Charity support

One of our four company values is Community, and a key element of this is being proactive in the community advocating the social, economic and environmental benefits of our services.

Every day National Express touches the lives of thousands of people across Britain through our bus, coach and train services. As a good corporate citizen, we recognise that we can make a positive contribution to be the communities we serve. The way that we can do this is to focus our charitable involvement on activities which benefit and support our bus, coach and train customers and through encouraging our employees to become involved in the communities in which they live and work.

What we currently do:

Involvement in the Community

In the areas we serve, we encourage partnerships with local community organisations, schools and colleges to support projects that will tackle issues related to travel.

For example, in the West Midlands we work with schools as part of the Safer Travel initiative to tackle issues of anti-social behaviour.

Employee support

We encourage our employees to get involved in their local communities, through volunteering or fundraising for local initiatives, and all employees are encouraged to make use of the company's payroll giving facility.

During 2009 we launched our Employee Charity Panel to encourage and support more staff to get involved  with the community. Employees can apply for funding to support any charitable or community initiative they are personally involved with. These applications are reviewed by our Employee Charity Panel who now meet quarterly to identify and allocate funds for those charities that they think will benefit most. Successful Employee Charity Panel applications are actively promoted via internal business newsletters and additionally generate news items in local newspapers.

Corporate Activity

In May 2012, we launched the National Express Foundation, to support the development achievement of young people throught the provision of student bursaries and community grants.

National Express continues to support Transaid, an international development charity, in providing trainers to improve bus driving standards in Tanzania. Qualified trainers have been seconded to the Tanzanian National Institute of Training in Dar es Salaam to build the skills of local driving instructors.

You can find out more about our partnership with Transaid here.

In Spain, Alsa provides support to a number of organisations. Since 2007 it has been working with Unicef to improve the conditions in babies are brought up in certain areas of Morocco. The next phase of the project will focus on the provision of neonatal and post natal care.

In North America, Durham School Services adopted the Special Olympics as its number one charitable cause in 1996.

What we don't support

The focus for our charitable support is in areas aligned to our business and our employees. We are therefore unable to support financial requests from individuals outside the business, political or denominational groups, arts or sports groups, medical and animal welfare organisations or building projects.

We don't normally support requests for advertising or sponsorship unless they are part of a project we are already involved with.

Because of the volume of requests we get, we are also unable to offer free travel for charity "jailbreaks" and other external fundraising events.