Assurance

In response to increasing corporate governance demands, in 2006 we formed a new Corporate Assurance function.

It has accountability and responsibility for providing internal assurance to the Board that:

• Our policies, standards and controls, as endorsed by the Board, are adequately designed and effective for their intended purpose
• These policies, standards and controls are consistently implemented by our sites on a timely basis and as designed.

During 2007, Corporate Assurance will take over the assurance accountabilities of all our functional departments that currently provide assurance, including those of Internal Audit, Community Relations and HSE.

The overall objective of the external assurance and verification components is to enhance the transparency and accountability of our performance on social and environmental issues by providing assurance that the material in the Sustainable development review is relevant, complete and accurate, and that, in particular, our policies and programmes are reflected in implementation activities at operations.

In 2006, Environmental Resources Management (ERM) undertook both the external assurance and health safety and environment data quality verification of our Review and have provided a statement to that effect.  ERM and Rio Tinto have agreed to a set of guiding criteria to prevent conflict of interest between ERM's assurance activities and other work undertaken for us by ERM.

We believe that it is important to learn from our assurance and verification activities. The recommendations made by ERM in the 2005 Sustainable development review have been assessed, and actions taken during 2006 are addressed in our response.

ERM's fees for this work in 2006 were £340,000.