...All our suppliers, wherever they are in the world and whatever size they are, must adhere to our strict ethical standards as a condition of working with us. These include providing good working conditions, freedom of association, treating workers with respect, health & safety in the workplace, limits on overtime and paying fair rates of pay. We take all appropriate measures to implement and enforce compliance with these principles in all of our contracted suppliers and every factory is audited annually by independent global third party audit companies and are also visited regularly by Marks & Spencer’s local Compliance Managers.

Therefore, we take any allegation of the potential violation of our Global Sourcing Principles and Human Rights Policy extremely seriously. M&S currently sources [...] from a small number of clothing factories across the East and South Eastern Europe region highlighted in the report, as you can see from our publicly available supplier map and specifically from only 2 factories in Serbia and 1 in Ukraine.  We have completed an audit and verified the wage data in all of these factories and can confirm that the lowest paid worker in each of the sites is paid significantly above the legal minimum wages of these countries...