Welcome to our 2011 Corporate Responsibility Report
This year’s report details our approach to managing our business, and the measures we employ to ensure we operate both successfully and responsibly. For Next, corporate responsibility (CR) means addressing key business-related social, ethical and environmental impacts in a way that aims to bring value to all our stakeholders, including our shareholders. Continuous improvement lies at the heart of our business, and we are constantly looking for ways to ensure we run our business in a responsible way.
Next faces similar CR challenges to many other major retailers as we continue to operate in a challenging commercial environment. We believe it is important our business is supported by a robust approach to CR, where we see no conflict between our approach to corporate responsibility and good business practice. We are committed to develop our business to be more sustainable and responsible as we work within an increasingly complex set of issues we need to address for our business, our customers, the suppliers we trade with, the environment and the communities in which we operate.
Our key areas of responsibility are:
- Our Suppliers – we work for positive social, ethical and environmental improvements in our supply chain
- Our Customers – we work to ensure we meet or exceed our customers’ expectations through the delivery of excellent products and service
- Our People–we work to provide an environment where our employees are supported and respected, treated fairly and taken care of, listened to and are motivated to achieve their full potential
- Environment – we work to actively reduce the impacts of our business on the natural environment
- Community –we work to deliver value through our charitable contributions to charities and community groups
Through our objectives to reduce the environmental impact of our business, we are pleased to publicly report on a number of reduction targets we have been measuring internally for a number of years. The targets are focused on our key priority areas of energy, waste and distribution and are set against a baseline year of 2007 until 2015. Please see the Environment section for more details on our progress to date.
Our CR programme touches on some big issues that are vital to how we do business, and we aim to be honest, open and balanced in our CR reporting. I hope you find our report interesting and informative, and hope we have met your expectations of how we run Next as a responsible business.
Andrew Varley
Group Property Director – Main Board
19th July 2011