About Us

Mutual Responsibility supports all of our givens and values and is fundamentally about who we are and how we do business.

Britannia is committed to operating in an ethical and responsible way to serve the best interests of our members and other stakeholders. We consider social, economic and environmental factors in establishing and maintaining relationships with business partners. Such partners include product providers, financial institutions who we borrow from or lend to, affinity partners and suppliers from whom we purchase goods and services.

We want to do business with ethical business partners who also seek to make a positive difference through their social, environmental and ethical performance – we expect to do business with people like us. We will work with our business partners to improve our and their ethical performance.

We will seek to avoid partnerships with firms whose products or services cause harm together with those who maintain unacceptable labour or environmental standards.

We are working on a series of policies and this, with feedback from our membership, will clearly define our approach and how we measure and monitor our progress.

Involving our members

At last year's Annual General Meeting we asked our members if we should do business only with organisations that share similar values to ours. Over 76% of members who replied told us that we should. We also conducted external research and consulted with our Members' Council to understand our members' expectations.

This consultation has given us a clear view of how we should move forward and we aim to complete this work during 2008.

Whilst this work is underway we are continuing to change the way we procure goods and services to ensure we meet our commitments in our environmental policy; where it is appropriate we have switched to more environmentally friendly supplies, such as:

• green electricity for our branches and Leek head office
• office supplies made from recycled materials
• paper made from 100% recycled material.

How we do business

Being ethical, socially responsible and a model of compliance means that we have a firm belief in treating our customers fairly and putting our members first in everything that we do. Examples of this include:

• running a Members' Council to allow real members to get an in depth understanding of the business, be a filter for new ideas and to feed in thinking from a member perspective
• ensuring that our literature is checked by a member panel to ensure it is easy to understand
• analysing our customer base to understand their needs and conducting customer satisfaction surveys
• making large print, Braille and audio tape versions of our literature available
• having a responsible lending policy that results in us having very low numbers of arrears and possessions
• marketing our products responsibly - we only mail those members who we think the products are appropriate for and do not send direct mail to people under 18 or over 80 years old
• encouraging diversity and equality within the workforce – Britannia has been recognised as an employer that supports diversity and this is recognised in the awards that we've won