We promote and abide by fair business practices

Traidcraft’s Purchasing Policy sets out the criteria we will apply to any purchasing decision and defines our view of "fair trade" terms.

Actions and activities 2006-2007

• In December 2006 we appointed a UK Purchasing and Ethical Sourcing Manager. This new role has strengthened our controls to ensure UK suppliers follow ethical practices. Improvements have already been made in a number of areas and we shall report in more detail on our achievements next year.
• During the year we made advance payments to 29 developing world producers (last year 34).
• In our view, payment to all suppliers within terms of agreement is also an important part of trading fairly. Traidcraft has continued with its commitment to meet agreed payment terms with suppliers. At the year-end, creditor days (that is the number of days of purchases owed to suppliers at the year-end) was 31 (last year 33) for Traidcraft plc and 15 for Traidcraft Exchange (last year 12) .
• During the year the Board of Directors approved a conflict of interest policy , which includes disclosure of relevant issues so that any conflicts of interest relating to Directors can be managed.
• Traidcraft updated its formal Constructive Engagement policy . This defines criteria for working with or accepting donations from third parties and gives parameters to staff and Board members in terms of appropriate relationships with other organisations.

Staff views

As part of our social accounting we seek the views of staff annually on a range of issues – including a number of questions about fairness.

Questions about fair policies and being treated fairly have continued to receive high positive scores (3.7 and 3.8 on average out of 5), and although these scores have deteriorated slightly over the last year, this may reflect a larger response rate by staff to the questionnaire.

59% of staff agreed or strongly agreed with the statement "I feel that the wage I receive is fair", although there was a deterioration in perceptions of this compared to the previous year, despite pay increases having been awarded slightly above national and regional averages.

See more staff views.

UK Suppliers

See information about our UK suppliers.