About Us
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About Us
Our Businesses
Investors
Responsibility
Media
Careers
The people across our businesses are united by our purpose, culture and passion for delivering for our customers. We empower them to innovate and support them to grow and develop.
A production operative at the Twinings manufacturing facility in Swarzędz, Poland
Our operations in 57 countries across the United Kingdom, Europe, Africa, the Americas and Asia Pacific employ around 140,000 people who are united by our purpose, culture and passion for delivering for our customers. Operating through a diverse portfolio of businesses, brands and ingredients platforms, we empower our people to innovate, make decisions close to customers and markets, and develop their skills and careers over the long term.
Our people are central to our success. We understand the value of good people and strong and accountable teams. We recognise our responsibility to ensure our people feel safe, respected and included. The Group promotes a unique opportunity through its global network, encouraging our businesses and people to connect and share expertise, build relationships and learn from one another. The strength of our Group is built on the expertise, commitment and entrepreneurial spirit of our people in all our businesses.
We expect our businesses to review continuously how we can ensure we are doing the best for our people. We operate responsibly and doing so helps us to keep our employees engaged and motivated. We want to ensure that the people who work in our businesses feel they are paid fairly for the jobs they do, which includes receiving compensation in full and on time. More on our fair pay approach can be found in our Annual Report. We also provide support for financial wellbeing and examples of this are shared on our website.
Reflecting our devolved operating model, each business is responsible for the development of its people practices, ensuring adherence to our values and considering factors such as International Labour Organization (‘ILO’) standards and local laws and practices. We expect our businesses to have internal grievance processes in place to give workers a voice on the issues they face in the workplace, in addition to our Speak Up mechanism.
We also expect our businesses to condemn any form of harassment and bullying, including physical abuse or discipline, the threat of physical abuse, sexual or other harassment and verbal abuse or other forms of intimidation. Not only is this the right thing to do, it supports our good work principles and the mental health and wellbeing of our employees and contractors.
The health, safety and wellbeing of our people remain a fundamental priority across the Group. We are committed to ensuring that everyone who works for us, including our contractors, returns home safe every day, wherever they work in the world.
Any loss of life connected with our operations is unacceptable. As such, we are deeply saddened to report one fatal injury to an employee and four to contractors. Two of these fatalities occurred during activities on our sites being conducted by contractors: a contractor in Brazil was electrocuted; and a contractor in Malawi was killed when a fire extinguisher exploded during pressurisation by the contract engineer. Two of the fatalities resulted from road traffic accidents: an employee was struck by a vehicle while crossing the road in Zambia, and a contract delivery driver was fatally injured in a road traffic accident in the UK. Last year we described a contractor fatality in Zambia during inflation of a tyre of an agricultural vehicle, which is reported in this year’s data. Following these tragic events, our priority was to ensure the families and colleagues of those who died were supported.
Comprehensive root cause investigations were undertaken to try to understand the causes of each incident and identify opportunities to prevent a recurrence. The findings and lessons learned are being shared across the Group.
Our businesses work continuously to identify and reduce risk, strengthen safety leadership and create environments where people can work safely. Our businesses take a holistic approach to health, safety and wellbeing, considering aspects such as mental, physical and financial wellbeing as well as physical safety.
| 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Employees | 352 | 347 | 392 | 425 | 423 |
| Employee rate | 0.36% | 0.35% | 0.39% | 0.41% | 0.41% |
All of our businesses continue to have a strong focus on contractor management and supervision. Vehicle and driver safety remains a top priority and our businesses are working with their contracted hauliers to ensure a robust focus on driver safety.
Our Group-level Health, Safety and Wellbeing Policy, which was updated this year, establishes the minimum expectations across all our businesses. These are supported by our non-negotiable safety requirements. This Policy is supplemented 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, including mental health.
In line with the Group-level Policy, our businesses continue to focus their safety efforts in the following key areas:
Across the Group, we have identified a set of on-site and
off-site critical-to-life safety risks that receive enhanced focus and oversight:
We continue to support our businesses through resources and toolkits focused on helping colleagues to address these critical-to-life safety risks and strengthening safety leadership and culture, including the management of change and safety conversations. Additional support has been provided this year through machinery safety workshops to engineers and their immediate supervisors across our UK operations, with plans to extend the programme to other countries.
This year, we introduced a defined severity scale for Lost Time Injuries (‘LTIs’), providing greater detail on the nature and impact of injuries. The majority were classed as lower severity, with employees requiring only a few days off work to recover.
The Group employee LTI rate this year is flat at 0.41% compared to last year.
The Group contractor LTI rate this year has decreased from 0.25% to 0.24%.
Across the food businesses the employee LTI on-site rate this year is flat at 0.39% (202 on-site LTIs compared to 212 last year) and on-site contractor LTI rate this year is flat at 0.15%. The food businesses are focused on continuing to drive initiatives to sustain the reduction in LTIs.
The Primark employee LTI rate this year is 0.44% compared with 0.42% last year
We are disappointed the Primark employee LTI rate has increased. Primark has carried out analysis of their incident data and has put actions in place that aim to reduce risk and address the causes of these incidents.
All of our businesses remain focused on investing in risk reduction initiatives. This year £43m was invested in reducing health and safety risks across a wide range of operational hazards.
Our businesses continue to focus on their governance approach, safety culture and processes to keep their people safe. This includes increasing or improving the number and quality of leading indicators, including safety observations and providing training and leadership initiatives to strengthen line manager engagement and ownership of safety.
Our health and safety networks connect expertise across the Group, enabling people to share best practices and learn from one another to strengthen safety culture and performance across our businesses.
Many of our businesses are starting to implement artificial intelligence and digital solutions to help them diagnose risk reduction opportunities, support with data analysis, carry out risk assessments, enhance safe operating procedures and training. Group-level agreements for selected technologies allow businesses to benefit from these tools.
See our Data page for more details on our health and safety data.
Supporting the mental health and wellbeing of our people is central to who we are and how we perform. We continue to strengthen our capacity to adapt to change, and remain a place where people want to work by supporting a healthy and engaged workforce. Our businesses use multiple communication methods to ensure our different workforce audiences have easy access to information when they need it, including notice boards, shift briefings and virtual platforms.
We encourage a culture of open conversations with the aim of removing the stigma associated with mental health, including supporting our people to share their personal stories.
Our businesses invest in wellbeing across the Group, including programmes designed to raise awareness and provide practical assistance, resources and tools across all areas of wellbeing, including financial and mental health. These solutions work best when they take into account local contexts and the views of our colleagues. As such, employees are involved in the design and development of our workplace mental health initiatives and more information on this can be found on our website.
We support our businesses' line managers in sharing information on wellbeing support and explore any necessary adjustments to ensure employees can perform effectively throughout their careers. This includes temporary or permanent adjustments to work scheduling and workloads.
Two team leaders in the main laboratory at National Milk Records, Four Ashes, UK
In a year where difficult decisions have had to be made about closing and restructuring businesses, our businesses have sought to ensure that employees are treated with dignity through consultation processes. They have engaged with unions and employee groups so that employees know that their views have been heard. They have worked with employee representatives to understand what support people need and have provided employee assistance plans so there is access to advice and guidance to support their wellbeing.
We continuously aim to improve our holistic approach to supporting our people with their physical, mental and financial wellbeing.
We utilise feedback from external organisations, such as CCLA Corporate Mental Health Benchmark UK 100, to benchmark our progress and reporting transparency. We were pleased that this year we were recognised as one of the companies making the most progress in this area, now ranking near the top of Tier Two of the benchmark.
We continue to provide financial and mental wellbeing tools and resources, easy access to employee assistance programmes (‘EAPs’) and information across a range of topics to support our people internationally. We also invest in training and resources for line managers, recognising the pivotal role they play in the wellbeing of our employees at key lifecycle moments of on-boarding, career development conversations, performance reviews, return-to-work discussions and stress risk assessments.
Many of our businesses also have wellbeing activities in place for their people. Some examples include:
Our businesses strive to attract and develop a wide variety of talented people. This is enabled by creating opportunities for professional and personal development, and by fostering environments that enable our people to showcase and use their diverse and unique skills. Our people give us a competitive advantage and strengthen the Group’s ability to deliver long-term success.
Our Board Diversity Policy sets out our groupwide approach and is complemented by local business policies, DEI teams and dedicated programmes. These policies and initiatives aim to support all employees, including women, ethnic minorities, individuals with disabilities and members of the LGBTQIA+ community, through equitable access to employment, training, career development and promotion opportunities.
We are committed both to enabling our people to perform at their best and realise their career potential, and to eliminating all forms of discrimination and bias that can harm their mental health and physical wellbeing.
Our Group Inclusion Network is made up of colleagues from across all our divisions. It shares knowledge, best practice and ideas between businesses to accelerate change. We also have around 500 DEI advocates through which we provide access to training and thought leadership from expert external partners on topics such as allyship, racial and ethnic diversity, female careers and leadership, handling difficult conversations, and neurodiversity, disability and LGBTQIA+ inclusion.
Production colleagues at Westmill's noodle factory in Trafford, UK
A number of our businesses use the Develop Diverse platform to support the consistent use of inclusive language on business policies, job adverts, job descriptions and interview questions. The insights around the importance of inclusive language have 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 utilise our dedicated internal website to connect colleagues across the Group with our DEI and wellbeing corporate partners, easy to use resources, training materials and internal case studies highlighting great practice and learnings, including British Sugar’s 'conscious inclusion’ e-learning module and Twinings Ovaltine’s health and wellbeing agenda.
We foster active communities of advocates and leaders who are driving their local plans and identifying where synergies could be helpful. Over recent years our most active communities have been Menopause & Menstruation, Disability & Neurodiversity, and Wellbeing, including a network for those leading MHFA groups in our businesses.
Unconscious bias training, cultural awareness programmes and a range of tools are provided to support our businesses in promoting inclusivity. These tools equip leaders and line managers with the skills needed to create inclusive cultures in their businesses and local settings. The materials are provided in eight of our key business languages and we have over 100 trained facilitators across the Group.
Our Women in ABF network, which has been running since 2011, continues to help women develop skills, broaden business awareness and build connections that support both current performance and future career opportunities across the Group. This network is open to anyone across the Group, giving access to virtual events featuring internal and external speakers, together with networking opportunities that encourage learning, collaboration and the sharing of experiences.
We prioritise attracting, developing and retaining a broad range of talent across the Group. We continue to focus on improving representation, including gender and ethnicity, by identifying and removing barriers that may discourage talented individuals from joining ABF or progressing into leadership roles.
Through our talent and development processes, we aim to create equitable access to opportunities and support a strong and diverse leadership pipeline for the future.
Overall, across the Group women make up 56% of our total global workforce.
We remain focused on addressing gender imbalances and are committed to a continued focus on ensuring women are represented at all levels, including those in the most senior roles.
We are pleased that women account for 42% of senior management roles across the Group, increased from 36% five years ago and showing steady progress over time. Our groupwide Executive Leadership Programme alumni also has an increasing proportion of women.
Of roles reporting to the chief executives and their direct reports our gender balance for 2026 is 27%. However, where the size of roles (in terms of scale and complexity) is considered, as opposed to reporting line only, 34% of senior roles are held by women.
Our leadership teams across the Group remain highly multicultural and ethnically diverse, with 31 nationalities reporting to the chief executive or his direct reports. Globally, 20% of these roles are held by leaders from ethnic backgrounds that would be classed as a minority based on UK definitions, up from 12% in 2023. We commit to a continued focus on ensuring those from ethnic minorities are represented in our most senior roles in the UK and globally.
We voluntarily report on our overall gender pay gap for employees in Great Britain (‘GB’) on our website and are pleased that this has improved, although it remains in favour of men. A significant number of our female colleagues work in retail, with 76.1% of roles in the lower pay quartile for the Group taken by women.
In the food business the pay gap remains in favour of women as we have a significant majority of male employees who work in a manufacturing environment. These employees are being compared to women who, on average, work in middle management. 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.
Primark has a median GB gender pay gap of 0.4% in 2026.
During the year, the UK Government confirmed its intention to introduce mandatory ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting for large employers. We have been voluntarily collecting ethnicity data from our employees in GB for a number of years and 77% of employees in GB currently disclose this (using Office for National Statistics categories). Many of our businesses will be including ethnicity pay gap reporting in their 2026 gender pay gap reports.
Research shows that where employees select ‘prefer not to say’ as their ethnicity election, this indicates low levels of trust in the organisation. We are pleased that only 0.5% of our employees have made this election, indicating a positive culture across our businesses.
We are continuously working to encourage more of our UK population to share their ethnicity with us. With robust data we are able to produce better action plans to ensure that all colleagues have great careers with us.
Our businesses’ gender and ethnicity pay gap reports share inspirational business-level insights about the actions being taken to enable all employees to successfully grow their careers with us. We would encourage you to read these reports.
| United Kingdom | Europe | The Americas | Asia Pacific | Africa | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No. of employees | 45,258 | 48,790 | 8,856 | 11,215 | 25,673 |
| 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Employees | 132,273 | 133,487 | 138,271 | 138,155 | 139,792 |
| Employee rate | 54% | 55% | 57% | 57% | 56% |
The engagement and development of our people are fundamental to the performance of our businesses. Our devolved operating model empowers people closest to customers, consumers and markets to make decisions, while benefiting from the breadth of expertise, experience and opportunities available across the Group. Through our networks, communities and collaborative ways of working, colleagues can build connections beyond their immediate teams, share insight, learn from others and access support from a broad range of peers and leaders.
We are committed to creating environments where people can perform at their best, develop their capabilities and build rewarding careers. By investing in leadership, functional excellence and professional development, we aim to ensure our businesses have the skills, knowledge and talent needed to respond to future opportunities and challenges.
Open communication is a core part of our culture. Across the Group, employees are encouraged to share their views in a wide variety of ways. These include conversations with managers and leaders, engagement surveys, discussion and focus groups, 90-day onboarding check-ins, exit interviews, employee networks and digital forums. The businesses work hard to have constructive working relationships with union and employee representatives. These channels help foster transparency, strengthen collaboration and ensure colleagues' perspectives help shape decisions that affect our businesses and workplaces.
A team coordinator prepares samples for quality control tests at Ohly’s lab in Hamburg, Germany
Engagement surveys remain the most widely used approach with 95% of our businesses regularly conducting engagement surveys through their chosen partners including Willis Towers Watson, Culture Amp and Peakon Workday. Surveys are run over a range of frequencies across the businesses from quarterly pulse surveys to more in-depth surveys every two to three years. Of those businesses that carried out surveys in the last 12 months, 89% of their people were invited to participate with a response rate of 74%. We consider 70% to be a strong engagement score. As the exact definition of engagement measures varies by survey provider, we monitor the percentage of our businesses scoring above 70% against each area. The levels of achievement of scores above 70% of the businesses conducting surveys this year are:
The businesses are continuing to expand the reach of their surveys to all colleagues through use of technology, while recognising legal and cultural challenges in some markets. We are particularly pleased that in 2026 Illovo Sugar Malawi successfully completed an engagement survey with over 7,000 employees across the business, including those that have previously been difficult to reach, such as colleagues working in operations and agriculture. This identified opportunities to better support employees through clearer articulation of career pathways, increased provision of improved resources and facilities at a site level. We look forward to seeing progress in Malawi as a result of its targeted 30, 60 and 90-day action plans.
Throughout our businesses, there is a strong focus on taking action as a result of the feedback from engagement surveys and other activities. Actions this year have ranged from improving collaboration, strengthening leadership capability, training and transparency, introducing focus groups for employee feedback and promoting greater learning opportunities. Some specific examples include:
In her role as designated Non-Executive Director for workforce engagement, Annie Murphy leads activities that provide assurance to the Board that our businesses maintain cultures of openness, where employees can share their views and have their voices heard and acted upon. All non-executive directors on the Board have committed to participating in engagement sessions with colleagues across the Group. More information on the activities of the Board in relation to workforce engagement is provided in the Annual Report.
Our businesses support individuals to develop their skills and strengths through a range of learning, development, mentoring and career opportunities. This enables colleagues to thrive in their current roles while benefiting from the scale, diversity and connectivity of the wider Group.
Our businesses encourage employee involvement in their performance, with many offering incentives to employees based on the performance of the business where they work.
We have multiple development programmes across the Group, with groupwide executive leadership, induction and functional excellence programmes for senior leaders, while the businesses focus on development interventions for cohorts within their businesses. In addition, the Group works with a range of partners to provide bespoke development initiatives, including coaching and mentoring for leaders and potential successors. All of these initiatives continue to strengthen capability, build leadership pipelines and support long-term career growth across our organisation.
