To get the campaign growing, we joined forces with Trees for Life – a registered charity working to restore the Caledonian Forest. With a seedling for the first 100,000   e-mail addresses we received during our demutualisation campaign, we paid for 100,000 new trees. And our Shareholder News campaign at the end of last year boosted our donation to £150,000 – that’s a total of 150,000 seedlings.

Trees for Life has planted 54,178 trees already, with more to come this autumn.

In October, Group Secretariat won two awards at the ICSA Awards 2007:

• 'Most Innovative Approach to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)' for our shareholder communications, and
• 'Company Secretary of the Year' collected by Malcolm Wood.

To find out more about the awards, visit the ICSA website.

Our first dividend payment

On 31 May, Standard Life plc shareholders received their first dividend payment of 5.4p per share – covering the time from flotation to 31 December 2006. 30% of shareholders chose to re-invest their dividends and buy more Standard Life shares rather than receive cash – an impressive achievement compared to the industry average of just 5%.

We also collected bank details from almost 600,000 shareholders. This means instead of paying by cheque we can pay dividends directly into bank accounts – which is much faster and easier for our shareholders.

Our first interim dividend of 3.8p per share will be paid on 30 November 2007.

Standard Life plc held its first Annual General Meeting as a listed company on 29 May. Over 300,000 of our shareholders voted – in person, online or by post. All resolutions were successfully passed and the AGM finished on a forward-looking note with our new Chairman, Gerry Grimstone, taking over from Sir Brian Stewart.