Alliance Boots

Corporate social responsibility risk management

Like all businesses, Alliance Boots faces a variety of risks. We have a structured approach to identifying, monitoring and assessing risks and the steps we take, where necessary, to mitigate them.

Our risk management process

Our executive Directors play the leading role, monitoring the overall risk profile and regularly reporting to the Board through the audit committee. In addition, the Board, through the executive Directors, is responsible for determining clear policies as to what Alliance Boots considers to be acceptable levels of risk. These policies seek to enable people throughout our Group to use their expertise to identify risks that could undermine performance and to devise ways of bringing them within acceptable levels.

Where we identify risks that are not acceptable, we develop action plans to mitigate them with clear allocation of responsibilities and timescales for completion, and ensure that progress towards implementing these plans is monitored and reported upon.

We believe that this demonstrates good governance in action, underlining our determination to meet our corporate social responsibility commitments to all stakeholders, whatever the future may hold.

Key amongst the types of risk faced by Alliance Boots are: the impact of regulation; changes and trends in consumer behaviour; competition; health, safety and environmental risks; product/services risk; major operational business failures; increased costs; acquisitions; currency exchange; funding and interest rate risks, and pension contributions.

In the case of risks associated with health, safety and the environment we seek to mitigate these, for example by setting standards throughout the Group which are closely monitored and regularly audited. Health, safety and environmental incidents are logged and analysed in order to learn the necessary lessons. Any major incident is promptly reported to and investigated by the Group operating committee.