Being a responsible business is important to us. We take our responsibilities to our people, our clients and our communities seriously.
Our mission to become a responsible business is to:
Encourage and enable sustainable business practices and behaviours across our business, and lead our team in line with our values.
Practice environmental and social accountability by demonstrating our progress against our goals in our impact plan.
Promote sustainable behaviours to our clients, our team and our wider community.
Why are we making changes?
As our firm expands, we recognise the need to grow sustainably. We have outlined three key pillars in our plan and have made strong decisions that will shape our future impact on the environment, our people, our clients and our communities.
We are dedicated to achieving our mission, working together across all our offices to drive profit with purpose and make responsible decisions, holding ourselves accountable. We have developed a framework to guide our strategic decisions and are working with our team to foster a fair, ethical culture that thrives on inclusivity and sustainable choices.
What’s important to us?
We can only achieve a sustainable future, together. Whether it be reducing our plastic usage or aligning our values to the UN SDGs, we need to ensure transparency and consistency. We work with various charities to ensure we give back to our region.
Charitable Support
Giving back is important to us. We work with many charity partners and regularly raise money through internal and external events, achieving over £9800 in 2023/24. Our most recent activities have included a charity football match, donating to foodbanks and members of the team running the Great North Run.
Our key areas of focus are:
Thriving Planet
Flourishing Communities
Prosperous Business
Flourishing Communities
With over 130 colleagues, our people are the most important factor in our success. To drive profit with purpose, our teams need to be diverse, ethical and inclusive. Shaped by our guiding values, we believe that our team will drive our business forward responsibly. We have a sustainability volunteer at each office to shape our sustainable journey and feedback to the sustainability squad who drive new initiatives forward.
Prosperous Business
Our clients are an integral part of our mission and responsible business purpose. Our behaviours will influence our clients to make similar decisions, spreading our sustainable mission wider than just our business. We endeavour to make our client interactions positive, reduce waste and environmental impact. We have recently signed the Prompt Payment Charter to ensure our supply chains are taken care of and we can support other local businesses. Our impact demonstrates our progress towards our responsible business goals as we aim for ongoing improvement and accountability.
Thriving Planet
Doing business regionally for over 40 years has meant we have created strong networks and relationships with our suppliers and other professional firms. We will work with this group to maintain our offices and make our sites more environmentally friendly. We have undertaken various initiatives to improve our environmental impact such as installing low-energy lighting at the Darlington office, and providing every team member with a reusable, recycled water bottle. We have created our volunteering initiative to give back to our planet through restorative projects including beach cleans and working on green-space projects.
Going further
We want to do all we can to meet our mission, and have chosen to support the UNITED NATIONS 17 SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS (SDGS)
In 2015, 193 governments around the world came together and agreed on goals to make the world a better place by 2030. They all pledged to support 17 clearly defined goals that address the urgency of climate change, target poverty and fight inequality.
We have aligned our strategy and reporting with the SDGs that resonate with our purpose and where we feel we can make an impact. Find out more about the SGDs here.
