Welcome to our 2012 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. This year’s report illustrates how the focus areas of our CR programme support our business approach of acting responsibly whilst we continue to grow.
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.
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 by:
- Acting in an ethical manner
- Taking care of our employees
- Being responsible for our impact on the environment
- Delivering support through charitable contributions
- Delivering value to our customers
Our business takes the long term view of what is right and this approach has driven our continuous investment in tackling environmental challenges, and working to achieve positive development in the challenging areas of social compliance.
During 2011, whilst NEXT has continued to grow, we have been able to deliver on our objectives of reducing our environmental impact and promoting good environmental practice. We are encouraged by the progress we have made reducing our carbon emissions, sending less waste to landfill and improving the efficiency of our vehicles. 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
11th July 2012