What is the issue?

Why is this relevant to our business?

How are we being a force for good?

Team engagement

Our new five year targets

What is the issue?

By February 2012 there were 2.65m unemployed in the UK; nearly 1m of those looking for work are aged below 25 and many do not have the experience or skills needed by employers. In the wider global community there is huge inequality with some communities living without access to even the basic essentials such as clean safe water, food and education.

Why is this relevant to our business?

As the UK'™s leading Hospitality Company employing 40,000 people it is important that we attract and retain the best team members and that we respect the communities in which our team members and customers live, work and relax. Just as importantly we must also respect and care for the communities which support our supply chains to ensure we can keep our guest promises.

What are we doing?

Team & Community is one of the 3 key pillars in our Good Together Programme. Our aim is to make lives better for our teams and communities through education, employment and opportunity. Our Team & Community programmes include charitable giving, job opportunities, career development, work access and inspiration and team member wellbeing.

How are we being a force for good?

We provide industry leading team and community programmes, as recognised by the BITC CR Index, which include:

• Creating new jobs
• Raising awareness of opportunities within the hospitality industry
• Enabling our team members to develop new skills and progress through the organisation
• Investing in young people through our community programmes whilst helping them gain employability skills
• Charitable giving

- Job Opportunities

- We created 2,500 jobs in the 12 months to the end of February 2012

- Our growth plans will mean 10,000 new jobs will be created over the next 3 years in our Restaurants, Hotels and Coffee shops

- In 2011 our restaurants worked in partnership with the Princes Trust, to pilot a 2-week Work Inclusion scheme with 12 disadvantaged young people, 4 of whom now have jobs with us. Following this success we will be rolling this programme out across our Hotels and Restaurants over the next few years

- See more about job opportunities

- Skills

- Our Hotel and Restaurant team members have achieved 3,600 skills based nationally recognised qualifications

- In Costa 558 team members have graduated from our development programme and we have trained 2,000 Barista Maestros

- We have opened 3 Food & Beverage Academies (PDF, 72 kB)

ƒ - Through our involvement in the B-live on-line careers service, we sponsors in-classroom employability skills development programmes and in 2012 we will offer 60 Work Inspirations placements. We have the potential to reach over 1,200 schools

- Read more details on what we've acheived in skills and learning

- Charitable giving

- In June 2009 we set our charity target of raising £1 million for WaterAid, which we achieved in late 2011, helping more than 66,000 people in India gain access to a long-term supply of safe water, improved sanitation and hygiene education

- This year we have raised £750k for our Costa Foundation, bringing our total since we started in 2006, to £2.5m. This has enabled us to open 24 schools, providing education to 14,518 children and jobs for 312 teachers and support staff

- A further £421k has been raised across Whitbread for other charities through our Raise and Match and Payroll giving schemes

- Working with our supply chain and waste management teams, a process is in place to donate duvet covers and pillows which are no longer required within our business to the Salvation Army. In 2011 this equated 333 thousand duvets and 55 thousand pillows with a value of £1 million

Team engagement

See what we are doing to engage and support our team members (PDF, 127 kB)

Read about our community investment programmes and successes