How we manage it

Making Corporate Responsibility part of how we do business means setting standards and managing risks in line with our normal operating procedures.

How Whitbread does business

We aim to be a leader in sustainable hospitality in our market sector. To realise this vision, we have developed our Good Together Commitments that define our overall approach to corporate responsibility and provide us with a vision for our Good Together programme.

We call these Commitments How Whitbread Does Business, because Whitbread wishes to embed a responsible approach to business in everything we do. We will seek to apply these Commitments in all of our business decisions and operations wherever and whenever we do business across our UK and international operations.

As we have described in more detail in the strategy section of this report, 'Our Strategy', we believe that by applying these Commitments, Whitbread will be a business for which people will want to work, a business in which investors will want to invest and will own hospitality brands that customers will be proud to visit.

Our Commitments

Our Commitments are informed by the six areas of Good Together: that is the six areas of sustainability impact that we have defined as the most material to our business. They are also informed by the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the OECD Guidelines for Multi-National Enterprises and our Good Together strategy.

The Commitments cover:

• Supporting the principles of sustainable development.
• Minimising our environmental impact.
• Respect for fundamental human rights.
• Creating jobs and learning opportunities for our employees.
• Sourcing responsibly.
• Corporate governance.
• Dealing with customers in a fair and honest manner.
• Offering healthy food options and nutrition information.
• Supporting community and charitable activities.
• Following these Commitments consistently wherever we operate.

See the full Commitments.

Bringing the Commitments to life

We have already a set of Brand Standards, which detail how we should act at every stage of our customer journey with us. We are currently reviewing how we adapt our Brand Standards to take into account our Good Together programme.

We already have developed the following policies and procedures:

• Environment and energy.
• Human rights, code of conduct, training, development, health and safety.
• Responsible sourcing policy.
• Healthier eating policy.
• Diversity policy.

Some policies, Commitments or procedures are still to be developed. These are:

• Green construction.
• Global People Principles.
• Other product-specific sourcing policies such as timber, cotton etc.
• Country risk and and bribery.
• Customer charter, consumer interests.
• Additional international principles of operations.

See all our policies that are available to download.

Managing risk

We have worked this year to incorporate Corporate Responsibility into our Corporate Risk Register. We consider the key risk and opportunity area associated with Corporate Responsibility to be reputation management, relating to the perceptions of our investors, customers and our team members and future team members. We consider Corporate Responsibility to be part of good and effective management and part of complete and effective strategic planning.

We recognise that an effective CR programme has potential to affect our financial performance, for example, by delivering significant cost savings, attracting new customers and keeping our existing customers loyal to our brands. At this time, however, we do not consider the financial risk associated with non-delivery of our Good Together programme to be, in itself, sufficient to meet the materiality threshold we use for inclusion on our Corporate Risk Register.

We are in the process of developing a CR risk register as a tool for the Good Together Steering Committee in setting strategic direction and reporting to the Main Board.

See what our individual brands are doing:

• Hotels & Restaurants
• Costa