Notes to the financial statements

5 Exceptional items

The exceptional costs relate to a strategic restructure and are not regular running costs of the underlying business, these include:

• £92.5m property-related costs including onerous lease provisions, property, plant and equipment disposals, leasehold premium write-offs and decommissioning costs;
• £32.3m costs related to the rationalisation of IT and logistics networks; and
• £11.1m redundancy costs.

The exceptional pension credit has arisen due to changes in the UK defined benefit pension plan relating to how members’ benefits build up. In January 2009 the Group announced that it had made changes to the scheme by capping employees’ annual increases in pensionable pay to 1% and changing the early retirement benefits for members who joined the scheme before 1996. There is a credit to the income statement to reflect the impact of adjusting employees’ projected final pensionable salaries.

Last year the exceptional pension credit arose due to changes in the plan where, to the extent that members chose the option to limit their future pensionable salary increases to inflation, there was also a credit to the income statement.