Five Lamps hits gold by investing in its staff

September 19th 2013

Five Lamps is celebrating after successfully being reaccredited with the prestigious business improvement award – Investors in People’s Gold.

Following a rigorous assessment that included lengthy interviews with a large number of staff from right across the organisation, this standard is only given to organisations which can demonstrate a commitment to the learning and development of their employees and achieve best practice in people management.

Less than 2% of all Investors in People organisations in the UK achieve the Investors in People Gold Standard highlighting the achievement of Five Lamps who first secured the Investors in People Gold Accreditation in 2010. Five Lamps yet again achieved the Gold Standard after being assessed in its engagement with employees, investment in and staff take-up of training, quality of appraisals and one-to-one sessions.

The gold standard award highlights the good practices that operate throughout the organisation and the excellent staff that we having working at Five Lamps, particularly reinforcing the value of our long-standing focus on service quality and continuous improvement.

Graeme Oram, Chief Executive of Five Lamps said

“Achieving the Investors in People Gold Accreditation is powerful recognition of the depth of our commitment to the personal and professional development of our staff, the quality of our policies and procedures in supporting our staff and customers and the way in which our corporate values drive our services and our strong sense of family”
“I am particularly proud that we can show people our medals, that we can stand up to the closest external scrutiny and be consistently at the leading edge of our sector nationally. To hold Investors in People Gold and Investors in People Champion status alongside being RBS SE100 Impact Champion, as well as Customer First and Matrix, following on from Best Companies in 2011 and 2012, is really special.”
“The Investors in People Assessor pointed out to me that our staff were very fortunate to have such a great employer and reminded us that we were very fortunate to have such great staff. Given that she met with over a quarter of our staff during her visit I think that she is well qualified to give us that perspective. We are a great business doing great things for our customers and partners and this reaccreditation certainly affirms that.

Five Lamps operate from 5 business premises across Stockton, have a staff of 85 and expect to turnover c£3.5million this year.

Our integrated service portfolio now spans

  • Empty Homes in County Durham and Darlington
  • Financial Inclusion work from Berwick to Scarborough, with £5.2million of lending last year
  • Business start-up support, including mentoring and access to finance, with loans up to £50000
  • Employability support in Stockton, Middlesbrough and Redcar & Cleveland
  • Youth services, including our VIBE special needs programme and MyBnK
  • ‘Helping Hand’ the regional private housing financial assistance programme delivered for all twelve north-east local authorities
  • The DWP New Enterprise Allowance Loan Service for the North East and Yorkshire which has enabled nearly 2500 people to leave benefits and start a business in the last two years, and
  • Welfare Assistance delivery in Stockton-on-Tees, Co. Durham and Northumberland

This year over 25000 people will receive Five Lamps services.