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• Performance Data
• Health and Safety
• Environment

Performance Data

SCOPE AND RELIABILITY

The safety and environmental data in this report covers our 236 manufacturing sites and 142 Primark stores plus the numerous depots, offices and distribution centres. Our acquisition this year of the BTC Group, Innovative Cereal Systems, and Protient Inc added 10 manufacturing sites and 275 staff.

Within ABF and the operating companies there are multiple layers of checking of the completeness and accuracy of the performance data. All site managers must satisfy themselves that the data they submit to their corporate headquarters provide an accurate and a fair representation of performance. Each operating company employs one or more safety and environmental specialists at a corporate level who have accountability for reviewing those data and for aggregating them into the corporate submission to ABF. The ABF Group Safety and Environment Manager reviews the individual corporate submissions and, once satisfied, aggregates them for the board and for publication.

In addition to these internal processes, we have recruited independent 3rd party verification of our HSE data since 2001. From 2001 to 2003, the UK data were externally verified by URS Verification Ltd. Although the 2001 and 2002 UK data were externally audited they were not deemed to be sufficiently accurate to present a true picture of our operations: nevertheless they represented our best estimate. Since 2003, our global safety and environmental data have been externally verified by Environmental Resources Management Ltd. ERM’s independent verification statement regarding our 2006 performance is available.

As a result of this year’s HSE data collection and quality review, we have found that the majority of the ABF Group businesses had satisfactorily met our Group HSE data reporting requirements with the exception of AB Mauri, a major business in our ingredients segment. Given the significant contribution this business has on the Group HSE performance (up to 20% for certain KPIs), we acknowledge that this is affecting the overall quality of our reported Group performance. Work is underway to address this and we expect improvement of data quality for next year.