Colin buchanan

Considering the whole of the community and the effect that the company has upon all that it comes into contact with is of great importance to Colin Buchanan (CB). As the nature of our work has a very real and direct impact on our employees, our clients and our suppliers, this is a consideration and a responsibility that we take extremely seriously.

Clients
Colin Buchanan aims to be a responsible supplier of services in all regards; we have taken a series of measures that ensure that our clients receive the best possible service. At an early stage in the commission winning process, rigorous conflict of interest checks are carried out for each proposal. The complex and varied interests of our clients can make this challenging but we believe this a vital service to ensure our clients have peace of mind concerning our impartiality and the absence of bias.

We have implemented a Quality Management System (QMS) certified to ISO9001:2000 to govern all of our operational activities from the enquiry stage to ultimate project archiving as well as office management and business continuity.

We recognise that confidentiality, due either to commercially sensitive developments or politically delicate issues, is always a concern of our clients. Client information is kept securely and on a need to know basis. As many of our clients are local authorities and therefore subject to the Freedom of Information Act, it is company policy to refer any applications for information to the relevant authority to obtain approval for release or to allow them to raise a defence. Our formal policies in connection with confidentiality & non-disclosure and data protection fully describe our control measures.

Our client feedback monitoring procedures ensure that we issue satisfaction questionnaires to clients when projects have been finished. Periodically (most recently in Summer 2008), we commission external consultants to carry out a detailed review of our clients’ perception of our quality, service and price as well as our position in the market.

Employees
Our employees are by far our most important resource; regular (usually weekly) meetings are held by the directors with senior members of staff who in turn cascade down information and receive and pass back views and information. Annually we carry out an anonymous staff survey – undertaken in electronic form for the first time in 2008 – following guidelines from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Through our employee suggestion scheme, we seek to encourage staff members to contribute to the continuous improvement of our business.

Knowledge management and knowledge sharing is promoted by regular seminars which staff are encouraged to attend. This is in addition to our bi-annually programme of staff appraisal that enables staff to discuss their achievements, aspirations and consider their training needs to enable professional development.

Health and Safety is well organised via our Health and Safety Committee, the membership of which comprises project director, project manager and other staff representatives from our London office and representatives from each of the other UK and Ireland offices.

Colin Buchanan is an equal opportunities employer and our staff policies include both a General Policy Statement and specific policies about ethnicity, gender, disability and the monitoring of such things. We maintain statistics about the diversity of our workforce. We endeavour to be flexible in respect of requests from staff members for differing working patterns to suit any care responsibilities they may have.

Sub-consultants and suppliers
At Colin Buchanan we aim to work in partnership with our sub-consultants and our suppliers of goods and services. We maintain registers of our suppliers’ performance, their environmental status and their insurance status.

Shareholders
Colin Buchanan shares all rank equally and all shares are owned by current or, in certain circumstances, recently retired directors and employees. The exception to this policy of private ownership is the Colin Buchanan employee benefit trust which warehouses shares for the purpose of the share option scheme. This share option scheme exists to provide added participation benefits to, in the main, senior members of our staff. The company runs a share incentive plan to facilitate easy, tax friendly share ownership for all staff from the most junior levels up to senior management.
 
The public who we involve in our work
Many of our schemes affect the public, either as travellers, residents or employers. Where relevant we encourage public comment and participation in scheme design and evolution, and have members of staff who specialise in public participation and consultation.