Bringing amazing and more sustainable tech to our customers isn’t something we do alone. Our partnerships with suppliers make a big difference too.
We collaborate with our manufacturers and suppliers to make sure the products we sell are safe and responsibly sourced. And when selecting our suppliers or renegotiating existing contracts, we thoroughly consider their overall sustainability performance, particularly their energy efficiency, climate change impact, water-use and biodiversity impact.
For customers to enjoy our amazing technology, they need peace of mind that we’re sourcing responsibly. When we collaborate with our manufacturers and suppliers or renegotiate existing contracts, we consider their overall sustainability performance, particularly their energy efficiency, climate change impact, water-use and biodiversity impact. With around 7,000 suppliers across the globe, we want to make sure we’re using our size and unique capabilities to do good.
In addition to compliance with all relevant national and international legislation, we've created our own Standards for Responsible Sourcing, which set out our expectations for all suppliers, partners and subsequent supply chains. The Standards reflect our commitment to acting with integrity in business relationships.
We ask all our own label brand suppliers to comply with strict trading terms and operational procedures. This means they must have effective systems and controls in place to meet standards of health and safety, fair wages, working hours, equal opportunities, freedom of association, collective bargaining and disciplinary procedures. Employing forced or child labour is strictly against our terms of operation.
We use external assessors to audit suppliers. If they spot something that isn’t right, our teams work with the supplier to help them improve their working practices. If there’s an issue of concern we can’t resolve, we stop working with that supplier.
We also have a dedicated team of experts whose job it is to help colleagues make purchasing decisions and ensure our Standards are upheld alongside traditional drivers such as price, product features and stock availability. It’s helping us to to grow our range from ethically and responsibly-aware supply chains, and to safeguard against risk.
We've also partnered with one of the leading providers of business sustainability ratings: EcoVadis. This helps us to measure supplier performance across a wide range of metrics and identify ways we can champion positive activities, collaborate to improve performance, reduce our emissions and benefit wider society.
We’re committed to eradicating all forms of modern slavery and human trafficking. The fact that modern slavery still exists today is abhorrent and eradication requires collaboration and transparency.
We continue to expand our efforts to tackle the issue – collating existing actions and working on new initiatives across our business and supply chain to mitigate risk and identify areas that need additional focus.
Our Modern Slavery Statement and Policy has been issued to all our colleagues, suppliers and partners. It clearly states the actions to take if a case of modern slavery is discovered or suspected. We work with our suppliers to ensure they adhere to our Modern Slavery Policy.
You can find more information in our latest Modern Slavery Statement.
At Currys we are proud of the achievements we made in 2021/22. We are committed to being a responsible business and have done this by:
- Inviting more suppliers to join the EcoVadis platform to enable us to measure their sustainability performance, with nearly half of total revenue of the Group now assessed.
- Joining the Responsible Business Alliance, an organisation with over 400 members involved in the manufacture of electronics and with an aim of driving sustainable value for workers, the environment and business through global supply chains. Read more on: https://www.responsiblebusiness.org/
- Updating our Modern Slavery Policy and issuing new Child Labour Remediation and Conflict Minerals policies.
- Rolling out our enhanced ethical and quality audit criteria for own label and licensed brand suppliers based in China and the Far East.
- Completing our assessment of tier 2 waste and recycling partners in the UK in conjunction with Slave-Free Alliance and our direct (tier 1) supplier.