,000 second prize winner was MSABI, a Tanzanian organisation with a subscription-based model for maintaining community water pumps. For more information on the winners, read this story.

2023 UNIQUE CONTRIBUTIONS OBJECTIVES
Protection of society – SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities): Expansion of financial inclusion efforts in Africa and APAC working to provide lenders with improved risk information from alternative credit data to benefit more people

Advance of science and health – SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities and SDG 13 (Climate Action): Global partnerships to advance an inclusive approach to climate action, including with the World Academy of Sciences to support women scientists in the Global South working to address climate change

Promotion of the rule of law and access to justice - SDG 16 (Peace, Justice And Strong Institutions): Advance the United Nations Global Compact’s SDG 16 Business Framework on Inspiring Transformational Governance to promote business understanding and implementation of SDG 16

Fostering communities - SDG 13 (Climate Action): Progress Net Zero Carbon Events initiative, including by reporting the net zero pathway for RX shows

Universal, sustainable access to information: Increase the number of unique users of the RELX SDG Resource Centre by 15% over 2022

BY 2030
Use our products and expertise to advance the SDGs, among them:

- SDG 3 (Good Health And Well-Being)
- SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities)
- SDG 13 (Climate Action)
- SDG 16 (Peace, Justice And Strong Institutions)

Enrich the SDG Resource Centre to ensure essential content, tools and events on the SDGs are freely available to all

Our People

One of our five RELX values is valuing our people and for us that means creating an environment where our employees can do their best work and achieve our business objectives. This, in turn, helps us be an employer of choice, so that we can recruit and retain the best people.

We conduct regular employee opinion surveys across RELX and our 2022 Pulse Survey had the highest response to date with almost 30,000 employees responding. Our Net Promoter Score is a key indicator, as it asks employees if they would recommend working at RELX, which continues to improve. We have also maintained employee engagement at 68%. Through these surveys we continually ask for feedback and ensure we respond accordingly to keep RELX an excellent place to work for all our people.

All four of our business areas were included in the 2022 Comparably Best Global Company culture list, Elsevier was 5th, LexisNexis Legal & Professional 18th, RX 31st and LexisNexis Risk Solutions 36th. LexisNexis Legal & Professional was cited in Comparably’s top 25 companies for career growth and LexisNexis Risk Solutions and RX received awards for best leadership teams. Kumsal Bayazit, CEO of Elsevier and Mike Walsh, CEO of LexisNexis Legal & Professional, were cited as two of the best CEOs for women and diversity.

Our workforce consists of over 35,000 people and seven years is the average length of service. 97% of our employees are full-time and 3% part-time, with the oldest employee being 86 years old. 1% of employees are temporary workers and we engage over 1,000 contingent workers. Approximately 13% of our employees were represented by a collective bargaining agreement. We estimate the total hours worked by all employees to be more than 63m in the year.

Training and development

We are proactive in helping our people to develop. Each year we undertake an organisational talent review that involves the CEO and other senior leaders identifying employee advancement opportunities. Employees have access to our global job board and can view and apply for available openings across the world.

Enabling Performance is our approach to personal development which reviews skills and achievements and identifies opportunities for recognition and advancement. Enabling Performance encourages regular and impactful performance, development and career conversations for all employees.

In 2022, we invested approximately $15m in training (including courses, seminars, one-to-one instruction and tuition reimbursement) to develop the capabilities and future potential of our people. RELX employees engaged in approximately 400,000 training hours in the year, including time spent on our online learning platforms. We invest in leading digital learning for all employees to support their personal and professional development via mobile and other devices.

Career development is further supported by a global mentorship programme, NetWorx, that involves participants from across our business areas. The digital mentoring platform recommends matches based on individual profiles and specific goals, creating six month long mentoring relationships. In 2022, the platform supported more than 500 active mentoring pairs.

Inclusion and diversity

The importance of inclusion and diversity is enshrined in our Code of Ethics and Business Conduct. We prohibit discrimination. We recruit, hire, develop, promote and provide conditions of employment without regard to race, colour, creed, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, marital status, age, disability or any other category protected by law. This includes accommodating employees’ disabilities and religious beliefs and practices.

At RELX, inclusion and diversity is also about encouraging, supporting and promoting diversity of thought across the Company. This includes diversity of national origin, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, as well as the other characteristics mentioned above such as gender, race, sexual orientation and religious beliefs. We derive competitive advantage from the breadth of backgrounds, diverse perspectives, opinions and differing ways of thinking that our employees bring to everything they do.

Our Inclusion and Diversity Policy builds on this and explains our commitment to a diverse workforce and an environment that respects individuals and their contributions. Practical action is driven by our inclusion strategy, and we have an Inclusion Council, composed of leaders from across our company, supported by a broader Inclusion Working Group with 240 participants. Our 2020-2025 inclusion goals, covering all aspects of diversity, guide our inclusion and diversity efforts. During 2022, we have progressed our inclusion goals through targeted initiatives encompassing training, development and recruitment.

Gender

In 2022, the gender diversity of our senior leader population increased from 30% women at the end of 2021 to 31%, while our women people managers remained at 44%. With respect to our Board of Directors, at year end 2022, women comprised 40% of the Board, and Non-Executive Director Marike van Lier Lels serves as our Workforce Engagement Director.

With some 10,000 technologists in our business, we need to attract the best talent for our current and future work. Of the approximately 8,000 technologists we employ, 25% are women. In 2022, we continued our Women in Technology internal mentoring programme. Senior women and men in technology serve as mentors to help high-potential women technologists advance. In 2022, there were 248 participants, a 143% increase from 2021. RELX is a signatory of the Tech Talent Charter, a non-profit organisation working to address inequality in the UK tech sector and in the year we contributed data in support of their Diversity in Tech report.

RELX is a signatory to the Women’s Empowerment Principles, a United Nations Global Compact and UN initiative to help companies empower women and promote gender equality.

reward and Pay equity

We have robust and well-established reward mechanisms across RELX, with a strong emphasis on performance, fairness and equity. In 2022, we introduced a programme of reward education for people managers to explain how our reward mechanisms operate and help build trust in reward.

In 2022, 45% of employees were eligible for variable pay through an annual incentive or commission plan.

We operate a number of different employee share plans including all-employee share purchase programmes in the UK and the Netherlands, which together represent approximately 20% of our employees. We will be rolling out a similar plan in the US in 2023, subject to shareholder approval at the 2023 AGM.

Performance targets associated with CR are embedded within our annual incentive framework to progress our annual and multi-year CR objectives.

Well-being and support

The global pandemic has had a long-lasting effect on how people work and we have many employees who are working from home most of the time. With this in mind, we have prioritised the physical and mental health of our people. We highlighted dedicated health and well-being resources available to all employees across RELX, maintained a network of more than 130 Well-being Champions, and marked World Wellbeing Week 2022 with events which highlighted health and well-being programmes and resources available to all RELX colleagues, including the Headspace app with mindfulness resources, and virtual fitness classes.

We offer employee assistance programmes to all our employees, providing professional counselling to help them and their family members with personal or work-related issues that may impact their health or well-being. This service is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

2023 PEOPLE OBJECTIVES
Inclusion – SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities): Expand Women in Tech Mentoring programme with more pairings

Well-being – SDG 3 (Good Health And Well-Being): Relaunch Fit2Win global employee fitness competition

BY 2030
Continued high-performing and satisfied workforce through talent development, D&I and well-being

Community

RELX Cares, our global community programme, supports employee volunteering and giving that makes a positive impact on society. In 2022, we made a gradual return to face-to-face volunteering and fundraising, while also continuing remote activities.

The mission of RELX Cares is education for disadvantaged young people that advances one or more of our unique contributions as a business. Employees have up to two days’ paid leave per year for their own community work. A network of over 240 RELX Cares Champions ensures the vibrancy of our community engagement.

In 2022, we held the 12th Recognising Those Who Care Awards to highlight colleagues who made outstanding contributions to their community during the pandemic. The winners – eight individuals and two teams – each received a cash sum to donate to the charity of their choice and were awarded additional volunteering days.

Each September, we hold RELX Cares Month to celebrate our commitment to our communities around the world. During the Month, over 3,000 colleagues across the Company took part in hundreds of volunteering and fundraising events.

During RELX Cares Month, colleagues engaged in activities ranging from fitness challenges including Risk’s You Move, We Donate; Elsevier India’s visit to a primary school to distribute stationery items for low-income children; US legal colleagues used Cares hours for beach clean-ups; and RX China colleagues held a walkathon to support educational services for children with autism.

In the wake of the Russian war in Ukraine, we gave approximately $1m, including to UNICEF, Red Cross, World Central Kitchen, the LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation, and Hope and Homes for Children, to provide vital humanitarian assistance. We also provided refugee assistance and in-kind product access to people affected by the conflict. Elsevier colleagues received three extra RELX Cares day in order to volunteer for charities aiding Ukraine.

Giving

Our central donations programme aligns with the RELX Cares mission. Employees serve as sponsors for charities seeking funding, which must in turn indicate how they meet one or more of RELX’s unique contributions as a business including protection of society and reducing inequalities, advancing science and improving health outcomes, furthering the Rule of Law and access to justice and fostering communities.

RELX Cares Champions vote on the submissions using decision criteria such as value to the beneficiary and opportunities for staff engagement. In 2022, RELX Cares Champions donated $250,000 to 22 charities supporting over 15,000 young people.

We donated £6.5m in cash (including through matching gifts), and £15.7m in products, services and staff time in 2022. Some 36% of employees, despite continuing pandemic restrictions in some locations, were engaged in volunteering through RELX Cares. According to 2022 B4SI data, the average volunteering rate was 21% for our sector and 7.3% for all sectors.

2023 COMMUNITY OBJECTIVES
Employee community engagement – SDG 17 (Partnerships For The Goals): Create new opportunities to engage remote workers in RELX Cares

Philanthropic giving – SDG 17 (Partnerships For The Goals): Undertake fundraising for Save the Children to help achieve the three-year target of $150,000

BY 2030
Through our unique contributions, significant, measurable advancement of education for disadvantaged young people; investments with partners for maximum impact

Improving customer outcomes

Our goal is to improve outcomes for our customers by providing information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers that benefit their daily work.

In 2022, electronic products and services accounted for 83% of revenue, up from 37% in 2006.

Digital knowledge and innovation: advancing customer goals

Across RELX, we work to address customer challenges through digital innovation.

Risk: ICIS, part of Risk, is a global provider of chemical and energy market intelligence. In 2022 ICIS launched Supplier Carbon Footprints to help companies measure, manage and identify opportunities to reduce global supply chain emissions for chemicals and plastics with ground-breaking emission data by supplier, plant, and product. Developed in partnership with Carbon Minds, Supplier Carbon Footprints provides emissions insights for 71 chemicals and plastics. Because emissions vary widely between supplier, region and plant, the tool provides more accurate findings than emissions calculated solely on a regional or country basis. With Supplier Carbon Footprints, organisations can clearly measure and compare the climate impact of their supply chains.

Scientific, Technical & Medical: Elsevier continued to improve its flagship clinical reference solution, ClinicalKey, to further streamline access to evidence-based information clinicians need to make informed decisions. In addition to single sign-on access added in the year, its auto-suggest capability was improved to include direct links to books and journals to enrich the user’s search experience. 126 new topics were added to the clinical overviews feature, medical topic synopses to assist in decision-making at the point of care, bringing the total to over 1,500.

Legal: In 2022, Legal enhanced Lexis+ with Fact & Issue Finder, a practice-specific feature that enables legal professionals to build legal strategies centred around the facts, issues and topics of their case, allowing litigators to generate precise, actionable search results and reducing time spent researching and compiling data from multiple sources.

Developed using feedback from customer interactions, Fact & Issue Finder mimics the processes that legal professionals perform when researching cases, enhancing the research experience with the use of search and machine-learning technologies, streamlined workflows and data visualisations. A single search can gather case law, practical guidance, verdicts and settlements, expert witness analytics, and unique practice-specific content, with the aggregated information displayed via an interactive dashboard.

Exhibitions: RX enhanced the power of its face-to-face events by launching Emperia in 2022, its smart, contactless mobile app for fast lead capture. Exhibitors can record visitors’ contact details and interests by scanning their badge. They can also rate leads according to priority and download them in real time for faster follow-up. At the 2022 PGA Show in Orlando, the industry’s biggest annual golf business event, over three-quarters of exhibitors used Emperia, generating over 40,000 connections. The average number of leads was 97, and the highest over 600.

Accessibility

We strive to empower all people, including persons with disabilities, by ensuring our products and services are accessible and easy to use by everyone. Our commitment to accessibility is embedded across RELX and advances our Inclusion Policy. We follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1 level AA).

We maintain an Accessibility Policy that highlights industry standards and tools to embed accessibility into our products and our business operations. We apply best practice from the RELX Accessibility Policy across hundreds of digital products and websites.

Our Accessibility Policy is available on www.relx.com/cr-downloads.

In 2022, members of the Accessibility Working Group logged over 240 accessibility projects and Elsevier’s Global Books Digital Archive fulfilled more than 3,300 disability requests, 87% of them through AccessText.org, a service we helped establish. Elsevier continued to enhance the accessibility of EPUB books by partnering with Benetech to move toward Global Certified Accessible status. Additionally, we continued work towards providing fully inclusive journal articles and book chapters in PDF format.

We worked with disability services offices, procurement officials, and instructors across the world to provide Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) and Accessibility Conformance Reports. Customers can also utilise the [email protected] inbox to connect with an accessibility expert and make VPAT and report requests. In the year, LNL&P’s Accessibility UX team generated VPATs for 36 products (21 of them new). We also offered a VPAT service package to help internal teams understand where they rank against accessibility standards compared with other products.

In 2022, ScienceDirect marked the 21st anniversary of including people with disabilities in design and usability testing with a new study to improve the user experience for people with visual impairments and launched new accessible features such as the first open access video journal, ScienceTalks, with closed captions and a fully accessible media player, the AblePlayer. Colleagues also released the first batch of accessibly tagged PDFs for 400 journal titles.

We promoted accessibility to outside companies and vendors throughout the year. RELX accessibility teams partnered with external content providers, including Highcharts, OAK, and Pendo, to advance accessible solutions for public benefit. Elsevier has collaborated with Highcharts for over seven years to continually improve the accessibility of its widely used chart library. In the year, we conducted research into scatter plots and large data sets and experimented with sonification, tactile displays and AI descriptions.

In 2022 we also celebrated the fourth RELX Accessibility Leadership Awards to showcase employees who demonstrate exceptional leadership in advancing accessibility, with winners announced on the International Day of Persons with Disabilities.

2023 CUSTOMER OBJECTIVES
Customer engagement – SDG 17 (Partnerships For The Goals): Strengthen Corporate Responsibility and sales team engagement

Quality – SDG 8 (Decent Work And Economic Growth): Roll out AI Principles across the business

Accessibility – SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities): Expand Accessibility Champions model across RELX

BY 2030
Continue to expand customer base across our four business areas through excellence in products and services, active listening and engagement, editorial and quality standards, and accessibility; a recognised advocate for ethical marketplace practices