Providing excellent value for our customers means sourcing the best products from around the world ¨C at the best prices. This helps families stretch their budgets further, brings more products within the reach of ordinary people, and helps to drive economic growth.

To deliver this, we source from many countries around the world. We believe that international trade helps people in developed and developing countries improve their quality of life, creating jobs and raising standards. The extraordinary record of export-led growth and poverty reduction in China and other parts of Asia bears testimony to this.

At the same time, we recognise that regulation and levels of enforcement of labour standards vary in different countries. Our ethical trading policy and programme applies to every country from which we source, including the UK, identifying risks and helping our suppliers to address them.

Our approach to ethical trading has five stages: setting and communicating standards; monitoring supplier performance; addressing problems where they arise; building capacity to prevent problems; and working with others to tackle the more complex and systemic problems we cannot address alone.

2008 was a particularly important year on ethical trading. We strengthened our independent audit programme, giving us even better oversight of conditions for workers throughout our supply chain and enabling us to improve them. We worked hard to ensure the 450 new products brought to market for the launch of our Discount Brands offered exceptional value without compromising our robust ethical trading requirements.

TARGET

*    Provide tailored training for at least 300 suppliers facing challenges on issues including forced, child and migrant labour

*    Develop in-country capacity to support poorly performing suppliers to improve