Baroness Wilcox, Chair, Board CSR Committee – continuing the journey
For Cadbury Schweppes the last few years have been a time of careful reassessment and purposeful renewal. We have re-articulated our CSR policies and strengthened our practices to enable us to live our values in an ever-changing business world.
In 2001 Cadbury Schweppes set up a formal Board Corporate and Social Responsibility Committee. We saw that how a company lived out its values and met its responsibilities was becoming an increasingly important focus of attention for our consumers, shareowners and society at large. And while these things had always been important to us at Cadbury Schweppes, our values and responsibilities needed to be re-articulated and managed in ways that made sense for our times. I was delighted to be asked to chair the committee.
Our approach in 2001 was to start by working out what living our values meant in the contemporary world and to make an up-to-date re-statement of our values. One of our first actions was to develop our Human Rights and Ethical Trading policy. Based on international standards and best practice this policy applies both to our own employees and to our suppliers. We then revised Our Business Principles, our code of conduct and guide to ethical business practices, to match current best practice and deal comprehensively with new and emerging issues of corporate responsibility.
We developed and built on what we have called our Five Pillars of CSR as a way of managing the many different aspects of CSR and of allowing us to focus on the key issues which impact, or have the potential to impact, on our business. They are:
- marketing, food and consumer trends
- ethical sourcing and procurement
- environment, health and safety
- human rights and employment standards
- community investment
We recently embraced a new set of Goals and Commitments on Sustainability (see CSR vision and Our goals and commitments on sustainability) for our activities in each of our pillar areas. These will guide and focus our CSR approach for the next five years.
As part of our strategic review we also examined whether or not our policies were robust enough for the 21st century, and upgraded those that no longer achieved the standards we wanted. We improved our management processes, and focused on embedding good CSR practice into our business, including celebrating success. And finally for this period, we began to measure, verify and assure what we do. This will feature strongly in our future work in this area.
On the basis of all these actions, achieved with the support and active engagement of our many stakeholders, and built on our robust governance structures, we have again improved our performance over the period under review.
I am proud of the progress we have made together on our journey. The last five years have seen our commitment to living our values ever more thoroughly embraced in the spirit of our company. Such spirit conditions how we work and think. I know it will pay a rich dividend for many, many years to come.