Evidence that centralized CSR departments can be among the first
casualties of corporate restructuring has emerged from drinks company
Allied Domecq and hospitality group Whitbread.
Allied Domecq’s corporate responsibility department has been denuded in
the wake of a takeover by Paris-based Pernod Ricard, while Whitbread
has disbanded its central CSR section as a result of job cutbacks at
head office, according to internal sources.
At Allied Domecq, owner of the Ballantine’s whisky and Malibu brands,
two key figures in the CSR department have left, partly as a result of
400 redundancies at the Bristol HQ since the takeover by Pernod Ricard
this summer.
Group social policy manager Ben Eavis has gone to fashion chain
Burberry, while corporate affairs director Steven Whitehead has moved
to a similar position with Barclays. Sources said CSR roles were likely
to be subsumed into other departments or scrapped. One former Allied
Domecq employee said: ‘The CSR department has effectively gone. There
have been a lot of redundancies in Bristol, and while Allied Domecq had
a centralized structure, Pernod Ricard likes to decentralize. Allied is
not going to be a leader on CSR in the sector from now on.’
Pernod Ricard said Allied Domecq’s corporate responsibility set up was
‘not appropriate to our decentralized culture’ and that a decision had
been taken to discontinue Allied’s responsible product marketing board,
which brings stakeholder views to bear on the company’s marketing
policies (EP7, issue 5, p6). ‘We have decided to retain the Pernod
Ricard internal ethical principles and team,’ it said.
At Whitbread, which owns the Costa Coffee, Pizza Hut UK and Premier
Travel Inns brands, the central CSR function has been scrapped in the
wake of £25million ($43m) a year cutbacks at the group’s Luton HQ. The
company announced in October that about 250 of the 1000 jobs there
would be lost due to difficult trading conditions.
Whitbread’s former head of CSR, Jerry Marston, left the company to work
for the Corporate Citizenship Company earlier this year but has not
been replaced. One well-placed source said: ‘The team has been
completely disbanded. The only related post is the newly created
employee reputation manager, a position filled by one of the former members of the CSR team and based within human resources.’
Whitbread, which has 40,000 employees and made pre-tax profits of £241m
on sales of more than £1.8bn last year, said: ‘There has been a big
restructuring that has led to a change of roles and responsibilities.
CSR will still be a major part of the business, but it is just a case
of where it sits.
‘Until now, it has sat in a central function, but it may become the
responsibility of the brands within the business – and human resources
will probably take on a bigger part in that.’
