Goals and strategy

Our Future Homes strategy

As one of the world's leading home improvement retailers, Kingfisher is in a unique position to help consumers make their homes more sustainable at lower cost. At the same time, we aim to make our own business more sustainable by reducing our environmental and social impacts.

This is what Kingfisher's Future Homes strategy is all about: helping customers, employees and suppliers make the homes of the future more sustainable and affordable.

Our strategy ties in with our Delivering Value business plan by adding value to the Group in two key ways:

• growing sales of eco products and services
• reducing costs through improved eco efficiency

Our Future Homes goals

Our seven Future Homes goals set out our long-term vision on key sustainability issues. They provide an overall strategic direction on CR and are linked to our overall business strategy. Our goals were introduced at the end of 2008 following consultation with the Kingfisher Board and other stakeholders.

The goals cover: our products and services, our stores and operations, our customers, our people, our community, our suppliers and partners, and our economic growth. See our performance for details of our goals and how we are performing against them.

We have worked closely with the independent sustainability experts, Forum for the Future, to understand the evolving CR agenda and views of our stakeholders. To help inform our thinking on the goals, Forum for the Future identified key CR opportunities and challenges up until 2020 and developed a business case for action. We are now working with Forum for the Future to identify key milestones that we want to achieve over the next three years. 

Our CR policy

Our CR Policy and 14 issue-specific CR policy standards set out our commitments and objectives on key issues relating to each of the Future Homes goals.

Our CR targets

We have targets for each of our Future Homes goals and report progress against them annually.

Most of our current targets are set over a five-year period and run until 2011/12. We have started working with the independent sustainability experts  Forum for the Future to develop new targets.

One of the key pieces of feedback from our stakeholder panel last year was that we should set some long-term objectives in addition to our short-term targets. As part of our work with Forum for the Future, we are setting key milestones as well as some longer-term targets to drive forward progress against our Future Homes strategy over the next ten years.

Our Steps implementation programme

We have a detailed 166-point implementation plan for achieving our goals, known as our Steps programme. This is designed to ensure that all our businesses – from Europe to Russia and China – achieve a defined level of performance within specific timeframes. Our operating companies are assessed twice a year (at the end of January and the end of July).

Key performance indicators (KPIs)

We monitor progress against a range of CR KPIs on an annual basis and these are subject to review by the audit firm Ernst & Young.

Future Homes