CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY REPORT 2009

When asked via our 2009 Employee Opinion Survey (EOS)
78%
of our employees said they believe Britvic behaves in a responsible way towards the community, up 5 points from last year

Policies and actions

Supporting local communities

We have community investment and volunteering policies that underpin our Learning for Life programme. These policies encourage our employees to play their part in the local community and support their chosen charities in a number of ways:

  • Employee fundraising matching scheme – Britvic now donates £2 for every £1 raised by employees.
  • Product entitlement – an allocated amount that every employee can donate to their chosen local charities and school events.
  • A payroll giving scheme – promoted annually through site road shows.
  • Employee volunteering policy – up to two days of paid volunteering per year.

Partnerships

Learning for Life helps us support our local community whilst also addressing the issues that are most important for our business. We have carefully selected our partners to help us make a real and lasting impact:

  • Barnardo’s – our company charity for the next three years and a partnership that enables employee engagement via local volunteering and donations through our Britvic charity lottery.
  • UNICEF – we continue to work with UNICEF supporting their emergency relief fund.
  • FareShare – a new partner that supports UK communities by distributing surplus stock to good causes, thereby minimising our waste and ensuring our brands go to worthwhile community activities.
  • Essex Community Foundation – now manages two Britvic funds helping local families and backing environmental projects. The funds align with Government focus on industry support for ‘grassroots’ projects.
  • Greenstreams – a project aimed at improving the environment around the River Colne region, where our Huddersfield factory is based.

Education programmes

Britvic has long supported projects on education and young people and this will continue under our new strategy. Below we highlight two key initiatives from the past year:

  • Rainforest Foundation – our partnership supported 20 children with schooling and helped a further 20 into safe housing. Four mentors have been trained to work with the children.
  • Our new Britvic Learning Zone allows us to work closely with trade bodies such as the British Soft Drinks Association (BSDA) to deliver added benefit to classrooms and learning days, and support the Government ‘work related modules’ launched last year. In addition, where possible we offer to host teachers and students at our manufacturing sites and also plan to open our small museum collection to these audiences.

Investing in the community

Since 2006, our charitable giving has grown from £80,000 to £330,000. Last year we had exceptionally high levels of in-kind giving due to our donations of bottled water to all those affected by flooding in Gloucestershire. We remain committed to increasing our community investment over the next three years.

© 2009 Britvic plc