Why Wates are the perfect partners for the Big Issue 100 Changemakers of 2026

There’s a brutal circularity to poverty that anyone who’s lived it will recognise. Without a stable home, work is hard to find. Without work, a home won’t stay stable. People get asked to solve both at once, but support tends to arrive one piece at a time… if it arrives at all.

“If you haven’t got a home and you haven’t got a job, it’s often quite difficult to put the other pieces of the puzzle together,” says Su Pickerill, head of social value at Wates Group. “And to hold them together.”

That trap catches people leaving prison, young people drifting out of education and care leavers stepping into adulthood. It also catches anyone who has one knock and then another. It’s a system that expects stability before it offers the tools that make stability possible.

Now in our 35th year, Big Issue has championed people creating opportunity from adversity. Each year, our Top 100 Changemakers list spotlights the activists, social entrepreneurs and community leaders who make that change happen. This year, Wates Group – one of the UK’s leading purpose-led businesses – is headline sponsor. It’s a 128-year-old, 6,000-strong family-owned company, working in development, construction and property maintenance. It has been building a social value approach around a straightforward idea: work can change lives, but only if people can get through the door.

In recent years, Wates has been working to improve social mobility, accessibility, diversity and outreach in the construction industry itself – a sector that perhaps not everyone associates with those sorts of inclusive values. Pickerill thinks that’s a lack of understanding.

“There are so many different jobs within the built environment,” she says.

“Entry-level roles that really don’t have any barriers – you don’t have to have qualifications. You can walk in, get your basic health and safety training in a couple of weeks, and start working on site.”

From there, there are more ladders than most people assume.

“There are opportunities in construction for lots of different skills and interests,” Pickerill adds. “From the physicality of a labourer through to a project director who’s leading complex regeneration schemes employing hundreds of people across the whole supply chain.”

That breadth is crucial for anyone starting over, at 19 or 45, with qualifications or without, after prison or care or just a run of bad luck. The door is wider than you might think.

Some of Wates’ activities in social value sit upstream, with schools, training and early intervention. Some address people with sharper challenges. Pickerill points to recent work with people preparing for release from prison. Employers must rethink recruitment from the ground up – not just policy, but how decisions get made and how clearly pathways get explained to candidates.

“We want to make sure that there is an open door so that we can consider on a case-by-case basis as many people as possible,” she says.

There’s also work that aims at something harder to measure: confidence. A summer programme aimed at young people who were at risk of becoming NEET (not in education, employment or training) blended career support with a youth-work approach. What stuck with Pickerill wasn’t the job outcomes.

“One of the things that definitely came out is that sense of being surprised at how capable people were of doing something they previously thought impossible,” she says. “That mind shift can move mountains.”

The other strand sits with social enterprises – the sort of organisations that appear in Changemakers year after year. Wates co-developed ASSETS, a mentoring and growth programme run with Impact Hub London. Over five years, 25 organisations have been through it, attributing up to 50% of their business growth to the programme and collectively creating more than 100 new jobs.

Pickerill is clear about why big construction companies take social value seriously now. “We won’t get planning, we won’t win a contract unless we’re engaging in this,” she says.

That might sound transactional, but she argues it’s exactly what keeps social value embedded rather than optional – and Wates has long seen it as core to how business should be done.

“The landscape has changed completely from companies just going out and doing a bit of volunteering. Social value is very much a commercial imperative – recruitment, retention, business growth, innovation, supply chain diversity,” she says. “It’s not a fluffy thing.”

“There’s an innate need to be sustainable in every sense of the word,” Pickerill says. “We have a vested interest in making sure we’re not a one-hit wonder with communities – that communities want us back, that partners want us back.”

Wates chief executive Eoghan O’Lionaird has been forthright about where that leaves the company in the current moment.

“As some political and business voices retreat from sustainability and EDI [equality, diversity and inclusion] commitments, I feel strongly that now is the time for purpose-led companies to double down,” he said recently. “Business done well should be a force for good.”

That’s the overlap with Changemakers. Purpose-led organisations that back people who build solutions through innovation. Both measure success beyond the quarterly report and focus on long-term impact for communities and society.

The partnership is another expression of going beyond legal or contractual compliance. But the aim stays close to where this started. Work can be an anchor – but only if the route in feels real, and only if support lasts long enough for the pieces to finally hold together – the kind of staying power Wates Group is determined to help people build.

Find out more at wates.co.uk 

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