Corporate Social Responsibility

In conducting business the Board recognises its responsibility to deliver quality to customers, recruit and reward people on merit alone, minimise health and safety risks, maintain stringent environmental protection standards and honour agreements with partners and suppliers. The CSR Steering Committee, which is chaired by the Chief Executive Officer, has a remit that includes health, safety and environment, sustainability, financial governance (information covered in the Corporate Governance section), community, customer and people within its terms of reference.

The TMG vision
All TMG employees are guided by the group’s vision to be the Number 1 marketplace for motorists. This objective is embodied in the group’s Top 5 Priorities which are:

• Put the consumer at the heart of everything the group does;
• Accelerate growth through new and existing products and services;
• Maximise and demonstrate value to customers;
• Defend the group’s market leading position; and
• Attract, develop and retain talent.

As an integral part of achieving this vision the group works to standards that promote integrity, fairness and honesty. The group focuses on the needs of its customers, respects its suppliers, respects the environment, interacts within the community and promotes and rewards solely on merit.

The group’s people
People are the group’s most valuable resource and the success of the group is to the credit of all our employees. The continued success of TMG and its brands is something of which everyone associated with the business can be enormously proud. In recognition of the diverse needs of TMG’s employees, our flexible benefits scheme, My Benefits, enables employees to tailor their benefits package to meet their own specific needs. As well as our company funded benefits, we offer a wide range of voluntary benefits including childcare vouchers, cycle to work schemes and critical illness insurance that are proving popular amongst our employees. We are always looking to evolve our package of benefits and therefore this year we have introduced travel season ticket loans, pension salary sacrifice and a wine club.

The group is committed to pursuing training programmes which equip all employees with the necessary skills to help them perform to the best of their ability and this investment in people is core to our aim to motivate and retain employees.

The group is committed to treating all its employees and job applicants fairly and equally. It is our policy not to discriminate on the basis of their gender, sexual orientation, marital or civil partner status, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, colour, nationality, ethnic or national origin, disability or age, pregnancy or trade union membership or the fact that they are a part-time worker or a fixed-term employee. The equal opportunities policy operated by the group ensures all workers have a duty to act in accordance with this.

The average number of staff employed by the group on a full time equivalent basis during the year was 1,514 (2011: 1,640).

Health, safety and environment
The group’s policy of ensuring safe and pleasant working conditions for all employees as far as possible within the constraints imposed by the working environment has continued to operate. A full time health and safety team is employed by the group and is managed through a sub-committee of the CSR Steering Committee which meets three times a year and is chaired by the Chief Executive Officer. The group regularly benchmarks its health and safety performance against similar organisations in order to help maintain an environment that continues to promote a healthy and safe working environment. The group has received gold awards from RoSPA for Occupational Health & Safety and Managing Occupational Road Risk (MORR) for five and three years respectively, in recognition for the continued excellence in this area.

During the year there were no major injuries (2011: none) reported under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations.

Community
A key focus for the group within its community-based activities is charity partnership initiatives. Each year the group selects a designated charity and encourages fund-raising and sponsorship events to support them. The charity is supported through a corporate donation, staff fundraising and volunteer efforts.

Since 2009, TMG’s charity partner has been Help the Hospices. The partnership gives staff the benefit of working with a national charity with national resources while directly supporting hospices in the communities where employees live and work, which can be very rewarding.

The group has also endorsed a Community Involvement Policy which supports its employees who wish to work with communities across the UK both as private individuals and also as employees of TMG. Beyond these initiatives TMG supports other national and local charities through a corporate match funding bursary provided for individual employee charitable commitments.

Donations to Help the Hospices and other charities during the year totalled £0.1 million (2011: £0.1 million).

Customer
We are committed to putting our customers at the heart of everything we do and in July 2011 we carried out an extensive piece of customer research, interviewing over 2,000 customers. Our starting point was simple - ask our customers what is important to them and what they expect from us. This research also underpins our regular Customer Satisfaction Index survey.

This research resulted in the development of our “Customer Value Promise” - our promise to work harder and smarter for our customers going forward. The promise is not just a pledge on a piece of paper; it is core to how we design our business - our products, services and technology - and work with our customers. It will evolve as our customers’ expectations do.

Sustainability
Paper for the group’s magazines is sourced responsibly from sustainable resources. Through its arrangement with COMAG, the group benefits from COMAG’s contracts that have strict guidelines for the secure disposal and recycling of returned copies in accordance with agreed industry wide standards in the Periodical Publishers Association ("PPA") Best Practice Guidelines for Wholesale Stock Control and Returns Systems Document. The PPA, via its magazine publisher members, has in conjunction with the Government entered into a Producer Responsibility Agreement with DEFRA (the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs). This agreement commits the magazine industry to encourage the final consumer to put purchased magazines into the recycling process that ends up with copies being recycled as newsprint and not landfill.

TMG has a group-wide, environmental remit with a primary focus on carbon management. The fleet management processes have been improved with the provision of monthly fuel data for review by the Executive Team. The group has worked with the Carbon Trust to identify energy efficiency measures that can be implemented at all office locations and used fuel efficiency data to help drive both carbon emission reduction and improve health and safety as the group worked with drivers to review their driving habits. TMG’s environmental impact has also reduced through the group rationalising the number of properties it maintains and through the printing of less magazines.

In the current financial year TMG has used this data to manage its emissions, substantially reducing its total to 2,161 (2011: 5,909) tonnes of carbon from its premises’ use of electricity, gas and car fleet fuel.

Carbon footprint of TMG’s car fleet, offices and print sites