Questions
We address each of your questions in turn:
1a) Are all garment workers producing the clothes you sell paid a living wage?
NEXT is committed to taking all reasonable and practical steps to ensure our products are made by workers:
- Who are treated honestly
- Who are paid fairly for the work they do
- Whose human rights are respected
- In safe working conditions
All of the countries that NEXT sources from have a national legal minimum wage for those working in the garment producing sector. To ensure that our suppliers are compliant with the legal standards of each country, our directly employed global Code of Practice team undertake factory audits. We carry out an initial audit of all new factories who supply NEXT products. Thereafter we conduct regular audits on an unannounced basis, meaning we are more likely to see the true picture. During these factory audits, checks are made regarding the legal compliance of workers’ earnings and payment records, as well as working conditions and safety.
Beyond a check of legal compliance, NEXT does not seek to determine the wages paid by our suppliers. However, it is worth noting that in all of the countries that are important sources of supply to NEXT (e.g. China, India, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Sri Lanka), the garment producing factories we use generally pay higher rates than the national legal minimum.
In many emerging market economies, the garment industry provides secure employment for a very large number of people, providing a pathway out of poverty. Successful factories in these countries are the ones that invest in training to develop and retain their workforce within skilled or semi-skilled roles that include sewing, quality assurance and cutting. Inevitably this means that these factories have to pay competitive wages to retain and attract skilled and reliable garment workers. Over the longer term garment factory workers can progress into higher skilled roles, supervision and management.
Alongside the natural competition between factories to retain and develop their staff, co-operation between NGO’s, industry and governments has brought about an improvement in working conditions, including safety. For example, NEXT is a founding member of the ACT (Action, Collaboration and Transformation) programme which was started in 2015 with 16 partner Fashion Brands and IndustriAll. Its aims are to improve workers’ conditions, support processes to establish fair wages and ensure mature industrial relations in the garment industry.
1b) What steps have you taken to ensure child labour is not used in your supply chain?
An important element of our ongoing work with our suppliers is the role that NEXT’s Code of Practice team plays. This team of 47 are directly employed by NEXT and provide the business with excellent insight into local factory issues and the drivers of non-compliance. Our Code of Practice Principle Standards is our ethical trading programme which forms an integral part of our business. It sets out the minimum standards and requirements for our product suppliers in relation to workers’ safety and human rights, employment and working conditions. ‘No child labour’ is one of our Principle Standards.
We take the matter of child labour very seriously indeed and our Code of Practice team actively communicate with our suppliers about our ethical standards when we first begin to work with them. Our Standards are then reinforced when we carry out audits on the supplier factories that make our products. During each audit visit our Code of Practice auditors will specifically check that the factory does not use child labour.
In our experience, the use of child labour has significantly reduced in the garment sector over the last 20 years. This reduction has been achieved by the enormous amount of work that has been undertaken by suppliers, Retail Brands and NGOs. During 2017 NEXT audited 95% of our suppliers’ factories, employing over 1 million people. During these audits we discovered 10 children working in factories, all between 14 and 15 years’ old. Whilst any child working in our supply chain is totally unacceptable, these 10 children represent 1/100,000 of all workers employed in factories producing NEXT products.
On the rare occasion we find child labour in a supplier’s factory, our priority is the welfare of the child. With this in mind, the following actions are undertaken beyond that of the child being simply removed from the workplace:
- We ensure an appropriate government or NGO organisation is appointed by the factory supplier to ensure the child returns to education
- The child and their family must be consulted
- We continue to closely monitor the situation and if the supplier does not meet their requirements, any future business may be suspended until remediation is agreed
2. What is the average life cycle of the garments you sell?
NEXT does not directly measure the life cycle of the clothes we sell but we do develop our products to be good quality, fit for their intended purpose, functional and durable. We achieve this by using good quality materials and trims which meet our rigorous testing requirements and use fabric dyes and finishes which help the customer care for their products and keep them looking new for longer.
It is our intention that our clothes wear well. Our customer’s choice to purchase new clothes is rarely determined by items failing in wear; it is more likely that a customer will choose to buy something new because they want a change.
Whilst we do not measure the life cycle of the garments we sell, we do analyse returns received where the customer feels the product has fallen below their expectations and is faulty. We use the findings internally to identify opportunities to improve. All returns are inspected, the fault categorised and findings fed back to our team of technologists to work with our suppliers to eliminate similar faults occurring on future products.
We recognise the importance of giving our customers the designs they most want, however we consciously do not sacrifice our quality requirements in order to deliver fashion faster. The reason for this is that our clothes come with an implied promise of quality which is integral to our brand.
In addition, particularly within our Childrenswear division, we have anecdotal evidence from customers who let us know how well our products last and that they are passed down between siblings or to their friends’ families.
WRAP (Waste Resources Action Plan) have undertaken consumer research in the UK and found that on average, clothing lasts for 3.3 years before it is discarded or passed on.
3a) What steps are you taking to reduce the environmental and social impact of the products you sell?
Each stage of the supply chain has an impact, from sourcing the materials through to post consumer use and disposal. The vast majority of environmental impacts lie in the fibre and fabric production stage.
We undertake a number of activities to reduce the environmental pollution caused during the production of our products, for example:
- The first and most important step in improving environmental and social impacts is to develop our understanding of where the raw materials in our products come from and the fabric mills that process the raw material into finished fabric. We achieve this by tracing our supply chain from the production factory back to the raw material source. We have made good progress with this work and have begun to eliminate sources coming from unregulated or poorly regulated industries.
- All our products contain chemicals in some form or other. Whilst the majority of chemicals are harmless, it is a key area of focus that our products do not contain chemicals which could be harmful to our customers, the workers who make our product or the environment. NEXT has a Restricted Substances Standard (RSS) which restricts or bans certain chemicals being used in or during the manufacture of our products from being released into the environment. Our RSS is developed in line with the requirements of the Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals (ZDHC), an organisation who are supporting the industry to tackle the issue of hazardous chemicals in the global supply chain.
- We are actively involved in improving the training of our key fabric mills and wet processors to encourage them to adopt a best practice approach in dyeing, printing, laundering of textiles, tanning and dyeing of leather. Through our Chemical Management Standards (CMS) programme we encourage the use of “clean chemistry” which leads to cleaner production, cleaner effluent and cleaner emissions.
- For our key raw materials our Product teams are working with our suppliers to source fibres and fabrics from recognised responsible routes which have a lower environmental impact such as Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) cotton or lyocell. We started a programme of progressive improvement in 2015. This is a 10 year programme as it will take time to implement and for fibre and fabric sources to become available that do not require NEXT to raise prices for our customers.
3b) How do you audit this?
Our Code of Practice team undertake audits of our key fabric suppliers in addition to the product suppliers. The focus of the audit covers social, environmental and chemical management impacts.
3c) How do you measure progress towards reducing the environmental impacts of the products you sell?
NEXT is a signatory of WRAP’s Sustainable Clothing Action Plan (SCAP). This is a UK collaborative framework and voluntary commitment to deliver industry-led targets to 2020 to improve the sustainability of textiles across its entire life cycle. Through this initiative we are able to measure the embodied emissions of our products over the whole product lifecycle (from raw material sourcing to product end of life). The SCAP fibre footprint calculator tool allows each signatory to measure progress in a consistent manner based on their fibre submission and delivers progress against carbon, water and waste targets per tonne of clothing sales at both an individual and combined signatories’ level.
4a) What recycled materials, if any, do you use in your products?
NEXT currently uses a small amount of recycled materials such as polyester or cotton within its products, and is actively investigating the potential to increase this in the future. However, there are some real challenges with recycled materials, such as:
- Fibre strength and finished fabric quality which generally requires the recycled fibre to be blended with virgin fibres to improve the strength, overall performance and appearance of the finished garment. Without this the garment will not last as long, will deteriorate and will require more frequent replacement.
- Cost
1. Recycled cotton is more expensive than conventional cotton. For example, a t-shirt made from recycled cotton would need to retail at more than three times the price of a conventional cotton t‑shirt. In addition, the recycled cotton changes the feel of the fabric making it less comfortable to wear. When we have trialled selling these types of products we have found our customers are not prepared to pay the higher price nor accept a lower product quality.
2. Recycled polyester offers a better opportunity as the recycled fibre cost is more in line with virgin polyester and so is being used in larger quantities within our products.
3. In a market with thousands of suppliers, verification is required for recycled fibres to ensure the fibre is coming from a certified route. This is essential for our internal processes and is also important if we want to make our customers aware of the positive environmental credentials of the product. For verification we use the Global Recycled Standard (GRS) through Textile Exchange. The cost of certification itself can add around 20% to the cost of a product .
- There is lower availability of good quality recycled fibre. This is gradually improving, more so with polyester than cotton.
- It is important to recognise that the recycling industry itself has its own environmental footprint in terms of energy, carbon, water and chemicals. We are concerned that the environmental impact needs to be considered when deciding on the right fibre to use for our products. We would encourage policy makers to consider this carefully.
4b) What could the Government do to encourage greater use of recycled materials in clothing production?
We believe the key barriers to the greater use of recycled materials in clothing production are cost and quality. If the Government wishes to encourage greater use of recycled materials there are significant barriers to overcome in relation to what the consumer is willing to pay for this type of product. If the Government is willing to fund technological research and innovation within recycling to help reduce costs and improve quality, this will deliver great benefits. Our belief is that investment in innovation in this area will ultimately determine whether the sector makes use of recycled materials.
In addition the Government can:
- continue to support WRAP’s SCAP programme – which encourages productive industrial collaboration between fashion businesses to learn and share solutions to address environmental and social issues within the industry
- organise kerbside collection of unwanted textiles
5. Is your company taking action to reduce the risk of microplastics being washed into the ocean? If so, what actions have you taken?
NEXT became aware of the risk to the marine environment of plastic microbeads (microplastics) in personal care products in 2013. We removed them from all existing and new products and formulations in our own brand products effective from July 2014.
During 2016, research was made available outlining challenges uncovered with other plastics, including microfibres, being found in the marine environment and during 2017 NEXT joined the Outdoor Industry Microfibre Consortium as we believe collaboration is required to develop a robust solution in the future.
The Consortium consists of brands and retailers; academia and research organisations who are working together on this complex issue and its key aims are to:
- Define common measurement methods – the University of Leeds is leading on this with a research project to develop test methodology to provide an industry standard which is a vital first step to enable the evaluation of fabric performance and as a precursor towards the development of new materials
- Share knowledge – collaboration across all relevant industry sectors covering research, sharing information, agree priorities and share knowledge
- Industrial research– to investigate feasible options to tackle the release of microfibre and contribute towards addressing a global problem
The research focus is on building a picture of why the shedding of microfibres occurs and how it is influenced by production and use factors. The long term objective being to address the problem through prevention or re-engineering of fibres and fabrics with reduced shedding properties.
We believe a robust test methodology must be developed and approved before measurement of shedding can be undertaken which is why we have partnered with the Consortium.
- Are you taking any action to encourage reuse, repair and/or recycling of clothing? What do you recommend your customers do to dispose of your products responsibly?
To help customers dispose of unwanted products on our website we promote WRAP’s Love Your Clothes consumer campaign and website https://www.loveyourclothes.org.uk which provides information to consumers on how to care for, repair, refashion or upcycle clothes and how to donate unwanted clothing to charity organisations.
In addition, for Home products such as mattresses and furniture which can be difficult to recycle, we have partnered with charity partners to provide solutions for customers. An example is with British Heart Foundation (BHF) through a simple postcard campaign. When a customer purchases a new Home product, we provide details for them to contact BHF if they have some unwanted products. BHF have fed back to us that in addition to collecting furniture, customers often donate other products such as clothing. This initiative has helped BHF raise funds in excess of £500,000 for their cause.
7a) Do you incinerate unsold or returned stock?
As a rule, NEXT does not destroy unsold or returned clothing. The only exception to this is the very rare situation when the product is found to be unsafe and in this situation we believe the only responsible action is to destroy it usually by sending to our ‘energy from waste’ route (this is the process of generating energy in the form of electricity and/or heat by burning waste).
Our unsold or returned stock falls into 3 categories, items which are:
- Never sold - Products which are not sold in our mainline stores and online are discounted in our end of season sales. Remaining products are then sold through our own discount routes, both online and stores, before being sold to NEXT authorised third party wholesalers who then sell the products within their operations. In addition, we work with charity partners to whom we donate unwanted products either for reuse to help people in need directly or to be sold to generate funds.
- Returned as faulty – All returns are inspected, the fault categorised and findings fed back to our team of technologists to work with our suppliers to eliminate similar faults occurring on future products. The faulty items, if possible, are either sold through our Clearance operation or donated to charity partners who are able to reuse them within their operations.
- E-commerce returns – A significant percentage of clothes we send out to our online customers is returned to us in line with a customer’s consumer rights under the Distance Selling Regulations. This is a very normal part of doing business online. Items that are returned are inspected, refurbished and available to be sold to further online customers. The items are returned for various reasons including being ordered for choice, not liked, do not fit or a small percentage are returned as faulty product. The faulty products are segregated to be sold through our Clearance operation (as detailed in 2 above).
7b) What percentage of your sales are online? What do you do with e-commerce returns?
Our online sales represent 45% of NEXT’s revenue, as detailed in our results for the half year ending July 2018. Please see point 3 in question 7a) above for information regarding e-commerce returns.
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to contribute to your work. I hope this information is useful to you and the Committee.
Yours sincerely
Lord Wolfson of Aspley Guise
Chief Executive, Next plc
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