Consumer & Retail

Responsible Business Director, Kingfisher plc ( 6 month interim ‘22- ‘23)

From November 2022 to May 2023 I joined pan-European home-improvement retailer Kingfisher plc, a £18bn turnover and FTSE100 business, in an interim role leading their group-wide responsible business agenda. Joining at a time of considerable flux, I led a team of 9 group centre-of-excellence colleagues, and a budget of £1.5m, reporting to an ExCo member (Chief People Officer, Kate Seljeflot).

Achievements and key roles:

Oversight and steer of a refresh to Kingfisher’s community strategy with the aim of refreshing the mission, theory of change and social impact measurements.

Chairing a newly established Net Zero Transition Plan steering group by bringing in senior directors from finance, risk, sourcing and legal to put in place the programme and work packages necessary to ensure connections between financial planning, risk management, operational execution and disclosure.

Oversight and steer of the external reporting of sustainability metrics to align with mainstream corporate ESG disclosures and frameworks including but not limited to; CDP, Forest500, Workplace Disclosure Initiative, ISS, Sustainalytics, UNGC.

Establishment of a new relationship with leading legal advisory firm DLA Piper to provider Group-wide legal advisory services regarding future regulatory risks.

Team management responsibility, including monthly Peakon engagement score reviews and management planning, PDR processes, recruitment and retention activity.

Establishment of closer ways of working with Kingfisher retail banners to ensure close alignment between top-level sustainability strategy, policies and governance with those at retail level.

Head of Environment & Climate Change, Sainsbury’s (‘09 - ‘12)

From early 2009 to mid 2012 I led environmental & climate change strategy for the UK’s oldest, and second-largest supermarket company, Sainsbury’s, a FTSE100 constituent and a £20bn business by turnover. I was brought in to review and consolidate operational environmental projects across the group, and horizon-scan threats and opportunities. In the process, I instigated a carbon-abatement investment project that then led to my co-creating a 10-year sustainability strategy spanning all facets of the business, a peer of Marks & Spencer’s Plan A or the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. I reported to the Corporate Affairs Director, Mark Rigby with dotted lines to the ExCo Property Director, Neil Sachdev and Sainsbury’s Brand Director, Judith Batchelor.

Achievements and key roles:

Leading the engagement and implementation with internal and NGO stakeholders specifically on environmental externalities, to co-create Sainsbury’s 10-year, £1billion sustainability strategy and targets called “20 by 20” (20 targets by 2020). The aim was to simultaneously meet current and future environmental policies that would affect the grocery retail sector and wider supply-chains, and set stretching SMART targets backed up by solid foundational research and investment cases. My focus was on a range of key strategic issues such zero waste, zero carbon and zero refrigerants, minimising packaging, plastics and single-use carrier bags, working with responsible-sourcing experts on key environmental commodities such as palm oil, soya, beef, milk and fish, food waste, consumer recycling and consumer behaviour change.

Initiating a carbon-reduction investment research project with a consultancy and the support of the logistics and store development team. The purpose of this review was to provide a credible baseline of research to underpin the possible carbon reduction scenarios faced by the business and develop an investment case. The project analysed the marginal abatement costs (MAC) of a wide range of carbon reduction technologies that would be implemented within the store development and logistics hubs. The ultimate output of this project was a 10-year costed carbon reduction plan that would ultimately be signed off by the store development board, the investment board, the ExCo and the Board of Directors. I was responsible for leading and getting group-wide sign off for the project, attending the investment board, the ExCo and the Board of Directors meeting for approval.

Reinvigorating and starting-up key governance groups within the business at strategic and operational level so that there was greater alignment between group commercial, business unit and operational projects & programmess. This included alignment of the terms of reference and members of the climate change committee, waste and recycling committee, single-use plastics committee towards a new strategy. Crucially I acted as secretary to the group-level climate change committee chaired by an ExCo member, and initiated a number of other governance groups to drive operational change.

I led an innovation and collaborative project for the business called Consumer Futures 2020, with partners Unilever and Forum for the Future. The aim was to create scenarios of the shopper of the future and then work with Unilever to research the possible behaviour change projects that could be brought about to empower and appeal to such future shoppers. I lead a follow on project with Unilever’s hygiene and detergent commercial team to create space in Sainsbury’s stores for smaller-pack, higher concentrate washing capsules and to showcase these to the customers as saving both packaging and energy if washed at a lower temperature. Such products are now absolutely the mainstream in supermarkets.

I saw an opportunity for Sainsbury’s to intervene and improve on the UK’s broken recycling schemes, particularly at the kerb-side. For many people, kerb-side recycling is insufficient and local supermarkets provided their own facilities, especially due to the criticisms about product packaging. I initiated a group-wide review of store’s recycling across 400+ supermarket sites. There were two components to this, one was to remove so called ‘charity’ recycling bins (of which there were many dubious bins) and carry out a consolidation review with the waste procurement team of store’s waste and recycling services. This then stimulated the development of a customer “take back” recycling partnership with Oxfam that enabled slightly faulty garments to be given to Oxfam retail stores.

Driving the regulatory, commercial and operational response to a newly introduce plastic bag tax in Wales. At the time, plastic bag waste from supermarkets was a hot-topic and NGOs and commentators were regularly criticising the free allocation of bags to customers. There were calls for supermarkets to do more to force behaviour change with their customers, but equally there was pressure from devolved governments who were using the issue politically. The Welsh Government proactively took the step to place a 10p tax on single-use carrier bags. Sensing an opportunity for change, I proactively lobbied for the business to simply remove all single-use bags, but instead charge customers £1 for a bag for life. To do this I set about creating a new governance and retail implementation group to remove single-use bags in Wales. In addition to the operational project management I was responsible for working with the stores teams regarding delivery of messaging to the customers about the change and the language that had to be used by store staff to ensure compliance. The project overall resulted in c.£1m savings of plastic bag procurement.

I was a key, media-trained, external spokesperson and internal adviser to Chairman, CEO and senior management team on environmental sustainability strategy and issues. As a supporter across a variety of external-facing specialist teams such as Public Affairs, Investor Relations and Communications teams, I was brought into meetings with external stakeholders to discuss what our plans and projects were and were going to be. A key project area of stakeholder engagement was arranging stakeholder briefings and networking. I was responsible for creating an event to discuss carbon reductions in the grocery sector and this was attended by over 200 guests. The event was chaired by David Nussbaum, former CEO of WWF-UK and two speakers, former Energy & Climate Change Minister, Greg Barker MP and ex-Guardian journalist, Jo Confino.