Our corporate social responsibility risk management
Like all businesses, Alliance Boots continues to face 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.
George Fairweather
Group Finance Director
Our executive Directors and the Director of Internal Audit & Risk Management play the leading role, monitoring the overall risk profile and regularly reporting to the Board through the audit committee. The process of risk identification is facilitated by the use of risk registers in each business. 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; impact of the global banking crisis on key suppliers; currency exchange; funding and interest rate risks; pension contributions; and data protection.
We seek to mitigate risks associated with health, safety and the environment by setting standards throughout the Group which are closely monitored and regularly audited. For example, 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 at the corporate level by the health and safety committee and executive committee.
