Our strategy
Good Together
Welcome to our 2009/10 Corporate Responsibility Report. 2009 was the year that Whitbread launched its new Corporate Responsibility programme 'Good Together'. We have put together this report to introduce Good Together to you. We will tell you about the strategy and the structure of Good Together, we will show how it builds on our previous charitable and community work. We will also report on the progress we have made as well as the new targets and direction that we have set ourselves.
What is Good Together?
Good Together is an overarching strategy and programme of initiatives to drive sustainable performance and further deepen corporate responsibility in our business. It is a broad and ambitious programme that aims to help Whitbread's people, customers and supply chain partners make changes to how they work and how they 'eat, sleep and drink' Whitbread. When combined, these changes will make a significant difference to the Company's overall environmental and social footprint.
"Good Together is our way of uniting the power and potential of our people, customers and suppliers so that we can make a genuine difference. We are at the start of an exciting journey." Alan Parker, Chief Executive.
Our Good Together targets
To help drive Good Together we have set the following public targets:
- Reduce our relative operational (scope 1 and 2) carbon emissions by 26% vs. a 2009/10 baseline by 2020.
- Achieve 80% of waste diverted from landfill from Whitbread Hotels & Restaurants sites by February 2012.
- Achieve a relative 20% reduction in water consumption in our Hotels and Restaurant portfolio against a 2009/10 baseline by 2020.
- 100% of all Costa Coffee production for UK stores to be Rainforest Alliance certified by June 2010.
- Launch purpose-built 'green hotel and restaurant' at Burgess Hill, West Sussex (to open in Autumn 2010).
- Achieve 3,000 qualifications from Whitbread Hotels & Restaurant Apprenticeship scheme. 400 Costa learners trained by the end of 2011.
- Raise £1 million for WaterAid over the next 2 years.
- To raise funds for and build Costa Foundation Schools sufficient to educate 15,000 children in coffee growing communities by 2012.
We will report on how we are delivering against these targets. We will also set more targets as Good Together develops and evolves. We will prioritise setting targets in those areas of Good Together which as yet do not have public targets associated and also consider the need for interim targets to demonstrate our pathway towards longer term objectives.
Why do we need Good Together?
In 2008 we reviewed our corporate responsibility strategy. We have a long history in Whitbread of community involvement and charitable activity. We knew that there was plenty of good activity already underway in the business. For example, we had significantly reduced team turnover, we had raised £675,000 for Hospitality Action and more than £200,000 for the Costa Foundation over the financial years 2006 and 2007.
We had also invested for several years in projects to make our buildings greener and to start to reduce energy consumption and water use. We felt, however, that there was an opportunity to take our activity to the next level. Our new strategy builds on these successes and integrates our various CR activities. In launching Good Together, we have set a new level of ambition for Whitbread.
What we heard from our customers and our people
We engaged support from PricewaterhouseCoopers Sustainability and Climate Change team and consulted with over 8,000 customers, 3,000 team members and the Group's 50 directors and Board Members about our approach to corporate responsibility. We also undertook a comprehensive peer and market analysis to understand consumer and macro trends relating to sustainability that are relevant to our business and our customers.
We learnt that across all our brands:
- More than 60% of our customers and people were 'very concerned' about environmental issues and expected companies to take action.
- More than 70% had started to take action at home by recycling or switching to low energy light bulbs for example.
- Only 40% felt that we were doing enough as a business to meet this challenge.
This was a clear call to action for us. Our market analysis also told us that the hotels and leisure sector in general has more to do to catch up with leading retailers in meeting and indeed driving consumer action on key issues such as climate change, water scarcity, and poverty.
A strategic opportunity
Good Together represents a strategic opportunity for the business. Our overall company vision, which we call the Whitbread Way Forward is to build the best large-scale hospitality brands in the world by becoming the most customer focused organisation there is, anywhere.
We will do this by providing outstanding value and making everyday experiences feel special - so that our customers come back time and time again.
Our research tells us that our customers want to see hotels, restaurants and coffee shops doing more to be sustainable. Good Together is our response and is part of our strategy to build our brands through being customer focused.
We pride ourselves at Whitbread on providing a great quality product and a great customer experience at unbeatable value. We believe that sustainable choices should be accessible for everyone and not a niche or a 'premium' alternative.
Customers are attracted to and feel the need for greener choices. But they don't want to pay more or to sacrifice quality and we don't think they should have to. Our aim for a sustainable Whitbread is to integrate corporate responsibility into everything we do to bring a better, greener but affordable way to eat, sleep and drink Whitbread.
Increasingly investors are seeing good Corporate Responsibility programmes as an indicator of wider good management and good governance. As you will read later in this report, in our Environment section in particular, Good Together also offers direct, measurable and significant opportunities for cost efficiencies through saving water and energy and waste. In the past year we have received an increasing number of enquiries from our major shareholders regarding Good Together and our green credentials.
In summary, being a sector leader in corporate responsibility will help us to achieve our wider strategy as we will:
- Differentiate ourselves in the marketplace with customers.
- Motivate and inform our people to deliver an even more special experience for our customers.
- Protect and enhance our reputation with government and opinion formers.
- Reduce costs and provide better returns for our investors.
