Our ESG Plan: Purpose

We love the place we call home and believe we have a duty to help our communityin any we can.

This starts with paying our fair share of taxes. We do not use any tax avoidance strategies, such as transferring profits offshore or artificially decreasing them to boost shareholder return.

Under the purpose strand of our ESG commitments, our policy is also to commit 0.5% of net profit to charitable initiatives that will help people and nature thrive in the corners of our community that are most overlooked, and another 0.5% to charities nominated and voted for by our team.

• This means that since 2022, we have provided school uniforms for over 150 children living in Ladywood – an area just a few miles from our Edgbaston home, where 54% of children live in poverty.  Working with the Ladywood Community Project, all the families we support are referred through either Children’s Trust workers, schools, or benefits and debt advisors, ensuring we are helping the most vulnerable families in our local community.
• We have also helped 30 families in Ladywood tackle fuel poverty by replacing incandescent bulbs with LED products, draught-proofing windows, providing radiator foil to eliminate heat loss, and installing C02 monitors to ensure safety at home.
• At the same time, working with the Canal and River Trust, we have adopted two stretches of canal in deprived areas of our local neighbourhood. Through paid impact days for the whole team, every year we help one little corner of Birmingham flourish through the clearing of brambles and weeds, litter picking, the planting of fruit trees and flowers to attract pollinating insects, and the removal of plastic from water so that it doesn’t reach our seas.
• Our partnerships with the Ladywood Community Project and the Canal and River Trust are very much ongoing.
• In early 2023, we lost a former colleague and long-standing friend of WPR, Stu Haynes, to suicide; tragically, suicide remains the biggest killer of under 35s. In Stu’s memory, for two consecutive years, the team has chosen to financially support two charities very close to his heart – ANDYSMANCLUB and Chasing the Stigma – hoping we can help others facing storms in their lives, and using their services to promote open dialogue around mental health within our agency.