Corporate Responsibility

Welcome to WH Smith PLC’s 2008 Corporate Responsibility site.

This year, environmental and social concerns have risen further up the public’s agenda, as issues such as climate change, waste recycling and factory workers’ conditions have all been the focus of media attention and public concern. At WHSmith, we have been engaging in Corporate Responsibility (CR) for many years and have long-established working practices which embed CR across our business. We believe that managing CR in this way enables us to understand and effectively manage the key impacts of our business, as well as the related risks and opportunities they pose.

This report outlines the progress we have made during 2007/08 towards meeting the objectives we set last year. We define our responsibility into four areas: Marketplace, Environment, Workplace, and Community. During the year, I am pleased to report that we have made progress in each aspect of our programme.

This year we have reduced our waste and encouraged customers to reduce the number of carrier bags they take from our stores. We are finding innovative ways to reduce the environmental impact from our transport fleet. We have reviewed and re-launched the suite of learning and development programmes we offer our store colleagues and re-designed our intranet site to make them more accessible. We actively support community and charity projects, which deliver clear benefits for the communities we support. We recognise that there is still more to do and have set new targets on each aspect of CR for the year ahead.

We aim to benchmark our CR performance against other leading UK companies as this can help us identify ways to further improve our programmes. The annual Business in the Community Corporate Responsibility Index provides just such an opportunity and, this year, we were delighted to receive their highest accolade in recognition of our CR work; a Platinum ranking.

Environmental and social issues have become a permanent part of the economic landscape. At WHSmith we will continue our work to manage our impact on society and the environment, whilst also exploring opportunities to use corporate responsibility to enhance our business performance.