The Wates Group has committed to ensuring that each of its business units achieves Living Wage Recognised Service Provider (RSP) status within five years.
The move means that by 2025, all Wates clients will be requested to consider the living wage for their contracts, with a target of 80% of all new contracts paying the ‘real living wage’.
The real living wage is based on the actual cost of living and is voluntarily paid by more than 6,000 UK employers. It is currently set at £9.50 per hour outside London and £10.85 within London.
Wates FM, the Group’s facilities management business, is already a Living Wage RSP and yesterday the Living Wage Foundation confirmed Wates Residential as an RSP and Wates Developments as a Living Wage Employer.
The news, announced during National Living Wage Week, is part of Wates’ commitment to challenging inequality, one of three key themes comprising the company’s new five-year social value strategy, Creating Opportunities.
Creating Opportunities includes the following commitments and targets for 2025:
Challenging inequality
- Create opportunities for those furthest from the workforce, employing at least one person from an identified group on every Wates project
- Achieving Living Wage Recognised Service Provider status (RSP)
Inspiring and educating young people
- Inspire 25,000 young people about careers in construction and the built environment by 2025
- Launch a new primary school engagement programme, Build Yourself: Junior, to help encourage children to consider construction as a career at a younger age
Supporting the social enterprise sector
- Spend £25m with the social enterprise sector, resulting in a cumulative total of £45m by 2025
- Pilot a new Mentoring for Growth programme in 2021, supporting Wates employees so they can act as business mentors to help at least five identified Social Enterprises to achieve national scale by 2025.
Wates Group chief executive David Allen said: “We are driven by our purpose of working together to inspire better ways of creating the places, communities and businesses of tomorrow. Delivering social value is intrinsic to that purpose and to our goal of being a progressive and responsible employer. By considering social value in our business decisions, including the way we employ staff, engage with communities and buy products and services, we can cultivate a more sustainable and inclusive society, and demonstrate that business done well can be a force for good. This social value strategy is rooted in our belief that how we do business, is as important as what we do.”
