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• Managing Corporate Responsibility

Managing Corporate Responsibility

Governance
GSK's Corporate Responsibility Committee consists of non-executive directors and provides a Board-level forum for the regular review of external issues that have the potential for serious impact upon GSK's business and for the oversight of reputation management. It provides high-level guidance on our approach to all CR issues. During 2004 the Committee met three times and reviewed our activity in a number of areas including:

• Access to medicines
• Research & development for the diseases of the developing world
• Charitable giving
• Committee effectiveness

GSK's Risk Oversight and Compliance Council co-ordinates internal control and management of significant risks to our business. The Council considers reputational and corporate responsibility risks.

For more information on the CRC and Council, see Risk management and compliance.

Management structure

Integration of CR skills
We believe that day-to-day management of corporate responsibility performance is done most effectively within our business operations, where experts on all our CR issues work.

Coordination is provided by a cross-functional team, made up of representatives from key business areas. Their role is to oversee development, implementation and communication of CR policy across GSK. This ensures a comprehensive and consistent approach is taken throughout the organisation.

We also have a small corporate team that co-ordinates policy development, reporting, and communication with socially responsible investment analysts.

For details of our Environment Health and Safety management see EHS management.

Stakeholder engagement
We have frequent discussions with a range of stakeholders, including employees, shareholders, patients, doctors, governments and NGOs, to inform our approach to managing corporate responsibility. See Engagement with stakeholders.

We have developed Corporate Responsibility principles to guide our activity (see Our CR principles), and in this report we explain our performance against each principle during 2004.

We use external guidelines and frameworks where relevant. This report includes an index based on the GRI Guidelines - to aid comparison with other company reports, see GRI Index.

Sir Christopher is the former Chief Executive Officer of Vodafone Group Plc. He is a non-executive director of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc; a director of the International Advisory Board of Hakluyt & Co; and is a Senior Adviser at Bain and Co.

Sir Ian was formerly a non-executive Director of SmithKline Beecham plc. He was Chairman and Chief Executive of Bass plc (latterly InterContinental Hotel plc) and Chairman of the World Travel and Tourism Council. He is non-executive Deputy Chairman of BP plc and a non-executive director of Sara Lee Corporation. He is also a member of the CBI President's Committee.

Dr Shapiro is Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research in the Department of Developmental Biology and Director of the Beckman Center for Molecular and Genetic Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine. She holds a PhD in molecular biology from Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

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