CE statement
"At Whitbread we want sustainability to be something that everyone can engage with and something that is affordable for everyone, every day...
...We aim to build Good Together into the heart of our business, so that it becomes an integral part of how we make decisions and measure our performance, how we choose our partners and how we express our core company values..."
Welcome to our 2009/10 Corporate Responsibility Report. 2009 was an exciting year for me and for all of us at Whitbread as it saw the launch of our new Corporate Responsibility strategy, Good Together. Good Together is an important evolution in our business: it is broad in scope and ambitious. It is designed to put us amongst the leaders in sustainable hospitality. It is a strategic opportunity for us and also a response to what we know our customers, our team members and also some of our most important investors want us to do.
At Whitbread we have 33,000 team members, over 3,500 suppliers and we serve more than 9 million customers each month. Good Together demonstrates, and starts to put into practice, the idea that together we can really make a difference if we make small but meaningful changes to how we live, how we travel and how we do business.
Our business model is to provide outstanding value and to make everyday experiences feel special. Our Good Together ambition is absolutely part of that. Customers don't want to pay more or to sacrifice quality for a greener choice and I don't think they should have to. At Whitbread we want sustainability to be something that everyone can engage with and an affordable option for everyone, every day.
We aim to build Good Together into the heart of our business, so that it becomes an integral part of how we make decisions and measure our performance, how we choose our partners and how we express our core company values, the Whitbread Way Forward. That means visible senior leadership and clear targets; it means embedding responsibility and accountability for progress across all areas of the business; and it means working hard to win the hearts and minds of all our team members so that they get passionate about the part that they can play.
So, this year you will see a change in how we are reporting our performance. Last year we reported on our environmental performance. Highlights included the opening of our Tamworth green hotel, a test bed of innovation in energy and water efficient buildings, as well as our partnership with the Rainforest Alliance sourcing sustainable coffee.
This report will tell you what we are doing and our future plans in all the key areas that form part of Good Together. It sets Good Together in its strategic context for the business, building on the Corporate Responsibility content in our Annual Report and Accounts. This Report will also tell you openly about some of the challenges we face and the next steps on our journey.
You can read, for example, about how we are working to assess our supply chain impacts, how we have integrated Good Together into our key performance indicators on our WINcard so that every manager in every outlet gets measured and incentivised according to whether he or she has met our energy targets, and how we have developed our charitable work.
You can see data on how we are doing against our new targets and how our Tamworth site has surpassed our expectations for a reduced energy and water footprint over the past 12 months. You can also find out what we hope to achieve in our next green site at Burgess Hill and across our entire buildings estate.
It is clear that the world is facing some big challenges about how we live in a way that promotes equality of opportunity for all, as well as how we use resources and steward them responsibly for future generations. I believe that we all, including business have a part to play and that there are real opportunities for those businesses that do it well.
In a challenging economic year, I am especially proud to have seen how Whitbread has started to embrace Good Together and the inevitable challenges and complexity it brings. We are at the start of this still, yet we have also made some significant steps forward. I hope that you will enjoy reading this report and that you are as excited and as inspired by what you read as I have been.
Alan Parker, CBE
Chief Executive
Whitbread PLC
May 2010
