Social Report
2005
Principles and processes
Our principles are brought to life through our company values and the behaviours that ensure they really are embedded in the way we do business. See Living our values.
We believe that:
- Everyone who works for Camelot is responsible for the company's integrity and social impact - it is emphatically not just the responsibility of specialist teams
- It is important for different business units to "own" particular elements of our responsibility-related policies and programmes
- To be a genuinely responsible business we need to use innovative ways of interacting with all our stakeholders so that we can understand and respond to their concerns. See Consulting and responding
- The development of our corporate responsibility strategy
- Appropriate formal management and consultation structures
- The development of formal, written policy statements to ensure that our day-to-day operations are consistent with our obligations and principles
- Reporting progress against published targets.
In 2004/05 we completed a strategic review of our approach to managing social responsibility and began to put this into practice during the year. See Improving our management for details. The rest of this section deals with the other three elements of our approach.
Management structures
Ultimate responsibility for our reputation and relationship with stakeholders lies with the Board. The diagram below and the section on Governance explain how the Board is advised by the Corporate Responsibility Board and our Advisory Panel for Social Responsibility.
The Corporate Responsibility Board consults and is advised by the independent Advisory Panel for Social Responsibility. Both these bodies are informed by several consultative groups, including the Staff Consultative Forum, the Retailer Forum and issue management groups such as the Responsible Play Group and the Diversity Forum.
Roll over the above panels
to view each area in more detail.
For more information about how these committees work see Our CR management structure
Policies
In consultation with stakeholders, we have developed a number of formal, written policies covering our social, environmental and ethical impacts. Some of these are required under our licence - they are indicated with an asterisk* below. These are the main policy areas relevant to corporate responsibility:
- Code of Conduct*
- Whistleblowing *
- Strategies for preventing underage and excessive play *
- Advertising and sales promotion code *
- Retailer selection and sales improvement
- Purchasing and tendering
- Community involvement
- Disability
- Environmental Policy
- Health & Safety Policy
Reporting
We see reporting as an essential ingredient of transparency and corporate accountability.
Our reporting process has five key objectives:
- To measure how well we are living our values
- To ensure that we are accountable to our stakeholders
- To ensure that what we learn year on year is reflected in our businesses processes
- To improve our business performance
- To account for the value we have added to society.
Every year we measure our performance against the commitments that we made to our stakeholders and the key indicators that we published in the previous year's report. We also set stretching targets for the year ahead. Details of our 2004/05 performance can be found in the Performance overview section.
This year we are reporting in accordance with the Global Reporting Initiative. See GRI index table, and Using this report.
Assurance
We use an independent assurance firm to verify the contents of this Social Report and our corporate responsibility management. We find that expert external assurance is an invaluable way of challenging us to improve further. In 2004/05 we appointed Reassurance Network to audit our Social Report and review our CR management structure. See Improving our management, Assurance statement.
