ERM was appointed by Rio Tinto to undertake an external assurance assessment and data verification of its 2003 Social and environment review. This is the second year of our involvement as assurers and we will repeat a similar exercise in 2004 and 2005.

Our approach allows us to provide commentary on the Review's relevance, completeness, accuracy and responsiveness, and on the effectiveness of Rio Tinto's implementation of its nine non financial business policies, as expressed in The way we work.

Our aim this year was to extend further into the business by involving supervisor level employees and also members of the local community. Our activities for 2004 and 2005 will build further on these perspectives. Rio Tinto has encouraged us in this regard in an effort to seek greater transparency and to gain further insight from the assurance process.

This year we built on our assessment of alignment between Rio Tinto's policies and implementation at operational level and began to look more closely at how these policies drive performance at a sample of nine mining operations. We did this by conducting diagnostic workshops with the operation's general management team as we did last year. In addition, we interviewed local opinion formers, conducted diagnostic workshops with supervisor level employees and talked to people from the local community involved in Rio Tinto's community projects. We also reviewed data reporting processes at each operation.

At corporate level we interviewed six senior managers (including the chief executive and three product group chief executives) in Australia and the UK; we again conducted structured interviews with ten external opinion formers (NGOs, investors, academics and government institutions).

Also at corporate level, and in addition to last year, we reviewed data management and verification processes by interviewing staff involved in collecting and internally verifying performance data from the operations, reviewed corporate databases and process documentation (on a sample basis) and interviewed corporate and consultancy personnel involved in carrying out 'environmental data quality reviews' at operations.

Finally, we reviewed the 2003 Social and environment review and associated web-based Review to form an opinion on how well they represent progress and performance on the ground.