Section 172 Statement
General confirmation of Directors’ duties
Section 172 of the Companies Act 2006 requires Directors to take into consideration the interests of stakeholders in their decision making; the Board of HCRG Care Group confirm that they have adhered to section 172 obligations and welcome the opportunity to demonstrate how this has been achieved in the financial year ending 31 March 2025.
The likely consequences of any decision in the long term
The Directors have a number of ways in which they ensure that any decision made takes consideration of the long-term impact it may have, examples of which include:
Delegation of Authority
As detailed in the Wates Statement, the HCRG Care Group Oversight Board has a comprehensive framework for determining matters requiring Board review and approval and those day to day decisions delegated to employees, through the Scheme of Reservation and Delegation (“SORD”). This ensures that the HCRG Care Group Oversight Board have oversight of new contracts and other significant financial commitments.
Strategic planning
The organisational strategy is set by the Board and, as highlighted in the ‘Wates Statement – principle 4’, a 3-year strategy was approved in 2022/23. The strategy was broken down into annual objectives and at the end of the year an assessment was made to ensure that organisational focus was on maintaining operational excellence, growth and financial efficiency.
The interests of the company’s employees
The Board ensures that the interests of employees are always at the forefront of deliberations. Examples of how employees are engaged and considered when making decisions are highlighted below.
Colleague engagement
Colleague engagement has remained fundamental ensuring we focus on colleague wellness and engagement as the health and social care sector continues to face staffing challenges across the country. We have ensured that colleagues feel they are being kept informed with regular updates from senior leadership nationally and locally, ensuring visibility of our strategy, immediate priorities and the individual contribution each colleague makes to changing lives by transforming health and care.
We deliver services across the country and our ability as an organisation to communicate with our thousands of frontline workers – many of whom are working on shifts 24 hours a day, seven days a week – has proved to be effective in helping our services remain adaptable.
We have continued to empower our colleagues to question and challenge and if there are concerns about something at work we encourage and support them to speak up. To make this as easy as possible we have Freedom to Speak up Guardians providing independent and impartial advice, as well as an anonymous online reporting system.
We have continued to support the development of our wellness centre to provide help and support to colleagues; this is part of our broader reward and wellbeing platform, and includes information on tools, places and people that can be used to help colleagues manage their personal health and wellbeing, whether through face-to-face conversations, our online wellbeing platforms or through our occupational health provider. In conjunction with Wagestream a financial wellbeing tool which allows colleagues to track, access, save and manage their finances, we have provided practical advice and support to colleagues on managing their finances.
We have continued to champion flexibility for our colleagues, continuing to develop and implement our flexible ways of working to services and teams as they are onboarded.
Rewarding and encouraging our colleagues’ exceptional skills and efforts remains at the heart of our organisation, our annual colleague awards event brings colleagues together to celebrate their successes.
We continue to allocate grants from our Innovation Fund, which provides money to colleagues for ‘seed’ funding for self-sustaining projects, or to purchase equipment or resources that will continue to make a difference to our service users and patients.
Objectives, appraisals and development
A rigorous approach is taken to objective setting and appraisals, ensuring all colleagues’ objectives are linked to organisational objectives and that each and every colleague has the opportunity to talk about delivery of their objectives and their personal development twice a year. This year has been no different and there has been a focus on ensuring that colleagues have the opportunity to speak to their managers regularly.
The Learning Enterprise (TLE) is HCRG Care Group’s training and development arm, delivering clinical and non-clinical training and development programmes for health and care professionals. TLE deliver virtual classroom courses which are available to any organisation in the health and social care sector on topics in quality, safety, leadership and clinical training.
We recently revised our approach to measuring colleague satisfaction and engagement, moving to more frequent surveys and to align to the NHS People Pulse survey which, while not required of us through our contracts, facilitates comparison between organisations across the industry and is backed by substantial research. Our colleague survey in 2024 shows that 63% would recommend the organisation as a place to work. Around three quarters of colleagues said care is the organisation’s highest priority (69%) and that they would recommend the care we provide (74%). Self-reported colleague wellbeing has remained strong and continues improving with 90% saying that someone at work cares about their physical and mental health.
The results of our surveys show HCRG Care Group is rated comparably or better in most cases to other industry employers who publish data, and our performance continues to improve survey-on-survey and over time. Our transparent and analytical approach to collecting and monitoring this data is recognised positively by our customers and by our colleagues.
The need to foster the company’s business relationships with suppliers, customers and others
The Directors regularly receive updates on a variety of topics that indicate and inform how customers, suppliers and other stakeholders have been engaged. These range from information provided from the HCRG Care Group sub-group’s finance and procurement teams (in relation to suppliers and supplier contract management topics) to information provided by operational teams in relation to contract performance (concerning customer relationships).
As highlighted in the Wates Statement principle 6, HCRG Care Group has a wide range of stakeholders who are key to delivering the strategy and providing first class care. Working in partnerships is not something new for HCRG Care Group – it is part of our DNA and over the past year maintaining our relationships with our stakeholders has been key to enabling us to continue to deliver effective and safe services and allowing us to support wider NHS and Social Care partners in continuing to deliver services. We send bulletins and newsletters to our key stakeholders (including Commissioners, partner organisations, MPs and councillors) advising of our latest news and any announcements as they happen. Below you will see examples of the exemplary work that has been undertaken across our services.
Our contribution and success in the sector was recognised through multiple national awards, with particular mention for our innovative service models, staff wellbeing, and recruitment expertise.
System Partners: We have continued to work in partnership with Mersey and West Lancashire NHS Trust to develop and enhance the local model of urgent community response and virtual wards. Our aim is to ensure that more patients are given the opportunity to receive care in this way instead of undergoing prolonged inpatient stays or admission to hospital. We are now working to implement telehealth and have a memorandum of understanding that our urgent treatment centre will support with some diagnostics to keep care close to home. Over the coming 12 months, we will continue to build on these achievements and take the lessons learned over the past year to ensure we can continue to change lives by transforming health and care in West Lancashire.
We also joined with other local community health providers this year to form a partnership across Kent and Medway, for the benefit of patients. This partnership enables us to maximise the clinical expertise and reach across the county, and to deliver services in a collaborative way to improve patient outcomes and journey.
Service users: ‘Family voice’ – the voice of the child or young person and family – is integral to the Essex Business Unit’s service delivery and is a standing agenda item within the service’s monthly Service Performance and Quality Review meetings. Service user feedback is used to inform future service developments and delivery and is shared with commissioners so they can see the impact of projects and initiatives on service users.
CQC and Ofsted: As a provider of health and social care, Care Quality Commission standards must be met. We run our own internal inspections and have robust online governance and reporting systems to monitor how services are doing. We work in a collaborative and transparent manner with our regulators to enable good service user outcomes and 97% of our services have been rated as good or outstanding with TLE also obtaining an outstanding assessment following its first full Ofsted inspection.
Care Homes and Commissioners: In 2024-25, collaborative working established in West Lancashire through locality based, integrated neighbourhood team projects, showcased the strength and potential capabilities of joint working. One such project explored the impact of collaboration between district nursing and care home colleagues to create better health outcomes for local care home residents. The focus included pressure ulcer prevention, management and education to support earlier recognition of skin integrity issues and enable early escalation to the district nursing team.
Local MPs and councillors: We reached out to key local MPs and councillors during 2024/25 to update them on our work and invite them to meet our managing directors and senior managers to find out more about what we do in their area. This resulted in a number of positive meetings.
The impact of the company’s operations on the community and the environment
Delivering high quality services for communities is what we do as an organisation. We are therefore very conscious of the impact we make in communities and understand the importance of focusing not just on the services we deliver, but also on the communities we serve. We don’t have a one-size-fits-all approach; instead we tailor our services to each of the areas we work in, partnering with commissioners, colleagues and local people and organisations to deliver a unique service, based around the needs of the local community.
Examples of how we have still managed to do this include:
We launched a project to prescribe dry powder inhalers to eligible patients at HMP Norwich in order to reduce the negative impact on the environment and make improvements to patients’ treatment outcomes. As a result of the change, we have decreased the carbon footprint by at least 15600kg of CO2, which is equivalent of 71,000 miles by car per annum. This success has been shared with our other teams across the country so it can be implemented in different services.
We signed up to the Armed Forces Covenant, making a clear commitment to ensuring that people who have served in the Armed Forces and their families are treated fairly. This included making a pledge to support the employment of veterans and their spouses or partners and to support employees who are members of the Reserve Forces or volunteer leaders in military cadet organisations.
The West Lancashire Partnership’s Provider Alliance Group (PAG), which works as a coalition of system partners to develop clinical pathways and strengthen the support we can offer to the residents of West Lancashire. PAG produced an Out of Hospital Services Surge Plan to identify and respond to pressures within services and ensure residents can continue to use local services rather than attending A&E. PAG also works with residents to define and agree the main priorities for development in the coming year.
We are committed to rationalising our use of national suppliers to ensure oversight and robust assurance in key compliance areas including modern slavery and safeguarding. At the same time, we recognise the significant value that local small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) contribute. Accordingly, wherever practical – and provided they meet our required standards – we actively seek to integrate local SMEs as an important part of our supply chain.
The Green Plan: Climate change, air pollution and waste present enormous challenges to the country, to the world and to future generations. Our purpose is to change lives by transforming health and care and our Green Plan, which was first implemented in 2020, sets out how we make sure we use resources efficiently to deliver high quality, safe and sustainable services. A copy of the full plan is available on the company’s website at www.hcrgcaregroup.com and copies of local action plans have been provided to the organisation’s public sector commissioners. We also publish our Carbon Reduction Plan annually setting out our key commitments to minimising and mitigating our impact on the environment through sustainable development.
Social mobility: It is vital that, as a forward-thinking employer, we ensure those from all backgrounds have equal access to healthcare. Social value is embedded in our day-to-day practices through a range of ways with examples of these on our website here: https://www.hcrgcaregroup.com/about-us/social-value/. This includes working with local partners to design services that address social-economic barriers facing our communities, supporting our volunteers to develop skills and work towards paid employment, and annual ring-fenced funding to help our teams improve local outcomes through our Difference Grants. We are also accredited members of the Social Mobility Pledge, with a focus on employability and skills training for a future workforce, supporting social mobility and addressing inequalities (like gender) as our communities grow and develop valuable new skills.
Apprenticeships: We are proud of the continual high standard of training offered and delivered through TLE. Supporting our colleagues in their personal and professional development is a continual commitment. We have a highly performing apprenticeship delivery team who support and develop the careers of our colleagues and, despite the ongoing challenges following the pandemic, we have seen 174 colleagues on apprenticeship programmes during the year and supported 37 apprentices in successfully completing their apprenticeship programme.
The desirability of the company maintaining a reputation for high standards of business conduct
Below we have selected a few areas that demonstrate how we have maintained these high standards:
Commissioners
We work closely with our Commissioners and believe having strong relationships is fundamental to delivering high quality services. These relationships are built at bidding stage and continue all the way through the life of the contract. As demonstrated above, we have worked closely with our Commissioners over the past year to ensure we continued to deliver first class service, whilst also supporting other providers in their provision.
Information Governance
As a data controller and processor of sensitive and confidential data we have a legal and ethical duty to keep the records we hold securely and confidential. The confidentiality and security of information is very important to us. We take the utmost care when handling personal and confidential information and ensure that we have appropriate organisational and technical security measures in place to prevent and detect unauthorised access, accidental damage, destruction or loss.
Examples of how we do this include: Induction and annual Data Security and Protection training of all staff; policies and guidance to assist staff to understand their duty of confidentiality and their responsibilities regarding data security, cyber security and confidentiality of patient and other personal data; annual completion and submission of the NHS Digital’s Data Security and Protection Toolkit (DSPT); data incident and risk assessment, management and escalation, as well as a robust data security and protection governance structure which includes an IG Committee with the SIRO, Caldicott Guardian, Data Protection Officer and Cyber Security Lead as core members, ensuring that data protection by design and default is built into our processes, completing due diligence and imposing contractual obligations on providers and persons working under our instruction.
Gender Pay
As a Board we are committed to closing the gender pay gap in our organisation, the current overall pay gap is negative 22.78% mean (7.42% median) and we have a number of measures in place to reduce this, including launching a new applicant tracking system to give us greater visibility into hiring trends and the ability to monitor and act on diversity in recruitment, refreshing our interview guidance to help reduce unconscious bias, rolling out a company-wide equality, diversity and inclusion learning programme, and introducing a senior leadership development programme with 70% of delegates being female, supporting our ambition to build a gender-balanced leadership pipeline. More information can be found on our website: Gender Pay Gap Report (hcrgcaregroup.com) .
Modern slavery
Our Board approved Modern Slavery Statement can be found at: Modern Slavery Statement (hcrgcaregroup.com).HCRG Care Group is committed to observing high ethical standards and does this not only to comply with laws and regulations but because we want to earn and maintain the trust of our service users, colleagues and partners. We believe that success and reputation is not only dependent on the quality of the services we deliver, but also on the way we do business. We share the majority of our supply chain with the state-operated NHS, and all organisations supplying the NHS are subject to the NHS Code of Conduct on Ethics and Labour. A recent audit of our procurement, due diligence, and contract management processes confirmed that our due diligence checks are carried out to a very high standard – we remain committed however to continually reviewing and strengthening these processes and will be building on the learning and recommendations identified through the review.
Our frontline teams are trained to appropriate levels in Safeguarding for their role, and this training – which is completed three yearly in line with the requirements of the intercollegiate document – includes material on identifying signs of modern slavery and human trafficking among the people who use the services we run.
In 2024/25, we provided a range of learning interventions specific to types of roles across the organisation. This learning is delivered by a blend of eLearning and virtual classrooms. These are SG Levels 1, 2 and 3 safeguarding training programs in which education on modern slavery is embedded, reinforcing our modern slavery policies, part of our annual Statutory and Mandatory Training Programme. Throughout the year the TLE team focused on ensuring all colleagues attended our expanded training offer and continue to review compliance through our annual appraisal process and to promote the importance of safeguarding knowledge. The completion percentages over FY 2024-25 are as follows;
SG level 1 – March 2025 – 86%
SG level 2 – March 2025 – 95%
SG level 3 – March 2025 – 93%
In addition, we take part in a number of joint initiatives with local authorities and other healthcare providers to further increase our ability to identify potential modern slavery and human trafficking among our service user populations.
Our shareholders
As a private company we have a single shareholder who is represented with seats on the Board. All decisions made have due regard to all members of the company.