Hello, I’m Stuart Rose, I’m the chief executive of Marks & Spencer, and I’d like to talk to you a bit about Plan A, M&S’s five-year, 100-point eco-plan.

I’ll kick off by outlining why we launched it, what it is, and what and how we’ve done in the first 12 months.

Now the concept of being socially responsible of course is not new to Marks & Spencer. We were indeed one of the first retailers to put staff canteens in our stores and offices, and also to understand the links between nutrition and productivity. We were the first food retailer to sell only free-range eggs, including our ingredients, and we were a founder member of business in the community, when our then chairman realised that disaffected, disengaged communities could be bad for business. As he said, healthy high streets need healthy back streets.

We launched Plan A a year ago to respond to the growing challenges of climate change, sustainable sourcing, waste, fair partnership and health. We knew that in Marks & Spencer we had the choice of taking a lead in this area, or being a follower. And we decided on the former, as it was clear to us that not only was it the right thing to do, but it made commercial sense, because our actions in this area would at some point differentiate us from the competition in the eyes of our customers, our suppliers and our colleagues. Simplistically, doing nothing was not an option.

Plan A supports one of our core values, trust, which we know is the key to the loyalty and even affection felt towards Marks & Spencer by our customers. It’s been a great way to involve our customers, employees and suppliers in change, helping to create a virtuous circle as their ideas and commitments spurred us on to make further progress and find new solutions. In particular, Plan A is encouraging our suppliers to see environmental and social issues less as the issue of basic compliance and more as the opportunity to innovate, bringing us new ideas and solutions.

One of the things that sets us apart in Plan A is its sheer scale and breadth. It’s ambitious: it has a hundred points and will take over five years to complete, and many of the solutions are not known yet and the commercial benefits cannot be fully quantified at this stage. Its scale means that the plan touches all parts of our business, including approximately 70,000 employees, 600 UK stores, five offices, 20 warehouses, and 900-odd trucks that make up our own operations. That does not include the 2,000 suppliers, over 20,000 farms and a quarter of a million workers who help produce our products. And of course the 16 million customers who buy, use and dispose of the hundreds of millions of food, clothing and homeware products that we sell each year.

The five-year plan means that by 2012 we aim to make our own operations carbon neutral, to send no waste to landfill from our operations, to extend sustainable sourcing of all our raw materials, to set new standards in ethical trading, and to help our customers and M&S colleagues live healthier lifestyles.

The first anniversary since the launch is a good time to reflect on how we’re doing. The broader retail environment has obviously been tough over much of this period and looks like it’s going to remain so during 2008, and maybe into 2009. Despite this I’d summarise progress as good, but with still much to do.

Specifically our achievements over the last 12 months have included the following: over 31 per cent of M&S customers now wash their clothes at a lower temperature in response to our ‘Wash at 30’ campaign, saving an estimated 25,000 tonnes of CO2 per annum. Plastic food carrier bag usage has reduced by 66 per cent in our stores in Northern Ireland, where we’ve trialled charging for our carriers, and across our entire business we’ve seen an 11 per cent reduction in customer usage of food carrier bags, and indeed we’re about to extend this trial to the south west of England. CO2 emissions have reduced by 55,000 tonnes in M&S stores and offices by switching an additional 23 per cent of electricity to renewable sources. 75 per cent of construction waste from Marks & Spencer store refurbishment programme is recycled. Sales of Marks & Spencer organic and fair trade certified food have grown by 48 per cent and 20 per cent respectively. In 2007 we purchased around one third of the world’s fair trade cotton and of over 3 million M&S garments sold 500,000 were made from organic cotton, linen or wool, and over 200,000 garments made from recycled polyester using 2 million recycled plastic bottles. Artificial colours have been removed from 99 per cent of Marks & Spencer food and we are on target to achieve 100 per cent by the spring of this year. The Food Standards Agency 2010 salt targets have been met for 10 of our 15 priority categories including ready meals and sandwiches, and we are on course to meet all targets before 2010. We have 570 Plan A champions across Marks & Spencer stores and offices to help implement Plan A. We also have 1,500 healthy eating assistants in Marks & Spencer stores trained to advise our customers and employees on health issues.

It’s a good start, but there is still much to do, and over this period Plan A has already emphasised to us the importance of partnerships to drive social and environmental change, working with a wide variety of external stakeholders including many of the major NGOs. These partners have helped us innovate, and they’ve provided the skills and knowledge M&S doesn’t possess. Partnerships like this will stay at the heart of our Plan A in the future.

Examples of this include WWF, helping us tackle environmental issues associated with water, cotton, wood, fish and palm oil sourcing; Oxfam helping us to encourage clothing recycling; Groundwork working with us to reduce carrier bag usage; and we’ve also worked with Tetrapak to improve recycling facilities, and with the Fair Trade Foundation to increase the availability of Fair Trade certified cotton.

We’ve also learnt that to deliver a plan of this complexity you need strong governance. I chair what other companies would call their CSR committee. We call it our How We Do Business committee. On the committee sits an executive board member responsible for each of the five main work streams. And we’re beginning to cut through with consumers. A recent CBI consumer survey highlighted M&S as the most reputable business in the UK and cited Plan A as an important contributing factor. Plan A has given us a clear direction in tackling social and environmental issues, which are evolving rapidly. As these expectations change, we’ll need to keep Plan A under constant review. Our freeze on the use of biofuels, and greater emphasis on working in partnership with our suppliers to manage labour standards are just two reminders of our commitment to keeping Plan A fresh and relevant.

So a year on, Plan A is firmly embedded in our organisation, and is a key element of M&S’s five-year plan. I’m pleased with progress so far, but very aware of how much more we have to achieve. Finally, I continue to believe strongly that Plan A is not only the right thing to do, but commercially will help differentiate us in the eyes of our customers.

Simply put, it’s a win-win.