Carole Piwnica, Corporate Responsibility Committee Chairman

As chairman of Dairy Crest's Corporate Responsibility Committee I am pleased to report that we have made great strides in fulfilling our corporate responsibility commitments and have been working towards making corporate responsibility an integral part of our everyday business life.

So what are the highlights of this year?

Environment

We are building the largest biomass boiler in the dairy industry which, once up and running, will reduce our overall carbon footprint by 12%.

In addition, we have made significant progress in reducing the amount of water we use in our manufacturing and cleaning processes, achieving our internal target - to make a nine percent saving - in two years rather than three. This puts us on course to meet our 2005 target set by the Federation House Commitment to reduce the amount of water used by 20% by 2020.

Marketplace

The development and growth in sales of our lighter variants has been good, especially ‘1%' milk which is available in Morrisons, Sainsbury's and via our doorstep delivery service.

We now have rigorous food safety processes in place so that if things do go wrong, as occasionally happens, we are able to act quickly, openly and honestly.

Workplace

The safety of our staff at work is a top priority, so I am pleased to report that following the introduction of our comprehensive health and safety campaign - "Think Safe, Drive Safe, Be Safe" - in 2009/10, we reduced the number of working days lost from accidents by 54% whilst our accident incident rate decreased by 36%. Although we were a little short of achieving the tough three-year target we set ourselves in 2007, Dairy Crest is now an even safer place to work.

Over the course of the year we continued to invest in making training courses more accessible to everyone in the company. Highlights included the establishment of a three-year dairy technologist programme at Reaseheath College in Cheshire and a 6% improvement in our employee engagement score, which was 7% better than the UK average.

Community

Over the last year we have been proud of the relationship that we have developed with Macmillan Cancer Support which has seen it grow to more than just a charity of the year.

We were also pleased with the success of our new volunteering policy which Dairy Crest people have embraced wholeheartedly. Because of this, we are well placed to support local good causes in the areas where our manufacturing sites, milk depots and offices are based.

Overall I am confident that we will continue to make good progress and am confident that we are on the way to meeting the challenges set by our Corporate Responsibility agenda.

Carole