Our communities

Royal Mail Group is one of the UK’s largest employers. We employ 163,000 UK residents and paid over £4bn in wages last year.

Key facts

• As a predominantly UK-based company, our economic contribution - both direct and indirect - is one of the largest in the UK.
• We employ 163,000 (1)UK residents and paid over £4bn in wages and salaries during 2010/11.
• Our annual procurement spend is approximately £2.3bn, the majority of which is spent in the UK.

At any one time, we are liaising with at least 600 different suppliers. 

• Our total community investment in 2010/11 was over £10m.
• In 2010/11 over £2.5m was donated to around 850 registered charities and good causes through our payroll giving scheme.

Strategic priorities

We are a major part of the UK’s economic and social infrastructure. We have a presence in every locality, employing local people, connecting customers, companies and communities.

Outside of the reporting period, we conducted a major review of our community investment strategy.

Our strategy is now much more focused on our economic contribution, as this constitutes our greatest investment in our communities.

• Enhance our contribution to the UK economy. Our position as one of the largest full-time employers in the UK means that we make a significant direct and indirect contribution to the UK economy.
• Continue to make a difference in the communities in which we operate. We wish to continue to harness Royal Mail Group’s unique reach to continue to make a positive economic and social contribution to the UK economy and society. We must provide our colleagues with meaningful opportunities to get involved in their communities.

Our contribution to the UK economy

We are a major contributor to the UK economy. Royal Mail Group is one of the UK’s largest full-time employers. We employ 163,000 UK residents on a full-time basis and paid over £4bn in wages and salaries in 2010/11. We also paid approximately £300m in tax. As a predominantly UK-based company, our procurement programme makes a major contribution to the UK economy. Our annual procurement spend is approximately £2.3bn.(2)

We contract business from over 600 suppliers, the vast majority of which are UK-based, helping to sustain local and national UK economic activity. We are very aware of the role that we play connecting customers, companies and communities across the UK. Outside of this reporting period, we have commissioned a major piece of research which seeks to quantify our direct and indirect contribution to the economy. We hope to be able to present the findings of this research in next year’s Corporate Responsibility Report and we anticipate that they will further inform our corporate responsibility strategy.

Recruiting from socially excluded groups

We are committed to recruiting and offering placement opportunities to people from socially excluded backgrounds. We aim to provide meaningful work experience and remove barriers to employment for people who may otherwise be denied the opportunity.

• Business Action on Homelessness - we have been a national partner of BITC’s Business Action on Homelessness programme since 2005. During this time we have offered over 450 work experience placements, with 185 of these people going onto work at Royal Mail or other organisations.
• Employment for the disabled - we have been working in partnership with Remploy, the UK's leading provider of employment services to people experiencing complex barriers to work, since 2005. We are one of only two organisations to have placed over 1,000 people through the partnership. Our work experience programme has a high success rate, with 80% of individuals going on to be offered paid work within Royal Mail.
• Ready for Work - we have employed over 250 Ready for Work graduates over the past six years. This accounts for 11% of the total employments secured by clients after completing the Ready for Work programme. In addition, over the next twelve months, we have also stated our intention to provide the following:

1. Work Experience placements - we have committed to offering a minimum of 80 work experience placements every year for a period of up to eight weeks for 16 – 24 year olds.
2. Apprentices - we have committed to offer up to 30 apprentices a two year Business Improvement apprentice scheme, which focuses on World Class Mail. 

Our Community Investment Programme

Our people take pride in the valuable work they do in all communities across the country. We are in a privileged position as a UK-wide company with a presence in every local community. We hope our new Community Investment strategy will maximise our colleagues’ engagement and advocacy. We must provide our people with meaningful opportunities to get involved in their communities.

Payroll Giving

We have one of the largest and longest established Payroll Giving schemes in the UK. Since its launch in 1989, our colleagues have donated more than £43m.

The biggest beneficiaries among the 850 charities supported by the scheme include Barnardo’s, County Air Ambulance Trust, Help the Hospices, Macmillan Cancer Support and our own charity, the Rowland Hill Benevolent Fund. Over the past year, the scheme has raised £2.5m. We currently have over 42,000 colleagues – one in four employees – taking part. This means that 6% of all Payroll Giving donors in the UK work for Royal Mail Group.

Our Charity of the Year

We aim to forge partnerships with organisations which make a big difference at a local level. In 2008, Royal Mail Group colleagues voted for Barnardo's to become our charity partner. This followed on from our highly successful partnership with Help the Hospices, which raised nearly £2m for the charity. Our partnership with Barnardo’s will soon be coming to an end. By the end of the partnership we hope to have raised over £2.5m for Barnardo’s.

Colleague Fundraising

We encourage our people to volunteer and fundraise for good causes. Through our peoples’ fundraising efforts over £1,800,000 was raised during 2010/11, benefiting some 550 different charities. CWU Humanitarian Aid is the CWU's national charity.

Thousands of volunteers and donors take part in a wide range of fundraising efforts to help vulnerable children in places of need. Royal Mail loans vehicles, supplies fuel and allows volunteers time off work.

In May 2011 a group of postmen from Warrington and Crewe undertook a non-stop run from John O’Groats to Land’s End. Our colleagues and customers also raised £499,000 for the 2010 Children in Need campaign. Royal Mail Group spends approximately £50,000 every year purchasing buckets and other fundraising material to use for big charity fundraisers.

Computer Aid

In 2010, Royal Mail donated 300 PCs and laptops to charity Computer Aid International. The charity professionally refurbishes donated PCs and laptops and provides them for reuse in education, health and agriculture in developing countries.

During 2011, Royal Mail has already donated another 3,000 PCs and laptops to Computer Aid. These will be used in a range of projects in schools, colleges and NGOs in countries including Malawi, Namibia, Ethiopia, and Chile.

Education Provision

Royal Mail Group has supported the literacy and numeracy curriculum in schools for many years. More than one million pupils across the UK have benefitted from our support over the past year. Over 105,000 children received personal items from the business. The Young Letter Writers Competition engages many thousands of young pupils every year. The subject of the 2010/11 Young Letter Writers Competition was ‘My Favourite Book’. Schools were invited to take part in the competition and send in the best from each class to Royal Mail for judging. 1,800 entries from 140 schools were received and 128 prizes of book tokens and letter-writing goodies were awarded.

The subject of the 2010/11 Young Letter Writers Competition is ‘What the Olympics mean to me’. Additionally, Royal Mail sponsors ‘Teachers Post’. This is an educational magazine that is distributed to over 26,000 schools in the UK. It highlights many educational themes including addressing, letter writing and grammar.

Priorities for 2011/12

Our new community investment strategy is now much more focused on our economic contribution, as this constitutes our greatest investment in our communities. We believe that each investment should have a genuine and measurable impact on communities. Our new strategy was revised and agreed by the Chief Executive’s Committee outside of this reporting period. It has been integrated within our new Corporate Responsibility strategy.

Our new Community Investment strategy includes the following objectives:

• Leverage our greatest asset – our people. We must drive up colleague advocacy and provide meaningful opportunities to get involved in the community.
• We must capitalise upon our unique position as one of the most local and national companies in the UK.
• We will conclude our current Charity of the Year partnership with Barnardo’s with a major fundraising push.
• We will launch a new Charity of the Year. Our colleagues will continue to have a role in choosing a cause that is relevant to both them and their families. It is important that our charity partner can clearly show us where the money raised is spent and the impact it is having on those who require the charity’s help and support. We also hope that the charity will be able to provide volunteering opportunities for our people.
• We will create a volunteering programme which will give all employees the chance to take one day’s paid-leave every year to volunteer in their local community.
• We will have a major push on payroll giving to try to improve upon our already excellent staff participation rates.
• We will re-launch our matched funding programme and increase awareness and engagement amongst our people.
• We will re-launch our sponsorship programme, so that it is more targeted and focused.
• Begin roll-out of cause related marketing strategy. We hope to launch a charity stamp in 2013.

Further information

Barnardo’s: http://www.barnardos.org.uk/

Children in Need: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pudsey/

Business Action on Homelessness: http://www.bitc.org.uk/community/employability/homelessness/index.html

Remploy: http://www.remploy.co.uk/

Ready for Work: http://readyforwork.org/

Charities Trust: http://www.charitiestrust.org/

Payroll Giving in Action: http://www.payrollgiving.co.uk/

Our commitment to collection points We are committed to ensuring all our customers can access collection points.  Find out more.

Our customers in remote areas As part of our license we are required to ensure that customers in remote areas can access our services.  Find out more.

(1) Full-time equivalent.

(2) Not all of our procurement spend is UK-based.