Marks & Spencer has always taken responsibilities to customers, employees, partners, suppliers and local communities seriously. Doing business in a responsible way underpins their values - Quality, Service, Innovation and Trust. This section tells you how they manage social, environmental and ethical issues across the business. 

The brand today is arduously taking care of every sensitive issue of the society be it charity for the society, issue relevant to climatic changes, industrial waste management, sustainable raw material management or health people and ethical trading.

Charity and community funding Donations

Donations to charitable organizations are done through the M&S local stores. They each have a small, limited budget and focus their support towards issues that are important to their local community.

Clothing and equipment

Centrally it donates returned clothing and business surplus to the charity Newlife. Newlife funds medical research, nurse support and awareness campaigns and vital equipment for disabled and terminally ill children.

M&S donates returned clothing and business surplus to them and the money raised from the sale and recycling of the garments directly funds 400 pieces of equipment for disabled children each year.

Donations of clothing samples are sent to Shelter; they are one of the charity partners and support the homeless.

Occasionally M&S stores may donate unwanted sales floor fittings or garments taken back as goodwill exchanges to local charity shops.

 Food

Marks & Spencer's aims to donate their date-expired food to charitable organizations. The first choice to receive the donations is Fare Share, a community food network that redistributes surplus food from the food industry to vulnerable people in the community.

The food manager in each local store manages this process - if you want to find out more please contact the local store.

 Christmas cards

Please note they do not accept bids to be the recipient of funds from our Christmas cards, they select the charities each year from their existing corporate partnerships  

Fundraising

M&S also allows fundraising to take place in their store sales floors only when it is part of a corporate campaign for one of their charity partners, for example Breakthrough Breast Cancer.

Major disasters

Before it makes any commitment to supporting a major disaster, M&S always consider the real needs, the requests from its customers and employees and whether the disaster has occurred in a region of the world where they have strong links either through the stores, offices or suppliers. M&S decides what it will do for each major disaster on an individual basis.

Climate change

As part of Plan A, five-year 'eco plan' it aims to make operations in the UK and Republic of Ireland carbon neutral and to help customers and suppliers reduce their emissions too.  Plan to:

• Reduce energy use by 25% and power stores with green electricity only offsetting their remaining CO2 emissions as a last resort.
• Commit to buying as much food from the UK and Ireland as possible.
• Cut air freight of food products and put an airplane symbol on food they do fly in.
• Develop low carbon products and services, such as energy efficient electrical products, to help customers reduce energy in their homes.
• Launch information campaigns for customers and M&S colleagues working with the WWF, the National Federation of Women's Institutes and The Climate Group.

Waste Management

As part of Plan A, five-year 'eco plan', M&S have committed to stop sending waste to landfill from their UK and Irish stores, offices and warehouses; reduce the use of packaging and carrier bags. Plan to:

• Stop sending food waste to landfill and instead use it to produce green energy via 'anaerobic digestion' or compost.
• Reduce non-glass packaging by 25% and use packaging materials that are easy to recycle or compost.
• Cut carrier bag use by 33% and make them from recycled plastic.
• trial 'closed loop' recycling (making new packaging from old packaging) in their Cafe Revives; and
• Make sure customers can eventually dispose of their clothing without sending it to landfill.

Sustainable Raw material

As part of five year eco plan, Plan A, it has committed to ensuring that all of the key raw materials come from the most sustainable sources available to us.
They aim to:

• Only use wood which is recycled or independently certified as coming from a sustainable source;
• Make their fresh whole turkey, geese and fresh pork Free Range.
• Sell only fish from independently certified sustainable sources.
• Triple sales of organic food.
• Use recycled plastic to make ranges of polyester clothing and home products
• Reduce their water use in the UK and Republic of Ireland by 20% and help suppliers reduce theirs.

Health

As part of Plan A, five-year 'eco plan', it aims to help thousands of customers and employees choose a healthier lifestyle. They plan to:

•  put 1,500 Healthy Eating Advisers in stores.
• increase the Eat Well range from 30% to 50% of food.
• continue to lead the way in reducing salt and fats.
• replace artificial colors with natural colors in kids' sweets and cakes in 12 months; and
• introduce Food Standards Agency traffic lights and Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA) product labeling.  

People

As they continue to grow their business and invest for the future, it's more important than ever to keep strengthening their team at every level, from the shop-floor through to management. To attract and retain the best talent in the industry, they have to demonstrate each day that M&S is a good employer, committed to making all their people feel valued and providing them with career opportunities and quality training.

Recruitment and retention

M&S employs around 71,000 people in the UK, 75,000 worldwide. They have one of the lowest employee turnover rates in UK retail, at 27% for customer assistants and 12% for management. Around 40% of their people have been with us for over 5 years and 22% for more than ten years.

They can offer graduates a fast track into management and last year received a record 8,500 applications in just over two months. Each year they employ between 150 and 200 graduates and business placement programme undergraduates for positions in retail, food technology, design, HR, buying, IT and other specialist roles. They won four major graduate recruitment awards, including the 2008 Times' 'Graduate Employer of Choice' for retail.

Training and development

M&S needs to train people thoroughly to do their jobs, but also want to retain their skills and experience by giving them real opportunities to plan and build a career with Marks & Spencer. Marks & Spencer has defined career paths in place for many of its people, including Customer Assistants and store management. During the year M&S introduced new career paths for store Section Managers and their HR and marketing teams. Everyone joining the stores completes a thorough induction and up to 26 weeks' ongoing training - the longest on the high street. M&S has over 7,500 people in stores who act as coaches to train and support their less experienced colleagues.

This year it has also run specialist training for people moving into senior management roles or taking up international assignments. Additionally, more than 4,000 people completed their Buying Academy and Food Academy courses. Now M&S is trialing similar academies for women swear and merchandisers.

Employee health, safety and wellbeing

They are committed to help their people make informed health choices at work. In February 2008, it launched a pilot wellbeing programme in several stores to trial a wide range of mental and physical health initiatives. They'll assess the results of these trials to fine tune their longer-term employee wellbeing plans. They also continued their breast screening programme this year, completing around 13,000 screenings for employees and pensioners. The service is available from the age of 40 (10 years earlier than the NHS), and can play a potentially life-saving role by detecting cancer early.

They are working hard to help their people prevent fire, health and safety related incidents, but also to report them if they happen. This year, they have completed further training for all the Fire, Health & Safety officers in their stores and offices. The number of reported incidents was 27,828 (or 26,210 if new stores are excluded) against 30,883 in 2006/07. The number of RIDDOR (Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations) incidents fell to 957 (or 892 if new stores are excluded) compared with 1057 in 2006/07. No work-related fatalities occurred during the year.

Diversity

Their store teams and workforces across the UK generally reflect national diversity averages. M&S regularly review their policies and procedures to make sure they comply with legislation.

Ethical Trading

Marks & Spencer has strong trading relationships across the world. It is a secular organization embracing all cultures, nationalities, races and religions. It doesn't supports or aligns to any countries, nations, states, Governments, political parties or religious bodies and this approach is applied consistently to sourcing all of their products.

M&S source from over 70 countries worldwide, including China, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Kenya, Morocco, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and the UK. It always clearly labels which country all the products are made in to giver customers the opportunity to decide whether or not they want to buy from certain countries.

In 1999 M&S developed a set of Global Sourcing Principles in partnership with their suppliers. These Principles set down their requirements for suppliers to comply with all relevant local and national laws, particularly on: working hours and conditions, health & safety, rates of pay, terms of employment and minimum age of employment.

As well as labeling all of their products with the country of production, many food products have further information about raw materials. This in itself is a unique approach for a large-scale retailer. It means that customers have the necessary information if they want to avoid goods produced in a certain country because of political or social beliefs.

As relationship with a supplier develops, it expects them to improve working conditions in line with the more demanding standards promoted by the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), a collaborative group of companies, trade unions and human rights groups set up by the UK Government. Marks & Spencer joined the ETI in 1999.

As part of Plan A, five-year 'eco plan' M&S have committed to improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in their supply chains. M&S is working on the following

• Introducing semi-announced on-site assessments of its suppliers, conducted within a three-week period, to ensure they are working to their Global Sourcing Principles at all times. These on-site assessments will have a greater level of involvement of worker representatives.
• Increasing the number of people based in the countries of production to follow up concerns identified by their assessment system within 12 months.
  
• Enabling suppliers to address difficult issues such as '‘living' wage and working hours through collaborative networking, conferences and the launch of an Ethical Exchange website. Setting up best practice projects including at least three Ethical Model Factories and a worker's rights training programme which can be extended across their supply chains.
• Extending the scope of their ethical trading assessments to include other parts of the supply chain.
• Trialing a confidential worker complaints mechanism for workers
• Introducing a ranking system for suppliers covering ethical trading performance by the end of 2008.
  

Marks & Spencer has strong trading relationships across the world. M&S sources from over 70 countries worldwide, including China, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Kenya, Morocco, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and the UK. Marks & Spencer's always clearly labels which country all the products are made in to give the customers the opportunity to decide whether or not they want to buy from certain countries.

In 1999 a set of Global Sourcing Principles in partnership with the suppliers was formed.
As well as labeling all of the products with the country of production, many food products have further information about raw materials. This in itself is a unique approach for a large-scale retailer. It means that customers have the necessary information if they want to avoid goods produced in a certain country because of political or social beliefs.

Marks & Spencer is on a journey to make their business more sustainable. Over the decades it has never stood still; moving from philanthropy to community investment and then corporate social responsibility (CSR). In 2007, Plan A was a radical commitment to move from the CSR world's focus on specific issues to a more holistic approach that tackled all sustainability issues.

With the new Plan A commitments, focused on involving the customers, M&S is putting in place the long term foundations to build a sustainable business.