Environment policy

The direct footprint, which is small

Bracton Ltd is one director, working remote first, with no office lease, no fleet, no manufacturing and no physical product. Remote working removes commuting from the footprint by design, travel happens where a meeting genuinely earns the journey and by rail where that is practical, and equipment runs on power saving settings for a long service life rather than being replaced on a cycle.

The company is well below the size at which reporting energy use and carbon emissions is compulsory. It measures its material emissions from the first year of trading using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the conversion factors published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, and publishes the result annually even though it does not have to. Where no figure has been measured, none is published, and this policy carries no target the company has not committed to.

The footprint that will matter

For a hosted software product, the direct footprint of the company is the smaller half of the question. The larger half is the electricity behind the servers that run the platform and the models that run over a firm's caseload, and that consumption rises with every firm that signs rather than with anything the company does at a desk.

Running a language model across every live matter in a firm every night is a real energy cost, and it is a cost the design decides rather than one that arrives. So the position is set out here in the terms an engineer would recognise, because a commitment written in any other terms cannot be checked.

What that means in the design

The model is sized to the task rather than chosen for headroom. A great deal of what the product does, matching a date to a rule, spotting a matter with no activity, reconciling a ledger entry, does not need a language model at all, and where it does not need one it does not use one. Where it does need one, the smallest model that does the work properly is the one that runs, and the choice is recorded rather than left to whoever wrote the feature.

The overnight sweep runs as a single pass over a firm's caseload rather than repeatedly through the day, which is the arrangement that produces the least compute for the same result, and work that has already been done is not redone because a page was refreshed.

Hosting is in the United Kingdom, which is a requirement of the security position rather than an environmental choice, and within that requirement the carbon intensity of a provider's United Kingdom regions is one of the criteria on which the provider is selected. The host for a paying firm is not yet chosen, so this policy names none and claims nothing about the intensity of a supply the company has not bought.

Where the product's energy consumption is measured, the figures will be published in the same annual report as everything else, and a firm that wants to understand the consumption attributable to its own use will be given what the company holds.

What the company will not claim

No carbon neutral claim is made, because the company has not measured its emissions across a full trading year and has bought no offsets. No environmental certification is held. No supplier has been assessed against an environmental standard, because there are no material suppliers until the hosting provider is chosen.

The company has committed to submitting a letter to the Science Based Targets initiative within twenty four months of its first full trading year, so that its reduction targets are validated independently rather than set by the person they bind. Until that happens, this policy states a position and not an achievement.

Ownership and review

This policy is owned by the director of Bracton Ltd. It is reviewed annually, on the choice of a hosting provider, and on the choice of a model provider, because those two decisions between them determine most of what the company is responsible for.