• Business review
• Chief executive's review
• Financial review
• Risks and uncertainties
• Corporate social responsibility
• Board of directors
• Senior management

Corporate social responsibility

We have made much progress over the past year with our CSR goals and, despite setting challenging targets, have achieved many of our aims. Last year we signed up to the Government’s Public Health Responsibility Deal (PHRD) which largely reflected our own aims and which now forms the basis of our target setting going forward.

This report covers our progress over the last financial year. Full details of our CSR policies and practices can be found in the Responsibility section of our website www.greeneking.co.uk.

Food safety and supply

In line with our commitment to the PHRD, and our own prior commitment to healthy choices, we have concentrated much of our effort on ensuring we are able to give our customers more choice, healthier options and lower fat alternatives, as well as on being able to deliver on our promises, namely around salt targets and trans fats in our dishes.

Salt targets

We have reviewed all of our core menu items across our Greene King pubs, hotels and restaurants and benchmarked them against the Government’s 2012 salt targets. Any products that do not comply with these guidelines are now being looked at with a view to either altering the recipe, where this is possible, or to removing them from our menus. In partnership with our suppliers we are putting a process in place to ensure all new products comply with the 2012 targets before they enter our supply chain.

Trans fats

We have contacted all of our suppliers to gain positive confirmation that the food supplied to us is free of any artificial trans fats and are pleased to report that the majority of our suppliers have already removed these from their products. We are now in discussions with those suppliers that still use artificial trans fats in their products to ensure that they are removed from our food supply chain by the end of this year.

Allergen information

We now publish information on all the major allergens found in our core dishes, together with information on dishes that contain ingredients free from gluten. Working with Coeliac UK, we are currently finalising a training programme for house managers and chefs on allergens in food that will be delivered this summer/autumn and which will equip them with up-to-date knowledge and guidance on Government guidelines. Armed with this information, our teams will be able to help customers with their choices and address any concerns they may have. The training will also now form part of the manager induction process. In addition, we are designing a kitchen poster to highlight key actions to avoid cross-contamination during food preparation.

Healthy eating

Our Hungry Horse chain continues to innovate with new ‘female friendly and healthier choices’ dishes. This year saw the introduction of dishes such as bruschetta and a roasted chicken and sweet chilli wrap plus a new lower calorie section offering dishes of 600 calories or less. Over the next year we will be looking at further lower calorie options and the introduction of more salads.

Healthy children

Our popular pick ‘n’ mix menu for children has been extended to 7–10 year olds. The menu allows children and their parents to select healthier options such as mash instead of chips and also allows them an extra portion of vegetables without charge.

We now use free-range eggs across all of our managed pubs in England and Wales.

Scores on the Doors

This year has seen both the extension of the Local Government environmental health departments’ grading system, ‘Scores on the Doors’ and with it a steep rise in the number of our pubs now graded good to excellent. Where schemes exist we now have 33 of our pubs with 5* Excellent scores and a further 33 with 4* Good ratings.

Small steps

High Park, Huddersfield (Hardy's House) has been helping children understand the benefits of healthy eating by giving them the chance to help grow and harvest vegetables and herbs. Pak Choi, peppers, carrots, lettuce, leeks, onions, beetroot, chillies, tomatoes, cucumber, radishes and coriander were all grown in planters chosen and painted by the children. Once the crops were ready to harvest the children were able to use them at a 'create a pizza' session at the pub.

The environmental impacts of our business

Our work on environmental matters has continued to focus on reducing our overall energy consumption, our water use, how we deal with our waste and reducing our emissions. Each year our data collection improves enabling us to be clearer about our progress and set more accurate targets.

The year has seen us increase the number of our pubs, increase the amount of beer we have brewed and has seen some of the harshest winter weather for decades, all of which have had an impact in our overall energy consumption. Despite that, we have still made good progress.

Key achievements this year have included:

Our progress

We actively seek to reduce our energy use year on year. However, last year we were faced with one of the coldest winters for decades with heavy snow falls in November and December and that, combined with an increase in the number and the size of our pubs and an increase in the amount of beer we brewed, led to an increase in our overall energy consumption of 0.4% to 412,443 MWh. However, the mix between gas and electricity meant that overall our CO₂ emissions were actually down 1.6%.

We used more water overall last year to brew more beer but still managed to reduce the amount of water used from 4.4 barrels of water for every barrel of beer produced to 4.3 which represents a significant reduction from 2007/08, when we first began to report how efficiently we used water in the brewing process. Back then we were using 5.6 barrels of water for every barrel of beer brewed.

Last year we cut the amount of waste we produced and increased the amount we sent to recycling from 28% to 63%. The amount of cooking oil we collected and sent for recycling as biofuel also rose by 24% to 1,106,000 litres.

Environmental data

Responsible retailing

Enjoy Responsibly

As part of our commitment to responsible retailing, we have launched an Enjoy Responsibly initiative to signpost our customers and consumers to our Enjoy Responsibly website (www.enjoyresponsibly.co.uk). The site contains useful advice and information in an easily accessible and non-judgmental way for anyone who is concerned about how much they are drinking. Our Enjoy Responsibly logo, incorporating the website address, is being rolled out on all our bottles, cans, packs, menus and drinks promotions.

Best Bar None

Our pub, the Frog and Parrot, Sheffield, was crowned overall Best Bar None (BBN) at a reception in the House of Lords earlier this year. The award recognised the pub as the most safe and responsible in the UK.

The popular Frog and Parrot had already been named the best pub in Sheffield, and went on to compete against six other pubs and bars from across the country for the national title. The awards reward pubs for their safety and crime prevention measures. Judges were impressed by the pub’s choice of music, training, community atmosphere and its relationship with surrounding residents – the manager, Nick Simmonite, has fortnightly meetings with residents’ associations.

In addition, the Festing in Portsmouth was awarded Best Bar in category and Portsmouth Best Bar None 2010. Another of our pubs, the Turf Tavern, Carlisle, was a finalist in Carlisle’s BBN awards, missing out to the winners by one point. And in Scotland, the Gold winning Twa Tams, Perth was also a finalist in the national BBN Scotland awards.

This year we plan to continue to support BBN and have committed to ensure that all our pubs, where BBN schemes exist, have BBN accreditation. So far we have 24 managed pubs signed up and a further 125 of our managed pubs are also members of local Pubwatch schemes.

Don’t drink and drive

Hungry Horse and Pub Partners again supported the Government’s Christmas anti-drink drive campaign with their Designated Driver promotion. Four of our pubs were involved in regional launches by MPs.

Safer by design

Whilst alcohol related violence has fallen by 33% since 1997, there remain 87,000 violent incidents involving glasses each year. Not only does this impact on the victims but also on families and communities and reportedly costs the NHS £2.7 billion a year. So, with an eye on both responsible retailing and customer safety we were delighted to be invited to take part in a trial to test, in a pub setting, a new toughened safety pint glass developed by Arc. The ‘Ultimate’ glass is designed to be both very hard to break and, if it should be broken, to disintegrate into tiny cubes of glass rendering it useless as a weapon. The glass, which has now been launched, could help provide both a safer drinking environment and a workable alternative to plastic glasses in outdoor settings.

The health and safety of our staff and customers

Earlier this year, our Bury St Edmunds brewery became the first brewery to open its doors to an unannounced audit by the British Retail Consortium. The audit looked at the quality of our ingredients and how we use by-products. As a result of the visit the brewery was awarded a Grade A*. Our Belhaven brewery has since undergone the same audit and here too we were awarded a Grade A*.

As part of our commitment to quality and to the improvement of our environmental impact, we subject ourselves to rigorous external auditing and are delighted that our brewing business has achieved the ISO 9001: 2008 and 14001: 2004 standards. These assurance standards reflect our obsession with quality and offer another layer of reassurance to pubs about the beer we deliver to them.

Other achievements in health and safety

Safer drivers

Some of our success in retaining the RoSPA MORR award this year lies in our improved driver training and assessment system. All new entrants to the business who are either company car drivers, or are required to drive on company business, now go through driver training and assessment with Accufleet as part of their induction programme. The assessment helps drivers enhance their driving technique to improve road safety and fuel efficiency. We have also extended this approach to our LGV drivers.

Support for the communities in which we operate

Last year our managed pubs, hotels and restaurants supported their local communities in a range of fundraising activities raising over £280,000 for various local and national charities and appeals. Our Loch Fyne Restaurants raised an additional £4,600 during 2010 for their national charity, the RNLI.

Our Brewing and Brands division held their first charity ball back in May 2010 as part of Greene King’s Real Food and Beer Festival in Bury St Edmunds. The event, which celebrated community heroes, raised over £12,000 for EACH (East Anglia Children’s Hospices) and Focus 12.

Last year we donated £14,161 to The GREaT Foundation. Formerly known as the Responsibility in Gambling Trust, the GREaT Foundation was established as a charity in 2002 as Britain’s largest funding body responsible for tackling problem gambling through the funding of research, education and treatment from voluntary donations.

Focus 12 changing lives

         
Focus 12 is an independent charity providing treatment for clients with drug and alcohol dependency issues. Based in Bury St Edmunds, it is a 16 bed residential unit which combines the safety of a registered facility with enabling clients to live in small independent living units that allow recovery to be as real an experience as possible.

Greene King has forged closer links with the charity over the past few years and is described by the charity as being “hugely influential in assisting the charity to survive the enormous changes taking place in all areas of Social Care. Financial pressures affect all small charities and Focus 12 is indebted to the help provided by Greene King.”

Greene King helps with management support, HR advice and fundraising events that have allowed the charity to thrive in difficult times.

Commenting on Greene King’s involvement in the charity, Chip Sommers, said: “Everyone at Focus 12 recognises the brave and unusual step taken by Greene King in supporting a charity that deals with dependency. This socially responsible approach is both welcomed and applauded by all involved with our services.”

         

Providing a positive working environment

Our anonymous staff survey is an important tool which enables us to ‘test the temperature’ across the company and find out how our staff feel about being part of our team. This year around 50% of our 18,000 staff responded and shared their thoughts on roles, responsibilities, management, pay and benefits.

We measure our progress in this area using an employee engagement score which we set at 3. However, this year we changed our survey provider to OCR International and with it the method of assessing employee engagement. With their help we set specific questions, with a proven link to engagement and benchmarked the overall rating with other retail businesses. For this year our overall score was 67%, which compared reasonably well to the retail benchmark and indeed our target, both 74%.

We have again this year offered all of our 18,000 staff the opportunity to participate in our attractive share save scheme, which provides both an affordable savings scheme and, at the end of the three or five-year term, a stake in the company they work for.

Retaining, developing and attracting talent with fair and rewarding terms and conditions

Recruitment is a key area for our business to help ensure we have the right people to deliver our vision. This year we entered into a partnership with Job Centre UK to offer job trials to people considering a career in one of our businesses. Greene King is proud to be ‘BACKING YOUNG BRITAIN’ – the campaign to encourage businesses to provide more opportunities for young people through jobs, apprenticeships and work experience.

In our Local Pubs division, the work trial scheme which gives people who haven’t thought of working in a pub a chance to ‘try before they buy’, has seen 16 people who signed up through job centres offered jobs.

More recently the Government has launched a new apprenticeship scheme which Greene King has signed up to. Over 300 of our employees have already applied for apprenticeships with us and of those 238 have now started their training programmes. The remainder are going through the induction stage. At the end of the apprenticeships our team members will have a nationally recognised qualification, either Level 2 Hospitality Services or Level 2 Kitchen Services. Our aim is that all of our full time team members hold this national qualification.

Building on the success of this scheme we plan over the next year to launch an advanced apprenticeship for supervisory and management teams that will lead to nationally recognised qualifications in team leading and management.

This year twelve of our business development managers began the first stage of the new Greene King BDM Post Graduate Diploma with Birmingham City Business School. The programme, which focuses on multi-site leadership, will take twelve months to complete. More of our business development managers will begin the programme in October.

Support for our tenants

Pub Partners, our tenanted and leased business, prides itself on working in partnership with our licensees and over the past year has developed a range of new ways of working and agreements designed to find the ‘best fit’ for each of our licensees.

As part of our commitment to ensure new licensees have the best chance of success, we now insist that all new licensees attend three mandatory training courses prior to them taking a pub in our core estate. The courses are ‘Go for Growth Induction’, ‘Cellar Management’ and ‘Finance’, all of which are designed to lay quality foundations on which new licensees can build their own business from day one.

In response to the parliamentary enquiry last year into tenanted and leased pub companies, all industry players were encouraged to introduce new Codes of Practice to ensure that their licensees clearly understood what to expect when they took on a pub. Pub Partners quickly rose to the challenge and produced a new code which swiftly gained British Institute of Innkeepers (BII) accreditation. The Code is now in force across most of our tenanted and leased estate.

KPIs

Current year priorities

In addition to continuing our work on our established priorities, we have also set ourselves some new priorities in line with our PHRD commitments.

Our priorities for this year are: