Right. Good afternoon, everyone. I apologize, just a few minutes late. We were waiting for Clive. We were told he was only a minute away, so, he's just getting his chair now. I've been reliably informed by Fraser that this is the biggest turnout in history for an Investor Day. Whether that's true or whether it's just the last few years through the pandemic, I'm not sure. We'll go with that 'cause we appreciate your time today. I should remind us that this is part one of the Investor Day, because as you know from the invite we sent out, this is part one, an update from Katie and I, the broader leadership team over lunch as well. Part two is Stevenage. We have two store visits planned that we've invited you to pick one or the other. Stevenage on the 23rd of November.
As you probably know by now, Stevenage was a Debenhams store. We converted it to M&S, and it's performing above our expectations, and it's the new Clothing and Food format. The other store is London Colney, a store Maddy Evans, our Head of Womenswear, and I were visiting just the other evening, looking at the disruption plans and what was going on. London Colney, we're next door to a Food competitor. It's going to be a great renewal store. We've offered the 13th of December to take you around London Colney as well. That's part two of our Investor Day. This isn't about trading. I know you know that.
We're in a closed period, but it is about our growth and value creation plan, and to give you a bit of an insight into what's on our mind and our plan for these few years ahead. I should just introduce a couple of people. If you don't want to talk to Owen today, then you have got our three Finance Directors with us. They're somewhere at the back there, but I think they're next to Owen. Emma, we can't see you, Emma, but that's fine. We'll see you at lunch. Emma is our Finance Director that covers all of our Food business, our property and our operations. Emma's at hand over lunch as well. There's Eoin Tonge, who runs all of our finance for Clothing & Home and international and data and digital. Adam, who's our M&S lifer.
We wouldn't be without him. Done every finance job in M&S for the last 25 years. I call Adam our Financial Controller, so he's sort of my central go-to person. Of course, you know Fraser and Jack. I should welcome, we've got many of our Board here today. Importantly, someone to my right is Hannah Gibson, who is our new CEO of Ocado Retail. I'm delighted.
20. Yeah.
Did I get that right? That was a bit of a guess. 22 days in the job, so go gentle on Hannah. There's a big task ahead, but we're very excited she's here. In fact, the leadership team and I run Bluewater store, and I was the Store Manager for the week and we were pretty hands-on for seven days running that store a few weeks ago. Hannah was on day two and decided to join us, running the store and getting closer to customers and closer to our colleagues. We appreciate that. As you know from the agenda, we've got presentations, myself and Katie. Over lunch, the wider leadership team. I'll introduce you to some of those people as we break for lunch, and we aim to close around 2:30 P.M to 2:45 P.M.
Key takeaways and, sort of I'll start with this slide and we'll end with the same slide. The first is, we know with our five-year ambition that we have to restructure our cost base. The first key takeaway is a permanent restructure of costs. Our ambition is to remove GBP 400 million of costs from our underlying cost base. In addition to this, we know we have to offset our annual headwind of inflation. Costs is the first key plan and the first key takeaway. The second is our investment in trusted value. We talk about being the most trusted brand in the U.K.. We've invested in value over the past five years, but that has to continue, especially when value is top of mind for our customers.
We think we're in better shape now to weather the storm and the uncertainty than we're in, but we do intend to invest in around GBP 200 million in value over the course of this five-year plan. The third takeaway is profitable growth in market share. That's in both our Clothing & Home business. We think we've got some big growth upside and opportunity in key categories. You'll hear some of those from Katie today, but also channels as we think about M&S omnichannel and our future. We think we've got capability to improve our margins in both businesses as well. High quality store rotation, something you've heard on previous Investor Days. Our property strategy and store rotation strategy is a really key plan that underpins also how we're going to be more productive and more cost efficient over this plan.
Our Clothing and home space will reduce by 20% as we think about Clothing and home moving to 50% online. We will open 100 new Food stores, and our Food space will grow by about 12%-15%. Although we do have a five-year plan, and Sacha is in the room today and will talk over lunch, the challenge for us is how do we get five into three? The next one is the most digitally engaged customers. We think we have a big opportunity with Sparks, 16 million members, 3.9 million app users today. We think we can grow that to about 10 million app users and really make sure every interaction with our customers is personalized.
Capital light partnerships, we have a good, strong plan on store rotation, but we also know we think we have an opportunity to grow revenue, probably to about half a billion GBP, by growing with our franchise partners globally, India, Middle East, Asia, but also a U.K. Opportunity to roll out more capital light franchise partnerships in the U.K.. Finally, capital allocation framework for value creation, ensuring we invest our capital for growth, and that helps us with a structural cost reduction. Aiming for investment-grade metrics and the ability to return cash through restoring a base level of dividend. In addition to these key takeaways, I do want to call out the leadership team because we have a really strong team.
Richard is our Managing Director, who you'll talk to over lunch, running Clothing & Home, and Alex, who actually joins us, Alex Freudmann, in four weeks' time as the Managing Director of our Food business. Also the talent and the bench strength of our broader team, I think is really important. We're focused very much on what's in our control. We're focused on growth, but also in these quite uncertain times, we're also focused on execution and doing what we need to do and what we've said we're doing, we need to do, and also focused on how do we keep our shape and how do we apply discipline. Of course, uncertainty is at its maximum, and we all know that.
There's lots of volatility ahead, and you've only just got to live the last 24 hours to know it's not just a sort of consumer crisis, it's an everything crisis. We know that there's so many factors, whether that's Brexit or the huge adverse headwinds in energy or cost of living part one and cost of living part two as we enter next year with the currency challenges that we're facing. Something we talk about is despite all of these market challenges, how do we mitigate and manage those and keep focused internally? Wage inflation is, of course, top of mind. We're determined to support our colleagues, and we have done with a second pay review this year. Overall, the average colleague in our stores, our hourly paid colleagues, their pay has increased 7% this year to last year.
We know there's going to be more pressure on wage inflation in 2023. Energy is definitely top of our mind, and it's on top of our customers' minds and our colleagues' minds. If we think about us in M&S, already this year, our energy cost GBP 40 million above our budget. We're learning how to offset some of these challenges in the next 12 months. Without government support, that energy headwind could add an additional GBP 100 million to our energy costs next year. Of course, the currency and the cost and the headwinds that we're going to face in Clothing.
Actually, we've been facing in Food GBP several hundred million of COGS inflation in Food already in the last eight months, that the team have been working really hard to balance that day job of providing great product, great quality at the best price possible. Yet we're also trying to manage the margins and that headwind in Food. That's a challenge for Clothing as we think about next year in autumn, winter. As I say to our leadership team, we don't want to get too distracted. We have to focus on the plan and what's in our control, and that's today's agenda. In Food, we know, and in Clothing, value is becoming the top priority for our customers. We hear that, we see that, and we see it in all of our data and insights.
The market has been particularly challenging, and it's something that actually post-COVID is quite different to during COVID, because in Food, we know people have been going on holiday, people have been eating out, and you've only got to look at the food market in the past 12 months to see the volume decline. In the market, as you know, there was a 3.6% decline in Food volumes across the market, an unprecedented inflation with latest inflation figures published yesterday. In Clothing, it's quite the opposite. Quite a buoyant market and more customers coming into stores. The value in the clothing market actually over summer, as you probably know, increased by 7%. What we're seeing now, though, is value in both businesses becoming really important.
In Food, customers shopping our Remarksable range. In Clothing, customers shop in what we call cozy categories are ready to get ahead, thermal underwear, for example, as they predict the energy bills for autumn and winter. Value should be really at the heart of the M&S plan. Something I learned joining five years ago when I read all the books on M&S, when I went to the archive center in Leeds, realizing that M&S was never a premium brand. M&S was about great style in Clothing, great quality in Food, but the best price you could give customers, and that's our DNA, and that's our focus in this growth plan. I do think we're a more resilient business today than we were five years ago.
If you just cast your eye on some of the things we've been doing since 2018 to the present day, we've strengthened our value, perception, and our value position in both Food and Clothing. We've launched Remarksable 120 lines in Food on the things our customers buy most, everyday items at fantastic value. In Clothing, we've halved the amount of product that's gone into sale. Actually, through COVID, under our Never the Same Again program, we accelerated change, and that's a good reference point for us because even up against all the challenges we're facing, it's a time for us to accelerate change and maybe go even faster on some of our transformation. We acquired 50% of Ocado Retail. Actually, we look back on that, what great timing just ahead of the pandemic.
We developed a more resilient supply chain, doubling the capacity in Castle Donington, implementing Vanguard across our Food business. Actually, for the first time in history, we now own our own Food logistics, which is critical so we can manage our cost, supply chain, and plan for the future. We relaunched Sparks and actually now have grown that to 16 million customers. On marksandspencer.com, over 9 million active customers, 3.9 million customers using the app, and a third of our Clothing business is now online. We've begun to tackle our legacy store estate issue. We've closed 68 stores. We've renewed many Food stores, and we now have a successful new Food format. We've more recently done that in Clothing & Home, and that's also proving really successful.
We've rolled out Vanguard in our food supply chain, but we've also bought Gist, as I said, acquired that in the past two weeks, and that will unlock some potential for us, especially in productivity and savings over the life of this plan. Importantly, we've strengthened our balance sheet from GBP 2 billion of debt four years ago to GBP 400 million of debt and a further GBP 850 million of facilities. Finally, we're going again on value across Clothing and Food. In just a few weeks, Paul and the team are relaunching Remarksable again and locking prices for the whole of winter. What does that mean for our business today? I think we're in a better place to face into some of the challenges that we all know are out there in the market.
In Food, we've got plans to grow our market share by 1% from 3.6% today by another 1% share. We also think we've got an opportunity to improve over time our net operating margin, especially with our cost program. In Clothing & Home, we're building the U.K.'s leading omni-channel Clothing & Home business, building the business for also global reach. Our long-term goal in Clothing & Home is to improve our market share already today over 9% by a further 1%. In fact, our Clothing & Home ambition for online is to improve online sales to 50% of Clothing sales. We think we can be north of 10% margin overall because we're going to particularly focus on that Clothing online margin as well. Katie will cover some of this later.
We think we're more resilient, but we're very clear-eyed about the challenges and opportunities. These are our nine programs, and I'll touch on all of these very briefly, deep dive a few, and then hand over to Katie on the rest. The first is we start with costs because we know we have to structurally lower our cost of doing business and work differently. Our ambition to remove GBP 400 million of costs is a permanent restructure, but we should also be aware of how we then have to offset inflation in lowering cost programs. That cost has to be removed from all of our overheads, from our store support center to our stores, through restructuring our property through store rotation and in our supply chain. Our second is our high-performance culture. Raising the bench strength of talent.
We've been relentless in the pursuit of great talent and development in the last few years, but we know we need to get closer to our customers, closer to our colleagues. Also help our colleagues be more digitally enabled, and use data and insights to make informed decisions. Our third is accelerating store rotation. Closing poor performing stores, going even faster so we have the best sites, more productive sites, more profitable stores, and quality retail space, and an estate that absolutely delivers our vision for an omnichannel M&S. Number four is our supply chain being faster, more agile, lower cost, in fact, across both Clothing & Home and Food. Number five is exceptional product and being the most trusted brand in the U.K. Without great product, we don't have a business.
Since arriving at M&S five years ago, I talked about protecting the magic and modernizing the rest. Protecting the magic is about the quality and innovation, and we should never compromise on that. Our modernization are the plans that you see on the screen. Number six is leading in omni-channel, and that includes Ocado. Becoming the U.K.'s leading omni-channel retailer, offering a seamless experience across all our channels and enabled by the app. Leveraging our stores and our colleagues, so we're a convenient and brilliant place to shop for our customers. Delivering our own label, own brand strategy, and a curated range of third-party brands. While Hannah's here on Ocado, you'll have conversations no doubt over lunch, but we're very excited by this opportunity. In fact, I think we agree, Hannah, we haven't really scratched the surface.
In this JV, timing's everything, and it was perfect timing pre the pandemic. Food had never been online. We delivered GBP 1.3 billion of sales since the launch. 580 million units since launching M&S on Ocado. 75% of our range is on Ocado. We're hoping Hannah will increase that slightly, if not most of the range in the next few months ahead. We've had synergies by FY 23 of GBP 65 million. We do think it's time for a strategic review, and that's why I am very excited and very confident in what Hannah can do, not in the next few months, but over the years ahead. Number seven is a compelling customer ecosystem, connecting every customer across the whole of M&S, maximizing the value to unlock and become the latest digital and largest digital relationship based in the U.K., utilizing Sparks.
That's 16 million customers and users, like, utilizing all of that at the heart of our ecosystem. Expanding global reach, leveraging the M&S brand to drive growth around the world, doubling down on our successful partnerships in the Middle East, in India, that I know Katie and the team think is a big opportunity. Also in the U.K. through capital-light U.K. franchise partnerships. Finally, a disciplined approach to capital allocation, driving a single-minded focus on value creation for our shareholders, maintaining a strong balance sheet and cash position while investing in high returns that drive competitive advantage. As I said, let me touch on a couple of those now and then I'll hand over to Katie to give you some more detail.
We start with costs because we know we're facing into that now and we know we have to restructure our cost base over the next 12 and 24 months. We're taking action now. In fact, the GBP 400 million over five years, in just next year, we know we have line of sight of around GBP 150 million of costs to go after. More details on that will follow in the interim results and the end of year results, but there are four key areas that we're focused on. Now, on energy, you could say that this isn't really part of our structural cost program, but it is top of mind because it's the largest headwind and it's really preoccupying our time at the moment. Sacha, I know, will talk about this.
I think we have a good plan, but actually we need even more detail to really get underneath our energy costs and how we mitigate those as much as we can over the next two years. As I said, without government support, the impact on that could be around GBP 100 million on top of this year. Unsurprisingly, 80% is in our stores and it's refrigeration. A third is, of course, heating, ventilation, air conditioning and lighting. We've got some trials underway on refrigeration. We're putting doors on some of our chillers. I'm not wholly convinced on that yet, but the team are doing it. We've got five stores we're rolling out pre-Christmas, and we will see the impact on energy and customer and sales.
That's one plan. We do have some plans around aerofoils and different shelf stripping that will also help reduce our energy by a few percentage points. We've got LED lighting replacement across our stores. Of course, in our new stores, we already roll out these programs. With a payback of under three years, we want to go faster on LED lighting. Energy is top of mind. The plan, I think, is okay, but we've got a lot of work to do to really get underneath every single pound of energy cost and absolutely understand what we can do, what's in our control to mitigate that. It won't be turning fridges off or turning all the lights off. In retail operations, we know through technology we've got an opportunity to be more productive.
In fact, running Bluewater just the other week, Katie, myself, the leadership team, our eyes were really opened. Now I do store visits every weekend. I never think much surprises me. When you're running a store for seven days and you see the inefficiencies and the opportunities, but also, quite frankly, you see us doing the things we love to do rather than things we need to do, we think there's an opportunity to still reduce our cost base in stores, especially by getting the right stock at the right time into our stores. Our current 11% of sales, we think there's an opportunity to get that to 10% over this plan. In our store support centers, we're really passionate about our flexible working, but actually removing some of the hierarchy and complexity in our store support centers. We want to be faster and quicker.
In fact, it's something I talk to the teams about when we're working with our partners. We should be the fastest and the quickest and the easiest to work with. That's a cultural challenge for us. In our store support center, I do think over the next few years, there's an opportunity to work quite differently. In Waterside here, our lease will run out in FY 2028, and I don't see us needing a large office like this in Central London. We've got a chance over the few years ahead to plan for that, to have smaller hubs around the country, and to do that in the most cost-efficient way, but also to do it where we can attract the best talent from across the whole of the U.K..
Of course, in property and supply chain, we know this is the key unlocker because with the right store estate and the right efficient supply chain, we know we have an opportunity to reduce our costs and work more efficiently. I touched on high-performance culture, but there are four key programs. Now, we launched recently, I think I'm day 142, but we launched Straight to Stuart. Again, Straight to Stuart is very much around a cultural change of all colleagues talking to leadership and talking to each other. We have a great digital platform called Community. On day one of launching this program, within one hour, we had seven colleagues giving me seven ideas, of which three we decided that day and implemented by the following day.
142 days on, 5,600+ colleagues have written through this program and given their ideas for the business. We want a culture where bad news travels as fast as good, where all ideas can be raised with leadership. It won't surprise you to learn that because of the high engagement of this program, I've now set a challenge to say, "For the next two months, I'd like all your ideas to be about cost and efficiency." This is a great way of enabling faster communication throughout the organization and a change in how we communicate and lead. We have a program called Closer to Customers. Now, of course, running Bluewater on the shop floor, talking to customers, serving at the checkout, dealing with returns.
In fact, one of the big actions from Bluewater as store manager, not only did I have two phones and gave one to Katie and said, "I can't cope with these two phones," but actually, it was amazing how many customers called me and interrupted the day. Now, Helen Milford is here, and Helen, who runs our stores, holds a conference call with managers every Monday. I dialed on to the call as the store manager of Bluewater. Helen made the mistake by saying, "Stuart, any early observations?" I took over the call completely and said, "How do store managers have any time?" By the way, we employ a few hundred people in our customer call centers to take all queries. Yet I probably dealt with 25 customers a day on the phone, as well as getting closer to our customers in the store.
We have to rethink all of our customer touchpoints and engagement, whether that's in stores, whether it's through Sparks and personalization, whether it's through social media. I'm sure many of my team are the same as we. We're hooked every night on Facebook, reading all the comments, or on Twitter. I'm hooked on Ocado, reading how many stars out of five we get for every single product. Also, how do we use data and insights in a much better way to help us make better decisions, but also help our buyers be better buyers and our sellers be better sellers. On the other hand, on talent, we've done a great job in the last few years, but there's so much more in how we harness everybody's contribution in the organization. In our top 150 leaders, 65% are new in the last five years.
We have got a richness of diversity in our leadership group and in our colleague base. We have clear objectives. We have four structured talent development programs. We've relaunched our graduate program to attract more graduates, but for the skills we need for tomorrow, in particular, around omnichannel, IT, data and digital. Also one of the best programs I think we've got is our RISE program. This came up actually in the Food group by one of our colleagues in the people team, and we opened up to all colleagues to apply for this program. It doesn't matter where you work and who you are, but you can apply, and we second you in the store support center in a department of your choice and help you understand the business in more detail. So far, already over 100 colleagues have gone through that program called RISE.
We do have a strong performance review and succession talent framework. Finally, I've talked about skills for tomorrow, but we're very conscious in our recruitment and training, the skills we need for now. What about in three years and five years time? Our BEAM Academy, led by our D&D team, is a fantastic example where over 800 people have gone through this academy, all on data and analytics. We have our retail's first data science and AI apprenticeship program with over 200 colleagues already passing that program. In our stores, we're investing in product knowledge using our academy stores to train colleagues on areas like fruits and veg or clothing merchandising, or how to deliver a fresh in-store bakery. On store rotation, accelerating this program, I strongly think is the unlocker.
We're concentrating on how we grow volume in more highly productive and a higher quality store estate fit for omnichannel rather than having this sprawling store estate across the country. We still have an aging, poorly located store estate across the U.K. and lots of good work has happened, but we need to accelerate this. If we think about the numbers on your slide here, hopefully you can see those just on the right, where we are today, where we're going to be at the end of our five-year plan. In fact, at the start of this program, just a few years ago, we had 301 full line stores. Now that's at 247, 68 closures, 14 openings. Already a net reduction in space in Clothing by 1.1 million sq ft.
Our ambition is on the slide in front of you. We're taking out lower productivity, old full line space while investing in a tighter store portfolio that really supports our omnichannel ambition. Over the course of the plan, we will have opened 30 new full line stores, and by the end of the program, nearly 20% of our full line stores will be less than 10 years old. We're investing in bigger, better and fresher Food stores in the new format that you've seen. The payback is incredibly encouraging in those new stores under two years, and I've not seen that in many retail businesses I've worked. The other key thing about this is new Food stores present a great opportunity for that Clothing omnichannel vision, where customers can come in and collect their clothing order. Also, this positively impacts our balance sheet.
As you can see, the lease liability of our current full line stores reduces by nearly a third. Of course, new stores will be on top of this, but our new stores will be shorter leases on better terms. Our average lease length reduces from around 17 years to nine years by the end of this plan. How do we get five years into three? Sacha and Will and the team are working on that plan. There's many great examples. I've picked one today, which is Llandudno in North Wales, because in this particular store, it sort of brings this rotation strategy to life. As I said, Sacha can give you some more examples. This is the old store on a couple of floors. Yet, not far from the old store, we've moved to our new Llandudno store, an ex-Debenhams site.
Less Clothing space. In fact, we reduced our Clothing space by 5%. Actually, what's typical in these stores, even in renewal stores, if you reduce the Clothing space and really look at the range and the ease of shop, Clothing sales normally go up. In this case, Clothing sales have improved by 35%. In Food, we increased the space from the old store to the new by 29%, and the Food sales have gone up 75%. Spot the difference in the two pictures. It's not the most attractive store, as I say to the team on the outside, but there's one thing very attractive in this picture, and it's called a car park with cars in it, which drives the bigger shop. I think that's a great example of store rotation at its best.
As I said, modernizing our supply chain has been a strategy for the last few years. In Food, one of our key points of differentiation is the fact we have amazing fresh, but that requires a fast, modern, efficient supply chain. With the acquisition of Gist, this does give us, for the first time, control and visibility. One of the biggest problems is the cost increases that you can see on this slide in the last five years. 60% cost increase in our Food business. Our cost percent to sales now over 5%. Now we've got the chance of achieving better productivity, not by just saving the management fee, which is GBP 25 million on its own, but by the property costs. We think there's an annualized benefit of around GBP 50 million in this plan of savings through those type of benefits.
Don't forget, one of the biggest challenges we would have had in 2027 is the same challenge that every leadership team prior me has had, which is sitting there trying to negotiate a contract that you've got no way of negotiating because it's the only option you've got. We think this is a big unlocker. In Clothing & Home, the challenge is slightly different. It's about managing the stock flow and how we get more efficient with our working capital. In fact, it's pretty problematic, and it's somewhat quite amazing how our stores and how we manage this today. We know we need to get the right stock in the right place for better availability and better productivity. Upstream, I know Katie would touch on some of this as well.
Upstream, we need to manage and consolidate our volume better, call off stock and flow in line with demand. Our opportunity is also to consolidate at ports, achieve better container fills, lower cost of shipping. In our U.K. distribution centers, we've already invested in greater resilience and capacity like Castle Donington, but also invested in Bradford as well. We know we can drive greater efficiency. Moving from hanging to boxed stock is an example. As we go forward, we want the UK network in Clothing & Home to be slimmer and to use the network for product flow, not product holding. Shifting our stock, holding either up or downstream where it can be most productive and most efficient. We also see an opportunity now, especially now we've acquired Gist, to rethink our transport strategy across Clothing & Home and Food and that combined transport option.
Later, you'll also hear from Katie how we're going to leverage our stores to support our omnichannel strategy, but also how our stores become a key component of our network plan. A topic that's hot and always a point of discussion is customer returns, how we can really develop a brand-new process and take time out of those customer returns as we see that as a big opportunity to halve that and get the stock to the shop floor much quicker than we're doing today. That covers the first four boxes in some detail. I'd now like to hand over to Katie to go through the rest. Thank you.
I know. We chose this picture very carefully of the calm candle from our aromatherapy range, on a busy day in the U.K. in terms of the economic situation we're in. Hello, everybody. I was about to say morning, but I realize it's afternoon. I'm Katie Bickerstaffe, and I'm the co-CEO. I've met many of you before, so it's nice to see lots of familiar faces out there. It's an absolute pleasure to be here today. I'm going to talk you through some of the growth opportunities we've had. Stuart's already outlined the efficiency opportunities we have and effectiveness opportunities we have across the business, but I'm gonna raise our gazes a little more to some of the opportunities that we have to grow this astonishing business. I'm going to start by talking to you a little bit about exceptional products and trusted brand.
Stuart talked to you earlier on about the DNA of Marks & Spencer. This is at the core of our business. This is why we're here. It is the foundation of who we are, and it is an extraordinary competitive advantage for us. Having a very strong, trusted brand presence where customers like us, love us, want to talk to us, want to touch, feel, taste our products, is an exceptional and extraordinary position to be in. More than that, it is driven by confidence around the quality of our product. There is a common bond, a common DNA between Food and between C lothing & Home that unites the business in the customer's eyes, and that is about the quality of our product, innovation in our product.
It's about style and fit in Clothing & Home, and it's about great innovation and taste in Food, all sourced sustainably and offering great value for money for our customers. Particularly in this time of extraordinary economic turbulence and uncertainty, value for money is very, very important. We're not cheap, but we offer great value for money for the great quality product that we sell. I'm gonna talk a little bit about quality first. In Clothing, we spend a lot of time making sure that our products are built to last, with great design, thoughtful fit, and using durable fabrics. We always think about the customer need first whenever we do a range review and we think about products coming in.
For instance, we sell machine washable cashmere and non-iron shirts just to take the complexity and difficulty out of running a household and looking after your clothing. In Food, quality is not a choice. It's absolutely essential to retain and protect our market position. We set industry standards in terms of our sourcing operation, and we work very closely with our suppliers through very, very close long-term strategic partnerships, and we're very careful that we use only the very best quality ingredients when we're producing products. In Clothing, we must offer great style, and in Food, unrivaled innovation. Stuart used the terms earlier on around protecting the magic and modernizing the rest.
The magic in clothing is all around the style and fit of our products, offering relevant newness, but also the contemporary core products that make up such a huge amount of our sales. I hope you can see and feel both upstairs, but when you talk to all of my colleagues here, a renewed spring in our step and confidence around the style that we stand for in Marks & Spencer. That's absolute credit to Richard and the Clothing & Home team. Phenomenal, this style language, this visible confidence is really, really important because it enables us to buy the right product and put it in front of the customer, and we're seeing our customers respond really, really well to our new ranges. In Food as well, we innovate all the time with new ingredients and different products, and this sets us apart from the competition.
We pretty much taste everything, and Stuart rightly is obsessive about this. Whether it's the pea and ham soup, whether it's my obsession about the bread that's upstairs, which I'll talk about in a minute. We do taste our products to make sure they are the very, very best, and we're obsessive about quality. In the last 12 months, we've launched 2,300 new products in Food and improved over 1,000 other products across our range, which is a phenomenal growth and change agenda, and it really matters. To stay ahead of our competition, to be number one in terms of quality and our product standards, we have to keep reinventing ourselves. We also have to do that in a sustainable way.
As you know, we launched Plan A a very long time ago, and we take sustainability both in Food and Clothing & Home very seriously. This isn't a fad. This isn't a thing that people think about. This is absolutely core to what our customers say matter, and we will continue to invest in sustainably sourcing products and making sure we give the very best to our customers. Stuart's already mentioned this, but value is very, very important to us. We are planning to invest GBP 200 million in value across a combination of the Clothing & Home and Food business. We want to be competitive on the products that customers say really, really matter. Value for money is at the very core of trust. We're not gonna have tricksy promotions, just honest pricing and value.
As you know, in Clothing & Home in the last few years, we've come away from the friends and family promotion and that high low pricing to make sure that we offer every day great quality and value to our customers. In Food, Paul and the team are resetting the Remarksable product range, and we've locked down some prices on our key SKUs until 2023. These are the products that really matter to families and to customers, and we want them to feel reassured that we're backing those products with great value. We've also launched bigger, better pack sizes so that people cooking on a budget have got more choice around what they're buying. We've doubled down on my particular favorite, which is the Dine In, and I'm delighted that gastro and pizzas are included in that, particularly pizzas.
Thank you, Stuart and Paul, for that. That's made my Friday night. That's solved everything in the Bickerstaffe household. In Clothing & Home, value perception is very, very important to us. I don't know whether you all know this or not, but I'm particularly proud of the fact that from a value perception index, we are neck and neck with Primark, but I know my product is much better quality and lasts much longer. We've maintained our value position while significantly increasing the participation of full price sales, which is just an astonishing achievement from the team. We've also made sure we strengthen our position in selected areas. In Knitwear, which is a core category for us, and in denim, we've protected some critical price points.
Over 70% of our Knitwear business and 60% of our denim business in autumn/winter 2022 is under GBP 30. That is great value for money. In both businesses, we're sharpening our communications. I think M&S generally, we're quite nice, we're quite kind, and we need to be a bit sharper in the way that we communicate with our customers and tell them what great value we offer. We had the peak conference a couple of weeks ago, and I used the expression parking a tank on our competitors' lawns. With fantastic product, beautifully styled, great innovation and taste in Food, great quality, sourced sustainably, why shouldn't we be proud of the business that we're building? We should shout about it to our customers. You get all of that at a good price. What more could you want?
Stuart talked earlier on about the importance of supplier partnerships, and in Food, we've worked very closely with a number of suppliers for a very long time. One of my favorite products is upstairs. In fact, I noticed it was labeled Katie Bickerstaffe's favorite bread, so do not touch that bread because I will be eating that later on. It's the Collection Sourdough bread. It is a thing of absolute legend. It is our number one favorite product, and if you look up my Sparks data, you'll see I'm constantly buying it. This is a bread that we created with a small bakery, an innovative partner, where we use handcrafted skills to build this range, and we've given this range scale and presence, and it's selling extremely well, and it's not just because I've been buying it all.
In Clothing & Home, Stuart mentioned this, we have a lot more work to do to bring our suppliers closer. We've got huge ambitions to change the relationship we have with suppliers. We think there is massive opportunity here. We don't order long-term enough. We don't make longer term commitments with our Clothing suppliers, and therefore, they don't invest enough. They don't give us innovation, so we need to fix that. We've made some significant changes to our sourcing operation and our sourcing leadership team, and Richard and the team are working really hard to make sure that we develop those partnerships further to bring great innovation, great fabric, great flow of product, and work closely to invest in the future with our suppliers.
We actually had a session on Monday this week where we were looking at the end-to-end supply chain and supply relationship from the fabric all the way through to when it arrives outside your door, and it was just extraordinary looking at the number of opportunities there are that we can fix as we go back up the supply chain. We don't want transactional relationships around just give me the best input margin you can. We want to think much more long-term about those, and we want to think where we source from. What's nearshore? What's Farshore? What are we buying in bulk? What are we testing and learning with? And we're really starting to experiment across that spectrum. In Food, we think we've got substantial headroom to grow when I think about our products and our exceptional brand.
We have, as you know, 3.6% market share of the Food business, and Stuart's already said we're hoping to grow that by 1%. That share, the majority of that share is driven by small baskets. We're very, very good at Food on the move. We're very good at food for tonight, and we have 9.7% of that market in our store estate at the moment. We're much weaker on medium and large basket spend. What we've got to do in our store estate is think about how do we drive those bigger baskets? How do we get customers to participate more in our brand? Some of that comes from the range that we offer customers.
Stuart talked about the store estate and the way that we're going to refit it and the way that we've been running our refits. We've opened up more space in ambient grocery, for instance, and we've increased space for frozen product, more products to be able to pop into your basket and extend your spend. In Clothing, our priority is to drive our share hard in our heartland, womenswear, menswear, lingerie, with brilliant, versatile basics, which I'm really confident that we have, but backing these with confidence. We've now got over 630 lines that are over GBP 1 million of sales, which is up 20% two years ago. It's making the big bigger, feeling bold, feeling confident about who we are, and our customers are liking what they're seeing. We also think there's enormous potential in kidswear.
We under-trade in kidswear, and our market position is weaker than it should be, and actually, it's particularly weak in the dot- com channel. We have an ambition to double the size of our share of this category. We know that when more parents are coming shopping kidswear they are putting other items into the basket, and we can see that in the data. Huge opportunity for us to double down on kidswear, and we think that could be a GBP 400 million business for us in the future. Super excited. Finally, and we chose this picture really carefully, we are going into battle, and I choose that word really carefully as well, on sportswear. I might not look it, but I'm a runner. I run a lot, and I'm in a bit of a hurry on this category.
We have great foundations in this product area. We founded a business called Goodmove a couple of years ago. I think Maddy's somewhere in the room here, who runs womenswear for us. Last year, it was GBP 87 million of sales from nothing. It's fantastic product. The leggings are absolutely legendary. They hold you in all the right places. They hold your mobile phone when you're running, and they wash brilliantly, and they hold their shape, and they wear and wear and wear. But we know the headroom in sportswear is enormous. Sportswear is over a GBP 5 billion category alone in the U.K., and we think we have a particularly strong opportunity in women's sportswear. We know our customers tell us they don't like shopping in some other sportswear brand shops. I leave you to guess what they are.
I personally find some of them quite terrifying and not a great experience, and our customers are all saying the same thing. They'd like us to be braver in terms of the sportswear offer that we have. Finally, as you know, we have acquired The Sports Edit, and I'm delighted with how that business is going. It's working very, very effectively. Today, I can tell you that we're actually going to be launching a series of brands that have been on The Sports Edit on marksandspencer.com, such as Girlfriend Collective, Varley, and On Running. These are at a much higher price point than Goodmove. I think there is the market there for us, which we have proven in terms of working with customers who are buying Jaeger as well. Super excited to give scale to some of those innovative brands.
The next box I want to talk to you about is leading in omnichannel, including Ocado. I have to be told to simmer down on this area because this is the very root of who I am. I am super passionate about our omnichannel opportunity. Today, we can't claim we have an omnichannel business. We've got a stores business and we've got a dot-com business, and they kind of meet at the click-and-collect counter. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, as we discovered when we were in Bluewater a couple of weeks ago. Actually, we have made some good progress, and Stuart talked earlier on about the foundations that we've been building under the radar in some cases over the last couple of years.
At the moment, just about 1/3 of our revenue comes from dot-com, and as you know, that grew significantly during the pandemic. Of the 1/3 of our sales that come from dot-com, an extraordinary fact that a lot of people don't know is over 1/3 of that comes through our app. Our app is a very, very, very powerful tool for us. We also have increased locations for in-store fulfillment. We've got in-store fulfillment in about 240 shops across our estate, which is absolutely fantastic. We know there is more opportunity. A few months ago, we commissioned a piece of research that looked at the end-to-end customer journey across omnichannel, and there were a series of things that frankly, we didn't do very well.
An expression I use a lot with my team is that by admitting where you're weak, it allows you to be strong. There were some things that just weren't good enough. 49% of our customers who shop dot-com told us the experience wasn't enjoyable. That was a bit of a career low for the digital and dot-com team, I have to say on myself. We also have significant failure issues at Basket, where we have the last item available, and we tell customers after they've gone through the entire customer journey. I worryingly can see a number of you, including Clive, nodding in the audience, going, "That has happened to me." In fact, that happened to me last night, and it's very irritating and we are fixing it.
We're quite slow to process and manage refunds through the process and returns, which is like many clothing and home retailers, a very big category for us, has just been too slow. Returns processing has just been too slow, and we need to get that product back on sale and work through as quickly as possible to turn that return product back into cash. We know our omni-channel customers have huge value for us. In M&S, we know that customers who shop all channels spend four times more than customers who shop a single channel. Current live data, GBP 394 for customers who shop multi-channel, omni-channel, and well, all of our channels. Stores only customers, GBP 94. That's 394 plus 94, and online only GBP 101. You get where I'm going with this.
Let's try and get as many of our customers as we can to shop omni-channel. We've got lots of assets that we can leverage. We've got 600+ touch points where you can click and collect product, and you can return your product to us as well. We've got phenomenal data assets Stuart mentioned earlier on, and I will talk about Sparks in a little bit. Actually, as of this morning, we're at 16.2 million customers in our Sparks database. Of course, we've invested in our partnership with Ocado Retail, and Hannah's with us today, which is fantastic. We think in the future, we can deliver a truly omni-channel Food and Clothing & Home business, and we think Ocado and Hannah and the team are a crucial and an essential part of that.
What are we gonna do to improve omnichannel across our business? First of all, we are gonna make the app front and center, making it seamless and connected across all channels. At the moment, we've got about 3.7 million active app users, and the team's goal in the next two years is to get that to 10 million active app users. Why? Well, I don't have to pay for the traffic. They spend more. All of the utility and services of M&S sit within the app. It's a very, very quick experience. It's a very, very efficient experience. Our app customers are our most engaged customers in terms of NPS. We also, by the way, use our app a lot as a colleague tool in store. You can see what's in stock. You can see where the stock is.
You can see where your nearest store is. Also, if you're on your phone and you're walking into our stores, I know you're here, and I know lots of data about you. That's a great way to enable colleagues to have information in real time about who's in their store, what they're shopping, what they're up to, what their history is, what their size is, for instance, if they're coming for a bra fit or buying a suit. The app also enables us to work harder to make sure that every single one of our customer journeys are personalized. When we started to rebuild our Sparks database, underpinning it, we have something that we call the CDP. Really, that's just a massive data lake. We have over 1,800 pieces of information about every single customer.
When you combine that together with all of the other data we have across the organization, we have really rich, deep real-time data and predictive analytics about what our customers want and what they're shopping. Currently in dot-com, 20% of our customers are receiving a fully personalized homepage and carousel, so 20%. When we serve that in front of our customers, we see conversion and spend go up. The team have said they think they can get to 50% personalization over the next 12 to 18 months. I've sort of said to them, "Let's try and get nearer a 100%." Why do we want to be personalized? Because when we're personalized, cost of acquisition, ability to convert customers, ability to get customers to put more in their basket all flows through having that personalized point at the very start.
On click and collect, we have made a lot of progress actually over the last 12, 18 months. We want to move our Click and Collect proposition to another level, and we want to be the most consistent, most effective, and most convenient Click and Collect proposition in the U.K.. We've got a few rules. The first rule we have is an in-and-out in 1 minute rule. As of yesterday, the collection time per customer on average when they arrive at the Click and Collect point was 46 seconds. We've got some real sprinters working in the Click and Collect areas of our stores. Unfortunately, when I was running Click and Collect in Bluewater, we were a minute 30.
I think that was something to do with my lack of ability to find the product as I was scrabbling around in the bins. Actually, when you know what you're doing, it's pretty quick. We want to expand the reach of click and collect across multiple locations, and we've been trialing same-day click and collect within an hour. If you've spilled coffee on your shirt today, rest assured you'll be able to click and collect a new shirt at Paddington and at Marble Arch within the hour. Please feel free, as long as that product is in stock in the store, and we are very clear of that in our customer journey. Interesting, the take-up's been actually quite high on that, so that's been very interesting. We think stores are an incredibly valuable asset for us. Many of our store...
Our .com orders are processed through stores and we've driven a lot of efficiency into this in-store fulfillment process. About 25% improvement in efficiency working with Sacha and the team to make sure that we deliver a really efficient click and collect operation. We are slowly targeting now to get our cost to serve in stores as low as we can and as close to Castle Donington as we can, because then I'm kind of agnostic where the product gets picked. Just pick it really efficiently. There are a couple of big spikes in the year that we have to manage. Back to school and the build-up to Christmas and the post-Christmas sale, these are big spikes that we have to manage through Castle Donington.
If I can flow some of that stock around the country, it just makes it much easier for us. Returns. Stuart mentioned this earlier on. It's our one of our biggest categories. We have been working really hard to reduce the dwell time of our returns. I know Richard's in the back here, and he won't mind me saying this was a bit of a shambles two years ago. Product was being held for long periods of time. Product wasn't being graded in terms of its value or its availability, so everything was being picked the same through the returns process, whether it was a GBP 300 coat in short availability, whether it's something where we had really high availability. Now we're picking the product in the right sequence, and we've reduced the turnaround time for returns significantly.
I'll give you an example. It's a place that I've been to and Archie's somewhere in the room. Archie had a day in Ollerton, and I got the benefit of an Archie email at the end of the day in Ollerton, which was a career high. In Ollerton, when the products arrived, originally, it used to take us 20 days to work it through, I'm ashamed to say. We've got that down to nine days, and we're targeting to get that down to seven. If you ask some of our competitors their returns processing rates, that is the right ballpark area that we need to be. What does that mean? It means I can get that stock back on sale really, really quickly.
When I fix the omnichannel algorithms that show you where the stock is as a customer, you'll be able to see stock on the water, you'll be able to see stock in transit, and you'll be able to see stock in return. We can tell you when that product you want to buy is gonna be coming back into stock, as opposed to the disappointing experience you get at the moment that, right at the end, it says, "I'm terribly sorry that's out of stock." We're also using our stores to leverage what we call keep, move, return. Working returns live and where they're in the stock file, getting that product back in front of the customer as quickly as possible so the returns don't drift over each of the seasons and we process them and get them back out there and on sale.
We can get stock through that keep, move, return process in front of the customer again in less than five days, which is a super improvement on where we have been. Lots to do in terms of the returns process. Also within our omni-channel business, we started this little third-party brands business, and I use that expression very carefully. When I met a few of you when we started in the role at the end of the last financial year, I talked a little bit about this business. This is a new thing for M&S and, actually, it's been quite countercultural. Credit to the team that we've cracked on through this. From a business that didn't exist two years ago, we're now GBP 100 million third-party brand business.
What we also know about this business, which is really exciting, is many of these customers are new to M&S. We know from our Sparks data, because we own the customer data here, that third-party brands is driving recency, frequency, and value. Average order value on a third-party brands basket is GBP 120, and 96% of those orders include a product from Marks & Spencer as well in the order. It's kind of double bubble. Also, very importantly, we're very attractive to brands. We've got 30 million customers a year. We've got 10 million customers on dot- com. We've got 16.2 as of this morning customers in Sparks. Our scale is very attractive and that enables us to partner with some really interesting brands. We think this is enormous opportunity.
Richard will kill me, but I will say a number out loud. We think this is potentially a GBP 400 million opportunity for the business, and we think there is more to go after, not just in women's wear and men's wear and kids wear, but also in home and sports and beauty. We're very excited about this. Really importantly, curated is key. Customers tell us they're exhausted by rows and rows and rows of the same product. They get tired, they can't convert, they look at it, and they come off. Many of our competitors do not curate their third-party brands range. We do curate our range. I wanna be M&S, I don't wanna be anybody else. We want to make sure that we put the right products from the right third-party brands in front of customers.
One of the examples I always use is black leggings. I think we make the best black leggings in the world, without doubt. Why would I want to sell somebody else's black leggings? I don't want to. But some sports shoes, I might want to think about. Maybe wellies, something we don't sell. Things like that, which we might want to sell, we should talk to partners about. The example I always use about curated is school uniforms. Forgive me because some of you have heard this before. When our customers are buying our school uniform, we knew from their bank card data, they were going down the road to Clarks to buy school shoes. We talked to Clarks, and we offer Clarks in our stores and on our website.
What happened was the school uniform basket went up because customers could buy their school shirts, their pinafores, their trousers, and their school shoes with us in one transaction. Perfect. If customers want more choice and our own label products or our own label categories aren't the market leader or we don't want to be the market leader in that category, we'll work with brands to give us a solution. Always curated, always carefully thought through, and always laid out in a really simple way. This team has delivered GBP 100 million, quite frankly, out of the back of a van, is the only way I can phrase it. We haven't really put operational systems and processes in here yet. We've got many, many things that we need to fix to be a brands center of excellence, speeding up the way we contract and onboard.
We've got a lot of lessons to learn, and I know that Hannah and the team will help us with this as well in terms of what Ocado have done. Currently, we are muling the stock around and moving the stock around. The D&D and tech team, along with Stephen's team in omnichannel, are currently building drop ship capability, which means it's a much lighter touch operation. I don't have to handle the stock. The stock is being held by those third-party brands, and we're gonna scale that rapidly over the next 12 months, which takes cost out of our third-party brands operation but still delivers brilliant customer experience. Lots to do in omnichannel. Now to talk about the ecosystem. We don't really know what to call this, so we call it ecosystem.
If anyone else has got a better word, do let me know. Actually, what we really call it is M&S Connected. This is about everything that connects M&S and our customers. Here's a little bit of update of where we are at the moment in terms of our ecosystem. We've actually moved Sparks from 6 million to 16.2 million members so far. Of that membership, as you know, 3.9 million of those customers are actually members through the app, and there are other customers who are using cards and scanning. We've got a lot of work to do. We migrated from a points-based system where there were billions of points left outstanding. They've gone into a everything that's brilliant about M&S rewards program. The points-based system had an NPS of -23 for Sparks with a card.
We're now at +5. We have swung the NPS significantly over the last couple of years, but it's not good enough. A really interesting side example is last year, we launched Sparks in the Republic of Ireland, and we made it a digital only, app only tool. In the Republic of Ireland, our NPS is 30+ for the scheme. Same offers, same deal, same everything, just in the app. We know the app is the heartland for loyalty. Brings me back to the point I made earlier on about 10 million app users. There's so much more to unlock. We've got 30 million customers. Our NPS, we need to really push on, and we need to push the scan rate as well to make sure that customers are feeling good about scanning and engaging with Sparks. Why does this matter?
Why does this thing matter? Well, this is what we call our sort of ecosystem flywheel. The more customers who scan and participate in Sparks, the more we know. The more we know, the more we can personalize. The more we personalize, the more effective our marketing becomes. The more we personalize, we know we get ATV and frequency up. We can also leverage the database that we're building to help us make better category and ranging decisions. What do I want the team to create? I want us to create the largest digital relationship base of any omnichannel retailer, and we have significant permission from our customers. We wanna have a single digital identity, no matter whether you're a Sparks member, an Ocado shopper, a bank customer, or you're browsing .com.
We want to unify you around one single ID, which allows us to communicate with you much more effectively. It will help us revolutionize the way that we market, what we spend on PPC, what content we serve up in front of you. All of these things will be personalized to you and you alone. This also allows us to automate more at scale and take away some of the decisions that we have to make now on balance as opposed to analytics and data. We're gonna put the best of M&S behind Sparks, unifying our rewards and offers between Sparks and the banks, locking more value behind the Sparks brand front so that you get the best value in Marks & Spencer if you're a Sparks customer, all in one place, accessible through one digital account in the app.
The app should be an indispensable tool for our customers, and it puts everything into one intuitive experience. Finally, before I hand back to Stuart, extending our global reach. At the moment, our sales internationally, excluding Ireland, are at GBP 1.1 billion. We don't talk about our global business very often. What we really do in global is we sell M&S to the world. We've got a tidier business. When we were navigating our way through Brexit, as a management team, I remember saying to the team, "Okay, let's get ourselves through Brexit." I can see Paul at the back who was running international before Laura picked it up. We navigated our way through COVID.
There were many more lockdowns in our international markets than there were in the UK, and we were in and out, in and out. Just as we raised our heads above the parapet, we had the invasion of Russia into Ukraine, which was absolutely tragic. We have a business in Ukraine that we still are operating, and we had a business in Russia, and we had to make a lot of decisions around what we would do there. As you know, we've tidied the business up a lot. We've exited Russia, and we've also exited our French business at the last financial year. Now we're doubling down on some brilliant partnerships with Reliance, AFG, and other partners where we think we have a capital light, very effective model that generates high cash returns.
In those markets, customers love our products and love M&S. It's a super growth opportunity. Couple of examples of growth, and again, Stuart mentioned this earlier on, we actually think we have huge opportunity in the Middle East. Just as an example, a few months ago, we launched Jaeger in three stores in the Middle East, and in our business, they are in our top five stores for Jaeger sales across the whole of the M&S business, which is fantastic. Last year, we took GBP 128 million in India despite COVID, and we think the Indian market is a big opportunity for us.
I was over in India a few weeks ago, which was just an extraordinary experience and fantastic to spend time with Reliance Retail, our partners, and out in stores and seeing our fantastic dot-com business and marketplace business over there. One of the stats that kind of resonated with me, particularly when I was talking about kid's wear earlier on, is that 25 million babies are born a year in India. To be honest with you, our kid's wear range internationally is a bit weedy. We think there's a massive opportunity for us in India alone, in kid's wear alone, as an example. There are lots of other categories that we think we can get into. There is also huge opportunity in other markets. In Indonesia, in strengthening our position in the broader Asian markets and in our Middle Eastern markets.
We know there is growth there. Actually, yesterday, we had all of our global partners here. They're actually in Stratford today looking at our ranges, and they're super excited about the opportunities to come. I hope in the last 20 minutes or so I've raised your gazes. I've tried to paint a fantastic, bright future for M&S. We're feeling very confident despite the choppy waters around us for the next few months. We know it's gonna be a hard time as we face into the economic uncertainty, but we feel very sure strategically about where we're heading. I'm gonna hand over to Stuart now. Thank you so much for listening.
Thank you, Katie Bickerstaffe. Well done. Thank you. I'm going to talk about disciplined capital allocation. As I do that, I feel at the moment I've got like two hats on, a CEO and a CFO hat. I know Owen is going to score me. I've been bombarding him with emails about pensions at the moment, trying to understand what's going on with pensions. Any pension questions, Owen is there over lunch, and I'm going to listen in as well. Owen, tell me how I'm doing at the end. I mean, capital and how we're going to allocate capital I know is top of mind for everyone. We've made huge progress on the balance sheet.
I think we're starting from a much stronger position with limited debt refinancing in the short term, cash is strong, and we've got good access to liquidity. We know, however, the next 24 months, of course, are going to be quite challenging. What I've just written up here is, I guess, my focus areas and our focus areas on how we're going to invest for growth. I'll start with my focus as CEO, because obviously, our focus has to be on the day-to-day operations and driving cash generation in the business and maintaining our strong balance sheet and liquidity position. That is, of course, our and my number one priority. We want to do this, of course. We talked about culture and our team today. We want to do that with an empowered team, a lower cost, but a great culture.
You'll meet many of the team, some you've met before, in a minute when we break for lunch and questions over lunch. We do need a performance culture, a culture of openness and transparency, a culture of boldness, but also a culture of boldness mixed with an element of discipline as we navigate the next 12-18 months. Our priorities are then to invest that cash in high return growth and structurally reduce our costs. They're the areas I've already talked through and Katie's talked through today. These programs are our priorities. Of course, our ambition is to sustain the balance sheet with investment-grade metrics in the medium term, and we'll consider returns to shareholders at the end of the year. To summarize, this is the plan for the next, what we call the three horizons.
I know you're used to seeing horizons at every investor update. In these next 12 months, we definitely need to simplify and continue our work on simplifying the operations, closer to customers, closer to our stores, using data to make better decisions with our buyers and our sellers. The cost restructuring is a critical part of our plan this year. In the next 12 months, we've got line of sight to GBP 150 million of lowering costs. At the same time, we're very aware that as a team, we have to work to mitigate the other inflationary headwinds. We will continue to invest in value. As I said at the start, in November, we will invest even more in our Food business with Remarksable prices on the things customers buy most and on locked prices.
Our value perception in both businesses is strong and stronger than it was five years ago, but we know that is top of mind for customers. We have to keep our eye on volume growth and cash margin, not just %. We do want more reasons for our customers to be locked into Sparks. That rich database provides so much opportunity, as you heard from Katie's examples. In the following 12 months, driving innovation and momentum with our customers, further restructuring our cost base, a continuation and focus in value, investing in our growth categories. Activewear, you heard around sports today, kidswear. Driving bigger basket in our Food business, particularly around grocery, fresh produce, in-store bakery. Driving growth through our partnership and our joint venture with Ocado and through Clothing & Home, through our own M&S label, but overall, through our overall curated brands third-party strategy.
Obviously, maximizing Sparks. We wrote here, making Sparks almost like impossible not to be part of the Sparks ecosystem and expanding our global reach. Therefore, at the end of our plan, a high-performing culture, a high-performing business, a structural underlying reduction in our cost base of GBP 400 million, a more efficient supply chain, the best omnichannel experience by a much improved store property strategy and execution of that strategy. Higher quality stores, higher quality space, more productive, more efficient, more profitable stores. Being the number one trusted brand for great quality, great style, but overall, great value. The most digitally enabled retailer in the U.K. using that 16 million Sparks, the 10 million target for app users and locking those customers into that ecosystem, so we can deliver very personal service.
Of course, that global brand opportunity, GBP 400 million of cost out, GBP 200 million investment in value, a continuation of always trying to lower cost to offset inflation, but also an opportunity to drive around GBP 500 million of sales through that global reach opportunity. All underpinned by disciplined capital allocation, bad costs out, investing our cash in higher returns to really drive a competitor advantage and delivered by a great leadership group that you'll meet over lunch. This, I'm told, could be the hardest part of the day because now we're going to try and navigate for the next hour or so, lunch, discussion, and Q&A. As I said, you've got many of the team in the room, but just to give you a quick heads up. In Clothing & Home, we have four partners upstairs.
I think you saw that when you came in for coffee. Led by Richard, our managing director in Clothing & Home. You'll meet Richard. Paul, who was our managing director in International. Paul will lead the Food discussion. Paul is now our chief commercial officer, four and a half months in our Food business. Omnichannel, led by Steven and the team that join him. Property and operations, led by Sasha. I'm told that on your badge, yes, I can see, you've all got a color code. What we're going to do is split you into groups with the color coding. We've got four fantastic chaperones. I'm hoping they're waving their colors, but I don't think anyone can see them. It's so dark. It's like a nightclub in here.
We will stand up in a minute and make it much easier for you to see our four fantastic chaperones, who will then guide you and your group to the area. There's about 15-20 minutes to grab something to eat anyway, and then the next session, 15 minutes per group. I hope I've explained that right. Just before you leave, can I thank you for your time and sitting through this last hour and a half? Here are a reminder of our key takeaways, and of course, everything is now on our website. I will see you at lunch. Thank you.