Responsible Business

In August 2021, we signed The Good Business Charter (GBC) and received accreditation. The Charter measures behaviour over 10 components: real living wage, fairer hours and contracts, employee well-being, employee representation, diversity and inclusion, environmental responsibility, paying fair tax, commitment to customers, ethical sourcing, and prompt payment.

An organisation must meet all 10 commitments to receive accreditation and is focused on encouraging responsible business behaviour and publicly acknowledging those organisations who exhibit such behaviour.

We’re very proud of our Good Business Charter accreditation and in April 2022 launched our first Responsible Business Report outlining the actions we are taking in line with each of the 10 components.

These actions include paying a fair living wage, treating our colleagues with dignity and respect, mitigating our impact on the environment, making a clear and transparent commitment to our clients, responsibly sourcing our supplies and paying our fair share of taxes. Take a look at the full report here.

Climate change is one of, if not the single most important issues of our time and one which SPW is committed to making a priority across the business. We are determined to play our part to tackle global warming and the impact it is having upon our planet and its inhabitants. We are committed to taking action on climate change and other environmental issues on behalf of our colleagues, clients and communities.

Over the past year we have been on a journey to determine our operational carbon footprint and develop a robust sustainability framework including data collection, reporting and developing a plan to achieve net zero carbon operations by 2030.

We’ve recently partnered with ClimatePartner to offset all our operational carbon emissions since founding in June 2019 up until December 2021, achieving carbon neutrality across these emissions (Scope 1, Scope 2 and Scope 3 – business travel). These are the emissions we emit from our buildings along with business travel. The offsetting will continue, and include wider emissions as these are identified during 2022 / 2023.

We’ve also partnered with climate positive impact organisation Furthr to plant more than 100,000 mangrove trees in 2022 in order to offset colleagues carbon emissions. In addition to planting trees, all our colleagues have access to additional support to help them understand and reduce their own carbon footprint.

We're an organisation willing to take the lead in social change through speaking openly about mental health.

We prioritise wellbeing to create a culture where everyone thrives and feels happy at work. This includes partnering with 'Time to Talk' to end the stigma around mental health in the workplace and signing the InsideOut Charter, which is committed to driving the agenda at the Leadership level.

We provide colleagues access to resources such as the Headspace app. We've also partnered with TLC lions, who use the power of storytelling to start a conversation about issues that impact our wellbeing and mental health.

Our colleagues also have access to our Employee Assistance Programme which provides free independent and confidential support, including short-term counselling.

We also want to create a better, happier society and we can do that by sharing our financial knowledge to help people aim to make their money work for them, so they can reach their life goals. That's why we champion financial wellbeing and education. 

Our annual Money and Mind Report, allows people to understand how their day-to-day finances could impact on their wellbeing and stress levels. 

We've also partnered with Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh to produce our 'On the Money' podcast which aims to help students get to grips with their finances from an early age.

We want to build an inclusive and diverse workforce, where everyone can bring their whole selves to work.

Here are just a few of the great diversity and inclusion initiatives we have got involved in so far:

We've signed up to the 'We are Change' initiative, helping to bring more diversity in through newly trained advisers.

We are a part of the #10000BlackInterns programme.

We're training the next generation of advisers, ensuring 50% of our Adviser Academy intake are women.

We have set up a number of engaging D&I employee networks who all seek to drive change for the causes that they are passionate about.

We've partnered with 'Women in Finance' for their Accelerating Change Together programme. A piece of research that helps us to bring about better gender equality in the financial services industry.

We want to make a difference in the communities we work in and that's why we champion volunteering and charitable initiatives that are close to our hearts. 

Throughout 2020 and 2021 our colleagues charity of choice was Alzheimer's Research UK and we've raised over £50,000 for them over the past two years.

We also run a number of volunteering and matching schemes and sponsor local community teams and initiatives.

To centralise all of the great work we already do in this space, in 2022 we launched the SPW Charitable Foundation. Through the Foundation, we have partnered with Groundwork, a federation of charities mobilising practical community action on poverty and the environment across the UK. We are working with Groundwork to create a ‘Money Mentors’ package of financial literacy training that will see Groundwork employees up-skilled in financial confidence enabling them to provide practical information for those in need.