I’m looking for an ethical insurance provider for personal and for public liability insurance for Better Century. Has anyone got any suggestions?
I’ll post my findings, and hopefully will be useful for others…
Found ETA who are listed by the Good Shopping Guide as a good provider but they don’t do business insurance… search continues…
Have checked out:
NatureSave - they give 10% of all income to charities…
EverGreen Insurance Services pointed to me by @Alandawson66 give 25% of the total commission to charities, slightly better.
None of them actually list the donations they’ve made… 
Better Century has drafted a ‘Better Business Framework’. I’m going to ask these companies the following questions:
- Do you have or intend to implement an Environmental Management System?
- Do you use 100% renewable energy in all of your practices?
- Do you have a system in place which will help you reduce your waste from your business practices?
- On your business premises do you have renewable energy installed or do you have any intention to do so?
- We believe that we should share the benefit of having access to less expensive products and services with our staff and customers. Do you provide discounts to your staff? Does your pricing policy aim to reduce costs of your product to customers?
- We believe that our staff should not unnecessarily travel or use good facilities they have at home. Do you have working from home policies for your staff?
- We believe that staff should have an option to share in the profits of the business. Do you have a means for staff to gain profit share within your business through bonuses based on business performance or share options?
- What policies do you have in place to ensure that staff are paid enough to live a quality of life that achieves this?
- We believe that everyone has an opportunity to improve the environment for all living things. In considering your impact on biodiversity loss through business, do you do anything to support biodiversity on your business premises or in the wider environment? Are you investing in ways to reduce the impact to the planet of your product or service?
- We believe everyone should have an opportunity to contribute to society and the environment. Do you have an equal rights human resource policy to ensure everyone has opportunity to work for your organisation?
What do people think? Reasonable questions?
2 Likes
Evergreen responses:
Please tell us how you improve use of resources in the manufacture or administration of your products
We only print when absolutely necessary and only use recycled paper.
We only print when absolutely necessary and only use recycled paper sourced from the FSC, in our 3 years of trading we have only ever purchased two boxes of paper. We prefer to communicate electronically.
Our website is hosted using 100% renewable electricity from sources like the sun, wind and sea.
Our office energy is provided by a renewal energy company.
We encourage our insurer partners to transact business with us electronically and provide electronic documentation to our clients, reducing the need to send items in the post.
We use long life lighting in our offices, we encourage all our staff to recycle and cut down on single use plastic. Although our offices are set off a main road we are creating habitats for pollinators by installing plant pots/boarders etc around our offices.
Please tell us how you improve Sharing of Resources in the manufacture or administration of the product or service that Better Century could promote on your behalf?
Everyone needs insurance for one reason or another, whether it be for your business, charity, social enterprise, community group or personal need for your homes, holidays or pets – Evergreen was set up to help our clients with these needs but then to also raise donations for nature, wildlife and conservation charities. Every policy arranged through us secures a donation that goes back to one of our charity partners helping with their vital work in protecting our natural world.
Make a different choice for your insurance, Make it Evergreen. – Click here to request your quote https://evergreeninsuranceservices.co.uk/ or call us on 020 3372 2160 (M-F 9am-5:30)
*** Include video link / or actual video about Evergreen ***
We provide discount to all staff members.
Staff can work from home from time to time.
Please tell us how you will help all life thrive in the delivery of your administration systems or services
We are a living wage employer and we have an equal rights policy to ensure everyone has the opportunity to work for our organisation.
You’ve done a bit of research since the email notification I’m responding to. I use ETA for bike insurance and they’re brilliant, but as you say, no liability cover. Have you looked at Unity? They work particularly with charities and Scouts & Guides…
Thanks Kerena, will check it out…
Nature Save just called us back. Here are the answers to our questions
- Do you have or intend to implement an Environmental Management System?
No.
- Do you use 100% renewable energy in all of your practices?
Lease the building and don’t know energy provider
- Do you have a system in place which will help you reduce your waste from your business practices?
LED lights, refurbished office equipment, reuse paper, box for printer cartridges which get refilled. No policies in place to become paperless, but are thinking about this.
- On your business premises do you have renewable energy installed or do you have any intention to do so?
Do have solar panels
- We believe that we should share the benefit of having access to less expensive products and services with our staff and customers. Do you provide discounts to your staff? Does your pricing policy aim to reduce costs of your product to customers?
No discounts for staff but have affiliates which give discounts… Offer EPR to clients…
Nothing to reduce costs of your product…
- We believe that our staff should not unnecessarily travel or use good facilities they have at home. Do you have working from home policies for your staff?
Don’t have working from home policy in place
- We believe that staff should have an option to share in the profits of the business. Do you have a means for staff to gain profit share within your business through bonuses based on business performance or share options?
No profit share schemes etc. Very small.
- What policies do you have in place to ensure that staff are paid enough to live a quality of life that achieves this?
Living wage employer
- We believe that everyone has an opportunity to improve the environment for all living things. In considering your impact on biodiversity loss through business, do you do anything to support biodiversity on your business premises or in the wider environment? Are you investing in ways to reduce the impact to the planet of your product or service?
Provide money for community energy projects and have funded forest schools, and biodiversity products. Purchased solar thermal bee hives.
- We believe everyone should have an opportunity to contribute to society and the environment. Do you have an equal rights human resource policy to ensure everyone has opportunity to work for your organisation?
Have an equal right resource
We use the Cooperative Bank for all our banking and business insurance, about the best we can find. Also as a Federation of Small Businesses member (FSB) we get preferential rates for business banking and an annual bonus !
At Portel AV Limited we put in place a very radical (at the time) process to allow everyone to work from home, it wasn’t easy as first we needed a CRM system made specifically for our line of work, after a few failures we had a Company called APT Projects produce us a version of their TCM CRM system, cost was about £16k at the time, a lot of money for a small telecom business but here we are ten or so years later and its still working for us. The second issue was how to make the telephone system work for us. As a telecom company we were selling / fitting / maintaining systems from Avaya, Panasonic and NEC. I visited a business over in the US who were developing an embryonic Voice over Internet Protocol phone system (VoIP) We took what they had and continued development over here in Great Britain, eventually after about £60k and a lot of hard work we came up with our own version of the VoIP phone systems (seen all over the place nowadays). Using VoIP and CRM allowed Portel to close its Leeds office and all work from home, that was back in 2008, we are still going strong selling, installing and maintaining our VoIP phone systems (pity we couldn’t get a grant to develop handsets!) The main thing is we reduced our carbon footprints down dramatically as our Administrator never needs to travel, most sales are done over the Internet or phone, engineers only visit site when carrying out hardware fixes or installations so we cracked it …so can you !!!
1 Like
I have been looking for ethical health insurance providers. The first that I have found is Westfield Health https://www.westfieldhealth.com/ - which is a charitable trust, and over the last 20 years has donated £15m to the NHS and other well being charities like Teenage Cancer Trust. The second one is WPA -https://www.wpa.org.uk/ - which is also a charity and has a Benevolent Fund which promotes good health in young people and has a Charitable Foundation which supports families with very ill children.
Obviously this doesn’t necessarily mean they have good eco credentials - but they are currently top of my list to get a quote. Does anyone know any other ethical providers?
Thanks
They are reasonable questions, but I suspect that any reputable insurer will have a set of responses that won’t leave you any the wiser.
I’m retired now but was an underwriter for 40 years. For 31 years I was with Municipal Mutual, a local authority insurer that ceased trading following mismanagement by a city accountant appointed MD. Zurich Ins saw a business opportunity to quote for its business and taking on (TUPE) some of its staff - I was one of them. Direct dealing Zurich Municipal is now part of Zurich’s business (though it’s no longer solely direct dealing, last I heard - another bizarre business decision).
Taking as an example one of your questions - profit sharing. This is often used as a device to substitute for a good salary, and across a corporate such as Zurich Ins, profit share fails to incentivise because a profitable part of the business gets caught up with the rest. The staff get the average, whether or not they out perform compared with the rest of the business.
Another example - support for the environment. Naturally, insurers want to see flood mitigation schemes and action on climate change, but since this hasn’t happened sufficiently, I believe that many insurers have withdrawn cover where insured’s live in flood plains. And the government hasn’t stepped in to fill the gap. Insurers are not charities - they are in business to make a good return of their investors equity. Historically (not so much these days) insurers made their money from investments - investing the premiums received knowing they’d have money in the bank before paying out. And, like any other investor, the best returns will come from the likes of the fossil fuel industry, military equipment and tobacco. This means that any corporate taking the ethical line will be at a financial disadvantage to its competitors. When I was made redundant (offered a demotion if I wanted to transfer to Farnborough from So’ton) in one of the continuous reorganisations that are done to reduce pensions payments, I decided I would only work for a direct dealing mutual, and expected to live off my pension, but got a job straight away with an education mutual (but in London). This confirmed to me that the best way to offer insurance is through a mutual (saving more than 20% on the additional costs of going through a broker), and in an ideal world, this would be set up by government…but that’s another story.
In a word I think you are chasing after a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow with your quest for an ethical insurer when you drill down to the nitty-gritty, though I’d like to be proven wrong.
If you are a charity/not-for-profit organisation, you could try Zurich Municipal - in theory, if on a direct dealing basis, they should at least be competitive. But underwriting is not a science - more of dark art. And it’s more about what they can charge that is competitive whilst assuring a profitable return. Zurich Municipal will no doubt have a propaganda glossy giving you answers you want to hear! Good luck, Terry
1 Like
Thank you for your insight - really interesting. I especially like the pot of gold reference ! Good food for thought