SECR reporting for professional services — UK guide

If you're a UK law firm, accountancy practice, management consultancy, recruitment business, PR agency, architecture practice or other professional services firm meeting the SECR thresholds (£36M+ turnover, £18M+ balance sheet, or 250+ employees), this guide covers what to file and where most professional services firms get it wrong.

SECR challenges specific to professional services

Four problems generic SECR templates handle poorly for professional services:

1. Tenant-only operations. Most professional services firms lease office space rather than own it. Landlord-controlled energy (common areas, lifts, central HVAC plant) is the landlord's scope 1 and 2. Tenant-paid energy (your office's directly metered electricity and gas, if any) is yours. The boundary matters — and most leased offices supply electricity via service charge, complicating data collection.
2. The scope 1 footprint is genuinely small. No site plant, no fleet beyond a few owned vehicles, no industrial process. Some firms have effectively zero scope 1 — which is true, but the narrative section has to explain it credibly.
3. Scope 3 is the entire story. Business travel (especially international consulting and legal travel), IT services (cloud computing, data centres, hardware), purchased professional services, and employee commuting are all material. Excluding scope 3 makes professional services SECR reports look unserious.
4. Client travel — embedded in client work — is a grey area. When a consultant flies on a client engagement and the cost is rebilled to the client, whose emissions are those? Operational-control-wise the firm controls the engagement, so they're typically the firm's; some firms argue the client controls the decision. Document the choice in the narrative.

Typical scope 1 emissions in professional services

Scope 1 for professional services is usually small:

• Natural gas — office heating and hot water (where the firm has its own gas meter — often only for stand-alone or freehold offices)
• Diesel, petrol and hybrid — owned vehicle fleet (small — partner cars, mobile teams in some firms)
• F-gas refrigerant leakage — only material for firms that own and operate their own building HVAC; usually a landlord scope item

Many leased-office professional services firms have effectively zero meaningful scope 1 — the narrative should state this and explain that the operational footprint sits primarily in tenant-paid scope 2 plus scope 3.

Typical scope 2 emissions in professional services

Scope 2 for professional services is grid electricity:

• Office lighting, small power, IT equipment (workstations, screens, on-prem servers)
• Office HVAC — where tenant-paid (often via service charge), or where the firm owns / has freehold of its building
• Hot water systems (where electric)
• Office kitchen equipment (commercial dishwashers, fridges, boilers for tea and coffee)

A larger directly-billed scope 2 figure usually indicates on-prem servers; a smaller one indicates a fully cloud-migrated firm.

Scope 3 considerations for professional services

Scope 3 is voluntary for SECR but is usually 80–95% of professional services emissions when measured. Critical categories:

• Category 1 — Purchased goods and services — IT cloud services (AWS, Azure, GCP), professional subcontractors (counsel, expert witnesses, specialist consultants), office supplies, print services
• Category 2 — Capital goods — IT hardware (laptops, monitors, phones)
• Category 6 — Business travel — typically the single largest scope 3 category. Air, rail, taxi, hotel
• Category 7 — Employee commuting — significant
• Category 8 — Upstream leased assets — landlord-controlled common area energy in your leased office, attributable to your floor area
• Category 14 — Franchises — for firms operating under a franchise model

Cloud computing scope 3 (category 1) is increasingly material — AWS, Azure and Google all now publish customer-specific carbon dashboards that feed into SECR-grade scope 3.

Common mistakes professional services firms make

1. Reporting only tenant-paid scope 2 electricity and ignoring scope 3 — produces a report dominated by office lighting, which looks unserious
2. Excluding business travel because data is in expense reports, not in finance ledgers — the data is recoverable from Concur, Egencia and similar
3. Forgetting upstream leased assets (scope 3 category 8) — landlord-controlled common areas attributable to your floorplate
4. Not asking the cloud provider for emissions data — AWS, Azure and Google all publish customer-specific reports
5. Reporting tCO₂e per £1M turnover without per FTE — the industry-standard intensity for professional services
6. Excluding subcontracted counsel and expert costs (law firms specifically) — these are scope 3 category 1
7. Treating client-rebilled travel as the client's emissions without documenting the decision — the operational-control test suggests it's still yours

Trade body context

Professional services has fragmented sector representation. Reference points:

• Law: The Law Society's Climate Change Sub-Committee and the Net Zero Lawyers Alliance; The Chancery Lane Project for contractual decarbonisation
• Accountancy: ICAEW, ACCA and CIMA all have climate-aligned guidance for member firms
• Management consulting: the MCA (Management Consultancies Association) has published sustainability reporting guidance
• Architecture and design: RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge, ARB
• Recruitment: REC sustainability guidance

The Better Business Act and B Corp framework are increasingly common references for professional services firms positioning beyond minimum compliance.