UK 
United States
UK Power Networks delivers power to 8.5 million homes and businesses in the UK. The employer of 5,500 scooped the top spot for the UK’s most inclusive employer as ranked by IT50. Here, Andrew Pace, Director of HR & Legal, UK Power Networks explains why they are worthy winners.
Congratulations on your award, what made you a number one winner?
Our continued focus on Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) has seen us make significant and sustained progress in 2024. We have introduced new initiatives, whilst embedding our existing practices, to ensure that we are making a demonstrable and tangible positive impact on the lives of our employees and those in the communities we serve.
In the last year we have successfully achieved re-accreditation in both the National Equality Standard and Investors in People Platinum. These external benchmarks, along with employee feedback, have influenced our approach in 2024 to move from equality to equity.
Andrew Pace
Director of HR & Legal, UK Power Networks
To drive inclusion, we have introduced Directorate D&I Dashboards to provide visibility and the identification of possible barriers for minority groups. Taking a data driven approach has allowed us to implement targeted activity such as the introduction of neurodiversity allies and training for staff on how to better support employees with neurodiverse conditions.
Our employee ethnicity demographics is broadly reflective of the UK population, and we have strong evidence that from a social mobility perspective we are above national averages, only 3% of our senior and executive leadership team attended private/fee paying schools
Continuing our work to support hard-to-reach communities we launched a new pre-employment programme, Power Among Us, which supports nine individuals who were experiencing barriers to employment and had been in receipt of Universal Credit for a minimum of six months through a four-week internship which resulted in five top performers being offered permanent employment, earning above the national average wage and securing a career for life.
