Mission-led social value – Bridging government goals and business impact

Principle One was established in 2018 as a values-driven business to support public sector customers in achieving their core missions, initially within the Law Enforcement and Policing sector, but now with a far broader reach across Health, National Security and Defence. This sense of social responsibility and shared purpose has always been an integral part of our culture, with our staff heavily engaged in driving the direction of our growth. As we have grown to almost 100 staff over the last seven years, our social value programme has been at the heart of maintaining one team across a growing portfolio of customer-facing projects.

Our social value programme has evolved over time, embracing new partnerships and looking for ways that we can make a difference at a local and national level. As a small company, we may not have the budget or reach of a large corporate organisation but have focused in on a series of social value partnerships where our “deeds not words” can make a difference. What’s been important to us is how we engage staff across our whole team in supporting these initiatives, which themselves align closely to the government missions that our delivery work supports. Our social value programme is often where our new joiners develop their technical skills and domain knowledge or where our student interns get an initial understanding of the work we do, while having an impact on real customer problems.

In 2025, our social value programme is focused around two key missions: building on our existing focus on Safer Streets and adding further work around a second mission, building an NHS Fit for the Future.

With our heritage in UK Law Enforcement, many of our social value engagements align with the work we do in delivering new capability to policing. We have a long-established partnership with Police Now, supporting front line officers in building problem-solving skills and developing innovative solutions to improve efficiency in neighbourhood policing. One such secondment has led to the development of a simple app to help officers navigate protection orders and safeguarding measures, which is now available to forces without cost via the Police Digital Service.

Tackling violence against women and girls has been a broader theme for our social value work and in 2024 Principle One became a White Ribbon supporter, making a commitment to create a community of allies to raise awareness and call out abusive and sexist behaviour among their friends, colleagues, customers and communities. By making a personal commitment to promote cultural change, our support of White Ribbon, drives inclusive engagement in the government VAWG mission and prompts innovative thinking across our team in the customer facing work that we do. In working with White Ribbon, we commit to raising awareness of their mission with partner organisations and have an exciting programme of events in planning for 2025.

As Principle One has grown, we have also worked more and more within the Health sector, finding that there are more similarities in the challenges faced with those we address in our policing work that we originally anticipated. With significant barriers to overcome around legacy system management, enabling interoperability and a complex and fragmented stakeholder landscape, our experience has transferred across seamlessly. As a result, we are adding the Fit for the Future theme to our social value programme this year, with our first internship focused on innovation around health inequality and exclusion.

Our social value programme is intrinsically linked to our “day jobs” – supporting our government customers, their missions and indeed our own mission as an organisation. As a result, it’s broader than many programmes and getting involved can be a reflective experience and demonstrates just what a difference each of us can make.

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