Capacity Building Initiatives
Find out more about our approach to capacity building
Environmental risks and social inequality are making the world more complicated and unpredictable. The size and complexity of most sustainability and societal issues mean they cannot be addressed by any one solution or organisation.
Our goal is to deliver sustainable value for our stakeholders through the high quality, own brand products we offer in the UK and internationally. To do this, we must look beyond our operations to the wider supply chain, where the biggest impacts occur. Simply put, we cannot deliver Plan A alone.
It is important to recognise that no-one has all the insights, resources or networks to deal with these complex issues. Capacity building has varying interpretations, but to us it’s about what we are doing to fill these gaps. It can include providing training and guidance to our suppliers, sharing insights about our business or sector with civil society, working collaboratively with our industry peers, helping governments craft effective public policy and a whole range of other activities. The overriding objective is to make individuals or organisations stronger and better equipped to deal with global environmental, social and economic change.
Partnership has always been at the heart of Plan A. We appreciate that it can be challenging for our suppliers to meet our sustainability requirements and whilst we need to be demanding we also need to help incentivise. Through collaborative working and advocacy we aim to achieve shared objectives and mutually beneficial economic, social and environmental outcomes.
Commitments and targets
Our ambition is to accelerate change by leading with others. We’re committed to achieve this by working collaboratively with a broad range of stakeholders: suppliers, civil society, the science community, governments, customers and other businesses.
We focus on challenges that are important to our business and where we can most effectively influence change.
Approach
We have an aspiration to be a leading major retailer on sustainability, but we can only achieve this if we are able to spark systemic, innovative change within our supply base. We need suppliers to be able to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving and complex commercial world. We recognise that it can be difficult for many suppliers to see what this brings in terms of direct benefits to them. We need to understand and be sensitive to these issues. Capacity building is absolutely essential to achieve the scale and pace of change we need to see in our global supply base.
Whilst ongoing monitoring of compliance is of course necessary and useful, it is not the be all and end all. For instance, solely focusing on individual non-compliances can result in underlying issues being missed. In addition, this approach may not identify emerging issues or trends, or promote the development of a continuous improvement culture within our supply base.
We therefore complement our approach to compliance by going ‘beyond’ and defining areas of collaboration that will promote continuous improvement with our suppliers. We do this by providing a range of capacity building tools and incentives to align our respective goals and objectives. This includes capacity in terms of resources, technical skills, knowledge, as well as research and development.
Our ultimate goal though is to make sustainable production the norm and for it to be fully integrated into global supply chains. To achieve this change at a global scale and rapid pace, we need to think beyond the capabilities of our business and supply chains by working with industry partners and other stakeholders.
We cannot deliver our objectives overnight – which is why our long-term commitment to delivering change through capacity building remains critical to our overall Food Group strategy.
Our approach to capacity building focuses on:
Enhancing sustainability capability within our supply base
Farming for the Future
We recognise that we need to be working in partnership with our farms and growers to be their customer of choice and to develop innovative supply chain relationships that secure the high-quality raw materials we need in order to continue delivering the quality food our customers expect.
Farming for the Future is about us helping the farms and growers in our supply base meet our M&S Select Farm Sourcing Standards and address the challenges ahead by finding opportunities to improve efficiency, environmental performance and ethical practice. This will make our business more resilient and profitable, ensuring that they can continue to deliver quality and innovation for the long-term whilst reducing their impact on the world around them. In turn, this delivers security of supply for M&S.
Launched in 2010, this programme has seen over £3.5 million invested into sustainability initiatives in the farming sector and we are committed to continuing these initiatives in the years ahead.
Forever Fish
Forever Fish was launched in 2011 as a 3 year initiative which aimed to encourage everyone to eat high quality, responsibly sourced fish, as well as give something back to the seas we fish from. It started with the donation of profits from our 5p food bags to a fish fund which raised over £4 million. We also involved the wider community by teaming up with the Marine Conservation Society and WWF to support beach-cleaning events and marine conservation projects as well as providing schools with educational materials via our School of Fish initiative.
Following changes in legislation in relation to carrier bag charging, we have reviewed our approach and this initiative in its current form has now come to an end. We’re now taking the opportunity to relaunch Forever Fish as the sister programme that sits alongside our successful Farming for the Future programme. Find out more about Farming for the Future.
This refreshed programme still has marine conservation at its heart. It is our programme of activity in the world of fish and aquaculture that allows us to secure supply of an exceptional range of high quality seafood, sourced from fisheries and fish farms in a way that mitigates ethical, environmental and social risks, delivering a lasting legacy for our brand.
Sustainability Framework
We’re continually innovating and setting new standards for UK food retailing and all our suppliers must commit to continuous improvement.
The Food Sustainability Framework is designed to reflect where a supplier is on their journey towards sustainability. The framework is underpinned by a self-assessment framework comprising three elements: Environmental, Ethical and Lean Manufacturing (or waste elimination) which detail the building blocks to enable change in performance. This framework took 18 months to develop and was based on shared learning from suppliers through our face to face Supplier Exchange meetings, as well as by talking to experts such as the Carbon Trust, the Ethical Trading Initiative and SA Partners (consultants in lean manufacturing which seeks to continually eliminate waste).
We expect all direct suppliers to be working towards Silver as a minimum. Products produced at sites which have achieved Silver or Gold are also eligible for a Plan A product attribute. Find out more about our approach to product sustainability.
As of April 2019, the proportion of M&S food products provided by Silver level suppliers had increased to 74% (last year: 63%) as a result of the validated performance of 148 supplier sites. Four of these 148 suppliers have been validated at Gold level.
Supporting market transformation through working with industry partners and other stakeholders
Advocacy
Most of the sustainability issues we face can’t be resolved by a single organisation, or by implementing one solution. We frequently advocate a specific position or approach to an issue in order to promote wide-scale change at the right pace – focusing on public policy and thought leadership.
Public policy can help make change easier (e.g. setting guiding principles, offering incentives, regulation, and so on) or it can get in the way. And contributing to thought leadership is important to ensure that the retail sector transforms itself as quickly as possible.
Through our membership of the Consumer Goods Forum we’re supplementing our involvement in multi-stakeholder initiatives by:
- Promoting the UN’s REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) programme
- Supporting an industry-wide push to achieve zero net deforestation by 2020, through sustainable sourcing of key forest risk commodities (palm oil, soy, cattle and paper/pulp products).
We’re also using our influence with national governments and multilateral platforms to ensure workers’ rights are at the forefront of trade negotiations and that a progressive agenda is in place to maintain improvements in protection and standards for workers. For example, we were one of five retailers that sponsored the ‘Stronger Together’ initiative which aims to give UK employers the knowledge and resources they need to recognise and address exploitation in the food and agriculture industries.
Collaborative Working
Partnership has always been at the heart of how we do business. This is because we know we need outside knowledge and expertise to help us understand what changes are required and how best to achieve them. We invest in partnerships that deliver tangible outcomes, working at all levels – from local communities to international forums.
In pursuit of our goal to eliminate deforestation from the use of key commodities in the production of products by 2020 we’re working collaboratively with a number of organisations such as the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS), and Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). Find out more about our approach to protecting forests.
Through our partnerships with the Marine Conservation Society and WWF we've helped to protect our sea life and beaches for the future. Through our Forever Fish programme we provided financial support to an international partnership of sea-users called Partnerships Involving Stakeholders in the Celtic Sea Ecosystem (PISCES) that bought together many different stakeholders to develop practical guidelines to promote a healthy marine environment and sustainable livelihoods.
We’re also helping to drive convergence in responsible sourcing practices. For example, through our involvement in the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange (Sedex) we’re sharing best practice on data, assessments, training of auditors and audit quality. We’re also an active member of a number of multi-stakeholder initiatives such as the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI).
Supporting programmes that build resilient supply chain communities
Global Community Programme
We launched our Global Community Programme (GCP) in 2014, to drive growth and increase efficiency by establishing partnerships to tackle some of the systemic issues that our suppliers and their local communities face. Our ambition is to become a more resilient business by empowering people in our supply chains to build more resilient local communities.
This is on the belief that if suppliers, workers, producers and communities are more resilient, the supply chain is more resilient and our supply for the future is more secure. It should also strengthen our brand, improve quality and drive innovation.
We don’t focus exclusively on specific communities, although a large number of GCP initiatives help the large number of women and small-hold farmers in our supply chain.
Key documents
