Commercial Partners - "those who supply us with goods and services"

Overview

Labour standards and human rights within the supply chain are widely held to be one of the most important responsibilities for a retailer. Home Retail Group’s network of suppliers and agents is very extensive and includes a number of regions where these issues may present a problem. We are responsible firstly for understanding our supply chain and the conditions within it, secondly for dealing with active or conspicuous abuses and thirdly for engaging with suppliers to communicate our customers’ concerns on these matters and to support them as they improve standards.

Our approach in this area has followed a well-established pattern of good practice. We have set out our acceptable standards for workers’ rights and safety (basing these on internationally agreed norms) and we commission independent audits of our suppliers to test whether they meet them. If not, we agree together a set of improvements that the supplier should make before they are audited again to check progress.

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