About the Challenge

This ground-breaking initiative was launched in Downing Street in 2016 by Social Enterprise UK, in partnership with the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport and Business in the Community (BITC). It was set up to transform how companies spend their money, going beyond traditional Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to embed social impact into their everyday spend. Over the last three years, the latest Impact Report shows that partners have spent more than £65 million and enabled the creation of 637 jobs with social enterprises.

One hundred per cent of partners also said that social enterprises are higher or equal quality to their mainstream competitors, whilst 20 per cent are cheaper than mainstream incumbents.

Landmarc and social enterprise  

Landmarc has been working with a small number of social enterprises for many years but we recognise that there’s more we can do. Current examples include From Babies With Love (FBWL) for maternity and paternity gifts for our employees. FBWL provides beautiful organic baby gifts and donates one hundred per cent of its profits to orphaned and abandoned children around the world. We are also a founding corporate partner of X-Forces Enterprise, a social enterprise that helps our military communities to be the best in business. The Good Hotel in London, which offers long–term unemployed people with local custom–made hospitality training and education, is our preferred hotel for business travel to the capital and we have recently started working with SmartGo, a social enterprise that provides discounts and incentives to encourage employees and their families to use low-carbon transport.

Mark Neill, Managing Director (Interim), said, “We recognise the value that a diverse supply chain can bring to our business, our customer and our local communities and welcome this opportunity to develop our relationship with SEUK to identify how we can use more of our procurement spend to make a positive impact on society. 

“SEUK and CAN Invest already support us with the production of our own social impact reporting through The Landmarc Difference, which demonstrated that we added £70 million Gross Value Added (GVA) to the UK economy through our supply chain during our last measurement year of 2016-17. Signing up to the Buy Social Corporate Challenge will now help us to add even more value across all aspects of our business activities.”

Peter Holbrook, CEO at SEUK, said, “Through buying from social enterprises, businesses are using their procurement spend to help build a more sustainable and equitable world. It is fantastic to have Landmarc officially join the Buy Social Corporate Challenge – taking the next steps to further embed positive social and environmental impact into their supply chains. We look forward to working with them on the Challenge and introducing them to more social enterprise suppliers.”