Our story

Founded in 2007, PPL is a social enterprise and B Corp working with individuals, communities and the organisations that support them.

PPL started life as a public sector team established to support the improvement and transformation of local government services in the early 2000s.

Our projects and programmes included improving adults’ and children’s social care, education, housing, benefits and environmental services.  As the work evolved we increasingly worked across boundaries – recognising that we couldn’t solve a problem in one area, without understanding the links to all the others.

This included how local government services worked with each other, how they worked with the health service and other partners, and how they worked with individuals, families and the places where they lived. We helped set up the first Local Strategic Partnerships which brought together different professionals, and set up the first Joint Service Centres which allowed GPs, Social Workers and other health and care professionals to begin to work together better around the needs of their communities.

We also became involved in national work to support public sector colleagues around the country.

We worked with leading consultancies and with a range of government organisations as part of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister’s National Capacity Building Programme. We worked together to co-develop tools, approaches and to help build skills and confidence in areas such as organisational design, analysing and improving services, and applying digital technologies.

We recognised that there were many things we could apply from experiences across the UK and internationally, and across the private and public sectors, around how to improve performance and outcomes; but also that there are unique challenges to working in local public and voluntary & community sector organisations, which could not be ignored. This is a key part of our work that continues today.

In 2007 PPL was established as an independent organisation, separate from any individual public sector body or geography, with a commitment to supporting health, wellbeing and economic success across the UK.

We had worked for and with a number of management consultancies. We recognised the value of good consulting, but we were concerned around the costs and availability of the right kind of support for the challenges the public sector and broader society were facing. And we wanted to create something that was different, the kind of place we would love to work, and a team which was genuinely co-creating social impact with like-minded individuals and clients.

We started with 2.5 people (Claire had just given birth to her first child!) and we have grown our work, our team and our impact ever since, as a Social Enterprise and as one of the leading Management Consultancies in the UK.

  • Claire Kennedy

    Joint Chief Executive PPL

    Speech icon

    We are experts at bringing partner organisations together to identify how they can best work together to support communities they serve; and we are experts at helping them to work differently to achieve that ambition.

  • Mayara

    Consultant

    Speech icon

    From Analyst to Director, everyone here works together to deliver real change to our clients, with our clients. This means a lot of professional exposure, making PPL a great place to launch your consulting career!

  • Nick

    Analyst

    Speech icon

    It has been really exciting to work first-hand on projects that support tackling societal challenges and impact people’s lives across health, social care, and local government.”