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Our CSR communications

We aim to be open, honest and balanced in our corporate social responsibility (CSR) communications, telling our Partners, customers, suppliers and others with an interest in our business how we are doing against the commitments we have set ourselves and the range of standards we aspire to.

The Partnership’s CSR activity and resulting communications have always been discreet; we have never been a company to shout about our achievements. We prefer to act first and talk later. We also appreciate that we don’t have all the answers, but we do recognise that we need to challenge ourselves to talk more about what our position is and what our aspirations are.

Stakeholders – both from within and beyond the Partnership – have an ever-greater appetite for information about our CSR performance, and communication to meet those needs is a challenge, not least because it needs to cover such a wide range of social, economic and environmental issues. So we are committed to being clear about our priorities, to better communicating what we do as a business and to taking a more targeted approach to our communication to meet these ever-changing and specific needs.

We also recognise the important role our Partners have to play in engaging people in this agenda and the need to fully harness their potential, both as co-owners of the business and as advocates (see Our stakeholder engagement). This is something we will be focusing on in the coming year. In all our communications, we will strive to use everyday language to make sure people fully appreciate our achievements and challenges.


About this report

Our current reporting trend is that every two years, we produce two separate Waitrose and John Lewis CSR reports, and in the interim years, we produce a Partnership-level summary of our CSR performance, achievements, challenges and external recognition.

This Partnership-wide CSR report, aimed largely at the informed CSR community, summarises our 2008/09 progress, and signposts Partners, customers and other interested parties to the CSR section of the Partnership website ( www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/ourresponsibilities ), where more information is published.

We have previously offset the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production and distribution of our reports through the organisation Climate Care, and used paper stock produced from well-managed forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. This year, we have taken these efforts to report our CSR performance in a sustainable way one stage further, and have produced an online report.