Our suppliers

Forging long-term supplier relationships

Over the years we have built many strong and mutually beneficial relationships with a number of suppliers. The criteria for the selection of our suppliers include the ability to meet our long-term needs by demonstrating technical excellence, financial strength, efficiency and the capability of developing a long-term partnership. In return, we provide them with development briefs and long-term account plans from which both can measure their success.

In today’s challenging trading environment such relationships with suppliers have continued to be invaluable in helping to offset some of the impact of raw material costs. We believe our relationships with long-term strategic suppliers underpin not only our future success, but theirs too.

Ethical Trading

We require our suppliers to comply with all local and national laws, in the areas of working hours and conditions, Health and Safety, rates of pay, terms of employment and minimum age of employment.

The Group supports the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the core conventions of the International Labour Organisation. We ask our suppliers to become members of SEDEX, a web-based tool enabling retailer and suppliers to maintain and share online data on labour standards throughout the supply chain. From time to time we carry out ethical audits on our suppliers based on risk-assessment and customer input.

 As we have previously reported, since the end of 2006 temporary labour providers in the UK have been obliged to obtain a Gangmasters Licence in order to operate legally in the agriculture, food processing and packaging sectors. We continue to work closely with a selected group of temporary labour providers to ensure the necessary licences are in place. All our temporary workers in the UK are subject to UK legislation.