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(Photo captioned: The Golden Jubilee Trust enables Partners to work on secondment to a registered charity for up to six months)

(Photo captioned: We are committed to limiting the environmental impact of our vehicles)


Our Partners make a genuine difference to local people’s lives and create strong links with the community by giving their time and skills. The Golden Jubilee Trust (GJT), the Partnership’s flagship employee volunteering scheme, has supported 441 Partners who have given over 181,500 hours to more than 400 UK charities since it was founded in April 2000. The GJT enables Partners to apply full or part-time for a volunteering secondment with a registered charity for up to six months. The placements have helped provide charities with the resource and skills to meet their own objectives in serving the needs of the wider community while participating Partners often develop new skills, grow in confidence, take on new responsibilities and become more motivated, satisfied employees.

Town centre investment

The Partnership believes its retail offering can play an essential role in the regeneration and longterm prosperity of town centres.

In Cardiff, our new John Lewis store provided a quarter of the 4,000 new jobs in the St David’s 2 retail development. In one of the biggest-ever recruitment drives in Wales, the Partnership committed to encourage, train and recruit local people into rewarding, fulfilling jobs by signing Cardiff Council’s training and employment charter. In addition, as the first John Lewis store in Wales, we were keen to integrate the Welsh language into the shop and its dual-language microsite, and our efforts to reflect the community in which we work were praised by the Welsh Language Board.

Environment

The Partnership is committed to reducing its impact on the environment and promote good environmental practice. Making the right decision for the long term is one of our founding principles, and environmental sustainability is key to this approach. We have programmes, processes and targets in place to ensure we continue to deliver our environmental commitments.

Carbon reduction

The Partnership is committed to reducing the carbon intensity of its operations, products and services and to developing policies and initiatives to support the UK Government’s long-term target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. As a growing business, total gross emissions increased by less than 2% in 2009/10 to approximately 515,000 tonnes CO2e. While we have made significant cuts in our emissions relative to the size of our business we are now committed to looking for absolute changes in our overall emissions. This carbon reduction commitment is supported by a range of initiatives and targets covering direct and indirect emissions. The largest contributors to our operational emissions are those associated with energy use, refrigeration and cooling, and transport.

We remain committed to using energy as efficiently as possible. Our absolute energy use continues to rise, but overall energy efficiency has improved. We have met our target to improve the energy efficiency of our shops by 20% by 2010 (based on 2003-04 baseline) – Waitrose achieved a 22% improvement and John Lewis 23%. We continue to source 100% of our electricity from green sources through an agreement with our energy supplier and consider all forms of renewable energy for our shops and head offices. Other solutions have included local agreements, brokered by Green Energy UK, such as John Lewis Cardiff receiving power from a waste recycling plant.

We are committed to limiting the impacts that our commercial fleet and company cars have on the environment. Our goal is to reduce energy-related transport emissions from store deliveries by 15% by 2013 (compared with 2005 levels). In 2009/10 we achieved a 6.4% improvement in tonnes of CO2 emitted per £ million of sales against our 2005/06 baseline. This progress has been aided by using computerised route planning and ‘load consolidation’ systems to streamline our supply chain and minimise unnecessary journeys, making use of otherwise empty vehicles on outward or return journeys, trialling new technologies, and utilising lorries with aerodynamic features, advanced, high-efficiency refrigeration systems and multi-deck trailers. We are also trialling pure plant oil (PPO) in seven vehicles and exploring dual-fuel engines. However, we acknowledge that (Continued on page 24...)