All of our businesses must comply with our Group Health, Safety and Wellbeing Policy. Many of them supplement this with additional local and business specific policies. Responsibility for ensuring compliance with these policies sits with the chief executives of the various businesses. Each business also has a nominated director with specific accountability for health, safety and wellbeing.

In line with the Group Policy, our businesses focus their safety efforts in five key areas:

• providing strong and visable safety leadership from senior management;
• identifying and managing activities with the highest risk of fatal and serious injuries;
• supporting line managers accountable for workplace safety with safety specialists and training approaches;
• actively involving employees in their own health, safety and wellbeing; and
• reporting against both leading and lagging indicators and implementing continuous improvements programmes and activities, taking learnings from other businesses where relevant.

Across the Group, we have identified the following key on-site and off-site safety risks:

• harm from moving vehicles;
• falls from height;
• machinery safeguarding;
• the storage and handling of hazardous materials;
• working in confined spaces;
• electrical risks; and
• the management of contractors.

On-site employee Lost Time Injury (LTI) rate has increased this year from 0.35% in 2023 to 0.38%. The number of on-site employee LTIs has also increased by 13% from 347 to 392. In Retail there has been increase of its on-site employee LTI rate this year by 9% from 0.34% to 0.37%. However, the LTIs cover a broad range of situations and over 60% of the LTIs are less severe on average than last year.

The on-site contractor LTI rate this year has increased from 0.32% to 0.34% and the number of on-site contractor LTIs has increased by 20% from 74 to 89. Our Retail and Sugar segments made up 81% of these LTIs .

We are pleased to report that 67% of our factories and retail stores have operated for over a year without an onsite employee injury. This demonstrates that despite the risks involved in our activities, such as using powerful machinery or working in fast-paced environments, safety remains our top priority with processes and programmes in place to safeguard our people.

The Group’s increase in LTI rate is disappointing, however we are clear on the details of the issues and action plans have been put in place to address them.The businesses continue to place even more focus on their safety culture, governance approach and processes to keep their people safe. The majority of businesses have increased or improved the number and quality of safety observations, with additional focus on line manager initiatives to increase their involvement and direct ownership. All businesses have improved their reporting of near misses and have placed increasing focus on reporting and investigating significant events linked to our critical risks.

We acknowledge that our safety performance this year has not met the high standards we expect, demonstrating a year-on-year improvement in performance. Our businesses maintain a strong focus on fostering a safety-first culture, with programmes continuously reviewed and updated to ensure they align with our commitment to maintaining the highest standards. Our businesses put into action safety practices that are shared by our employees, contractors, regulators and industry experts. We believe that continuously exploring new approaches to safety is essential to protecting our people. A number of our businesses are operating innovative behavioural safety programmes. 

This year, we received 242 visits from health and safety regulators which related mostly to incidents, fire department checks, routine boiler and electrical inspections, or shared best practices. We value these visits as learning opportunities and a way to promptly address any needed changes.

See our Data page for more details on our health and safety data.

In the last few years a number of our businesses have used the Develop Diverse software to support the consistent use of inclusive language, with over 120 people using the system to refresh policies, job adverts, job descriptions and interview questions. The insights around the importance of inclusive language has also been adopted in line manager training, such as Primark’s Hiring Inclusively programme. We continue to raise awareness and educate our people, advocates and leaders on the evolving field of diversity, equity and inclusion. We partner with external experts to provide robust and thorough materials on a range of topics that include disability inclusion, female careers and leadership, gender identity and expression, racial and ethnic diversity, neurodiversity inclusion and LGBTQIA+ inclusion. 

We utilise our dedicated internal website to connect everyone across the Group with our DEI corporate partners, easy to use resources, training materials and internal case studies highlighting great practice and learnings including British Sugar’s 'conscious inclusion in action’, Silver Spoon’s ‘creating a culture of allyship’ and Twinings' health and wellbeing agenda. We foster active communities of advocates and leaders who are driving their local plans and where synergies could be helpful. Over recent years our most active communities have been Wellbeing, Menopause & Menstruation, and Disability & Neurodiversity.

For almost 15 years our Women in ABF network has helped women develop skills, build business awareness and grow connections that enhance their current performance and future careers prospects. Women across the Group have access to virtual events featuring both internal and external speakers as well as valuable networking opportunities. This year this network achieved The Stellar Standard, a new industry benchmark to evaluate the impact of employee network groups. We continue to prioritise attracting and developing a broader range of talent, maintaining our focus on gender and ethnicity imbalances through identifying and removing barriers that could discourage talent from being attracted to or joining ABF, or from advancing to leadership positions. 

Overall the gender balance of the Group is fairly equal, with women making up 57% of our total global workforce, increased from 53% in 2019/20. Women also account for an increasing number of our senior management roles, currently at 38% across the Group, with three of our divisions having senior management and leadership populations of well over 40% women. Considering the most senior levels to be those reporting to the divisional chief executives and Group functional directors, our gender balance as reported to the FTSE Women Leaders has improved to 30% from 28% last year and 22% in 2019/20. It is pleasing to see the outcome from the focus we have given to addressing gender imbalances. We commit to a continued focus on ensuring women are represented in our most senior roles.

Our leadership teams are increasingly multicultural and ethnically diverse, with 30 nationalities in our leadership group reporting to the divisional chief executives, business managing directors and group functional directors. We are pleased with the progress that we are making on ethnic diversity in this most senior population. Globally, 14.5% of these roles are held by leaders from minority ethnic backgrounds, up from 12.4% last year. In the UK, while those of minority ethnic backgrounds are under-represented in our most senior leadership positions, we are pleased to have increased their representation from just over 8% in 2023 to just over 9% this year. We commit to a continued focus on ensuring women and those from ethnic minorities are represented in our most senior roles.

We voluntarily report on our overall gender and ethnicity pay gaps for employees in Great Britain (GB) in our Annual Report. Each of our GB-based businesses with over 250 employees also reports on its own gender pay gap, with these reports published on their websites.

These reports share some inspirational business-level insights about the actions being taken to enable all employees to successfully grow their careers with us. This is our first year of reporting on our ethnicity pay gap and we are pleased that so many of our GB-based employees have chosen to share their ethnicity with us to enable this.

The frequency of engagement surveys varies from business to business and region to region. 76% of those using engagement surveys ran one in the last financial year, inviting 88% of their people to participate with an 81% response rate. Across the Group all of our businesses are focused on increasing the proportion of their people they invite and choose to participate in engagement surveys. A great example of a mechanism used to increase participation included the use of QR codes so more of our factory, field or retail employees can join in despite not having laptops or desk-based computers.

Themes and action plans from the feedback are identified and developed at a local level, however we see strong, positive themes emerging for the Group overall, such as the quality of line management, presence of inspirational leadership, opportunity for learning and growth, positive team environments, focus on colleague wellbeing, and benefits of autonomy and accountability in our business model.   

Development

We offer learning and development initiatives aimed at equipping our people with the skills they need to achieve in their current role and to develop a fulfilling career in their current business or across the wider Group. These initiatives support our people to identify their own aspirations and include skills programmes encompassing skills training, personal development, apprenticeships, and mentoring. For example, Primark’s Early Careers programme is creating a talent pipeline for the future, our sugar businesses in Africa have a Leadership Development Programme, created in partnership with the Gordon Institute of Business Science in South Africa, and AB Mauri has a Global Technology Centre to deliver technical bakery training. The Group provides an Executive Leadership Programme for those in senior roles, and functional development programmes to support Finance excellence and enhanced business acumen within our People and Performance community. We run an induction programme for new colleagues in senior roles across the Group to enable them to form networks and understand the purpose, culture and values of the Group and how we operate at our best.

Our groupwide Career Conversations site gives people in all our businesses access to advice, guidance, resources and templates to plan their careers, as well as job adverts for opportunities across the Group. Our recent relaunch of this site with updates, materials and videos for colleagues speaking about their career experiences in ABF has seen traffic increase by 50%.