Ms Christine Tacon:

Yes I have. I have been to Dublin quite a few times, talking to suppliers. I have also been to Murcia in Spain to talk to suppliers. The survey that I conduct each year is sent by the retailers to their suppliers. They send it to their database of suppliers and generally around 15% of the responses are from overseas. It will not surprise the committee to hear that Germany, the Republic of Ireland and Spain feature prominently in a list of about 25 countries. I have not noticed anything different about the overseas suppliers apart from the number of them that are trained in the code. I suspect that is because the training is available in the UK. I am not finding that the overseas suppliers are unaware of the code but that they have not necessarily been trained in it.

It was very clear when I was conducting the Tesco and Co-Op investigations and reading thousands of emails that there was very little difference between UK and overseas suppliers. I decided that the suppliers I would speak to had to be both large and small, own label and brand, overseas and across the UK. I tried to make sure that I spoke to suppliers in every category. I had to speak to a large number of suppliers before I even started the investigation proper to be representative. In both investigations I can say that the only real difference between how suppliers were treated was based on whether that supplier was own label or brand. There was no difference between large and small, overseas or UK and so on but there was quite a difference in the treatment of own label versus brand suppliers. Many of the retailers see own label suppliers as an extension of their own business and, as a result, they treat them better.