2024 MCA Awards

As the UK’s largest Defence contractor, BAE Systems underpins national sovereignty and security, as well as making a significant contribution to the economy. Research from Oxford Economics found that in 2022, the company contributed £11bn to GDP – equivalent to 0.4% of the domestic economy.

One area of significant focus is the Air domain. The company’s Air Sector designs, manufactures, supports and provides training for Typhoon and F-35 military fast jets and the Hawk trainer aircraft, while developing the next generation combat air system, Tempest, which will secure the UK’s sovereign combat air defence capabilities for the long term.

The company identified the need to drive efficiency, affordability and agility for customers in helping them respond to the evolving threat context today, while also taking key steps to transform to deliver the products and services of tomorrow faster than ever before.

KPMG was appointed as the partner to help deliver this. Through an extremely close working relationship, where commitment has been a watchword, a multi-skilled KPMG team has worked with BAE Systems to deliver the transformation at scale.

This has included moving over 5,000 people into new teams digital and data-led performance improvement across supply chain, procurement, engineering, project management and manufacturing; enterprise performance management; embedding Enterprise leadership through redesigned senior executive forums; and a full programme of cultural and change management.

Examples of specific workstream projects and outcomes include designing and implementing a new end-to-end digital solution for engineering using an integrated workflow tool; the design and implementation of a modernised digital procurement solution that will help drive significant efficiencies, cost savings and performance improvements; and the launch of a whole new line of business within the Air Sector – FalconWorks® – which is its innovation hub for new products and services, employing 1,200 staff and working with a range of external partners in a dynamic ecosystem.

The programme has played a key part in energising the organisation, and strengthening its  confidence and resilience for the future, with key outcomes including:

• New operating model designed and implemented
• Newly created Falcon Works® innovation hub fully operational, staffed with 1,200 FTEs
• Nearly 100 individuals in Air trained and developed to deliver transformational change activity

The project has resonated widely, to other divisions of BAE Systems and beyond into the wider Defence ecosystem. There have been over 1,000 visitors to the Ignition 35 space that the BAE Systems and KPMG team has created – including senior customer figures who have been keen to find out more about transformation approaches and understand how the successes of the programme may be replicated elsewhere.

Corruption and financial crime are pervasive in society, and have been a growing focus for regulators for many years. The technological advances made in the last 10 years with regards to online payments, virtual businesses, biometric verification etc., have given criminals a new arsenal of tools and ways in which they can exploit the financial system.

Despite UK banks and financial institutions spending an estimated £34.2 billion a year on financial crime compliance, less than 1% of illicit funds in circulation are intercepted. This is often because by the time the criminal behaviour has been identified, the funds and the criminals have moved on.

A change was needed across the industry; a more sophisticated approach to identifying and detecting criminal behaviour in real-time.

Convinced that its approach to the monitoring and detection of financial crime needed to evolve, NatWest partnered with KPMG to embark on an ambitious project to deliver a sustainable solution that could adapt and grow in line with business needs.

NatWest was looking to transform its understanding of its customer by reengineering how it manages data, monitors customer information and behaviours, and drives better detection and management of risk. Its ambition was to leverage a variety of data sources to build a richer picture of its customers, their relationships with other businesses and individuals, and their use of their accounts or products.

With the expertise of a connected team of specialists covering forensics, data, business analysis, enterprise architecture and more, KPMG worked alongside the NatWest team and third-party suppliers to incorporate technology and data at the heart of the solution; helping NatWest build a detailed view of its customers and customer networks, unearthing previously hidden connections between businesses and individuals.

The KPMG team created a delivery approach that would achieve the client’s business outcomes, while minimising disruption and layering in increasing complexity as the system and data matured. The design leveraged the bank’s investment in its customer interactions, external data, and environmental data, to not only automate 70%+ of data administration, but curate that data for monitoring through the latest innovations around behavioural and network risk.

This approach gave NatWest the flexibility to quickly react to changes at a local and international level; from the changing face of the UK’s high streets to large scale global events. As this new information was collected, the transactional models could be re-trained in a timely manner and emerging financial crime risk could be highlighted for review by financial crime specialists. This was transformational for managing financial crime risk where collection of data and identification of risk traditionally happened over a 1-to-5-year time period.

The delivered customer information platform dynamically detects, monitors, and significantly automates the resolution of simple customer data events, reducing operational overheads and simplifying customer journeys, while reducing risk by addressing events as they occur. 

This market leading platform has enabled NatWest to manage its regulatory compliance more effectively through more accurate and swifter detection of financial crime, transformed customer experience across its financial crime processes, and provided continuous customer insights for strategic decision making across the business.

We helped Cumbria take seven local government bodies, structured in a two-tiered system and transform them into two brand new unitary local authorities and a fire and rescue authority capable of providing modern-day governance. We did it all in about a year.

The complexity of the challenge was massive. The existing government bodies provided more than 700 different services to nearly 500,000 people across England’s second largest county area. It was a hugely complex programme with an immoveable ‘Day 1’ deadline. There was no room for error and no leeway for service interruption.

That’s why Cumbria’s leaders chose to work with KPMG in the UK. The KPMG team brought deep experience gained from helping other local governments across England to reorganise and transform. We could draw on a deep bench strength of extensive multi-disciplinary capabilities. We appointed senior leaders who could serve as objective and independent ‘critical friends’ to decision-makers. We demonstrated that we understood local government and had valuable insight on Cumbria’s unique challenges and opportunities.

Working as a blended team with the client’s dedicated local government reorganisation resources, we identified 212 requirements that needed to be in place by Day 1. That included everything from setting up new policies and IT systems through to briefing politicians and ensuring the new executives were properly established. We focused on seven key areas – people, places, corporate systems, ICT, customer, finance and fire. We identified nearly 1,300 Level 1, 2 and 3 milestones we would need to monitor and measure throughout the programme. There were massive interdependencies.

At the same time, we had to disaggregate and rebuild more than 700 different services – some of them statutory or critical – within two separate entities. Sometimes that meant bringing duplicative services together. Other times, it meant splitting apart services that had previously been delivered centrally by Cumbria Council. It was complex stuff, often requiring deep capabilities in areas such as HR, assets and estates, systems integration and policy development.

While Cumbria looked to KPMG to help them with capacity, technical support and project management capabilities to get the project over the line in time, their Senior Responsible Owners (SROs) also wanted a ‘critical friend’ who could challenge them when needed, provide independent perspectives where required and deliver expert insight and advice based on experience and deep capabilities. And we delivered exactly that.

Ultimately, we helped Cumbria disaggregate seven different government bodies and reassemble them into two new unitary authorities and one fire authority that is fit and ready to provide modern governance. 

We performed excellently under the tight timelines. We delivered all of the 212 requirements by the 1 April 2023 deadline. In doing so, we allowed the two new unitary governments and their Chief Executives to stand up modern governance bodies with integrated services in a way that is not only legal and safe, but also more efficient and effective for the councils and the people they serve.

The Care Quality Commission has a big responsibility: it’s their job to make sure your health and social care providers are giving you safe, effective, compassionate and high-quality care. And they wanted to radically rethink how they performed their regulatory responsibilities. Their legacy systems and paper-based ways of working had become inefficient. They needed to become much more proactive and data-driven in order to meet the needs of the UK’s population going forward.

“Our legacy IT systems weren't able to support our new ambitions. We knew we needed a complete transformation in our technology to help us create a great digital experience for both the wider public and providers. We spoke to a number of vendors and because of their expertise and proven success in the healthcare sector, we decided to go with KPMG in the UK and Microsoft.”

• Mark Sutton, Chief Digital Officer, Care Quality Commission

With KPMG as their technology partner and overall transformation partner, we had the holistic view we needed to help the regulator move quickly, with agility and with confidence on their technology transformation. We helped them shape their service models, think about new ways of working and different structural options for the organisation. Then we used that insight to help them create a technology environment that would deliver on their stakeholders’ needs and expectations.

Leveraging our deep technology implementation experience and our unique tools – including KPMG’s Connected Enterprise and Powered Enterprise frameworks – we helped CQC design and build all of the technology pieces that underpin their new regulatory framework and their new ways of working.

While technology was critical to this transformation, we also needed to ensure that the stakeholders were brought along on the journey. So we put people at the heart of the transformational efforts. We involved CQC’s various stakeholders in all aspects of the design, build and test. We also identified user-advocates and change champions to socialise the benefits. This reduced project spend, managed services spend, and sped-up time to value.

At the same time, we needed to show them how to transform. As this was CQC’s first experience delivering a large-scale transformation using agile methodologies, the methods and ways of working were new and had to be learned on-the-job. That meant getting leadership comfortable with the approach, which was to build foundational products, release, and then iterate, meaning some features and capabilities wouldn’t be present from the get-go. Yet it was widely acknowledged that this approach would allow the joint teams to deliver benefits early and to continue to deliver a wider holistic transformation aligned with the CQC goals. 

Ultimately, we helped CQC modernise their entire technology landscape from the planning and preparation stage all the way through to inspections and the publishing of a new ratings product. And that means the CQC now has the insights they need to understand which sites and providers need their support the most, and the tools to deliver fit-for-future, effective regulation.

The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) is supporting many programmes around the world to aid the global climate and net zero transition – one of these being the ASPiRE (Accelerating Smart Power and Renewable Energy) programme in India, to which it appointed KPMG as delivery partner.

KPMG has been leveraging its global experience, industry benchmarks and understanding of the global transition of the energy system to support pilot projects, provide policy advice and build capabilities across multiple sectors in India as well as providing project management capabilities. 

A team from KPMG UK has been working hand-in-hand with colleagues from KPMG India, with a KPMG-led consortium providing policy, commercial and technical advice, collaborating closely with key Indian government ministries (the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, and the Ministry of Power), and facilitating introductions and partnerships between India and UK businesses.

A significant additional focus has been to embed a gender and social inclusion dimension within every work package and activity. This has included increasing access and increasing employment opportunities, as well as improving working conditions, for women and socially excluded groups.

The programme has seven key areas of focus, and these all have numerous work packages within them – making it a complex project to manage. But through KPMG’s extensive project management experience, including other international projects and specifically other complex FCDO programmes, as well as our deep subject expertise relating to the climate and energy transition, the team has been able to run the implementation successfully – meeting targets and in many cases exceeding them.

The programme has achieved some significant results:

• Developed a pipeline of market opportunities of at least £10 billion across smart power and renewable energy projects
• Facilitated 17 partnership discussions between Indian and UK organisations, which are in advanced stages of finalisation
• 61 companies supported to enter the Indian market
• 50+ technical reports/analytical studies/white papers/tools developed across smart power and renewable energy themes
• 25+ information materials shared with Indian and international businesses and stakeholders (including UK) on technical capabilities, market opportunities, etc
• Capacity building of 1,800+ senior level stakeholders on priority areas such as smart meters, energy storage, industrial decarbonisation and energy efficiency (IDEE), offshore wind, green hydrogen and energy storage themes
• Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission reduction of ~2 million tons of CO2

KPMG has supported clients and key stakeholders, helped scores of UK businesses find entry points into the Indian market, pushed and promoted the inclusion agenda – and helped propel one of the world’s largest economies towards a greener, lower carbon footprint. It is a programme that the firm is proud to be a part of because it is truly making a difference on an international scale.

After navigating the challenges of the pandemic, pub operator and brewing company Greene King was keen to explore additional sources of value to help drive profitability. KPMG was asked to support in reviewing diverse aspects of the business. But it was the team’s analysis of the pricing approach and potential strategy that caught the client’s attention.

Greene King operates a very diverse portfolio of pubs, from busy city centre venues and community locals, to food-led pubs in picturesque rural villages. The customer-base, too, was equally varied, depending on factors such as the venue, the location, the food and drinks on offer and the amenities provided. This huge diversity of pubs, consumption patterns, expectations, and preferences, however, was not reflected in its pricing strategy.

KPMG identified an opportunity to implement a value-based pricing strategy that was aligned to the consumers’ perception of value, with levers that enabled price customisation at an individual pub level, while still ensuring a consistent pricing architecture. This was supported with a dynamic market signals tool that facilitated more frequent, market-driven price reviews.

Step one was a data-driven network segmentation to group similar pubs together into distinct segments. This was based on factors such as the location, type of venue, balance of product types (drinks versus food), type of product offering and, crucially, the preferences and expectations both of existing customers and the local market in general. Even without the pricing element, this was hugely valuable for the client, giving them much deeper insights into their estate.

The next step was a detailed consumer preference study to understand preferences for each product and associated willingness-to-pay, to inform a product-price architecture for each segment. For each product, the aim was to understand the consumer's willingness to pay, depending on location, where they were going, what the occasion is, who they were with, etc., together with the inter-relationship between these factors and their impact on price. This provided invaluable insights not only into the pricing strategy for different segments, but also a target pricing hierarchy among the beer brands.

The final step was to turn these insights and analysis into a pricing tool and supporting capability to review and refresh prices on an on-going basis. This enabled the client to understand for every pub, for every beer, what the current price is, what the target price is, and how best to move from the current price to target price by venue, while maintaining its competitiveness.

Implementing the new pricing strategy and toolkit was a transformational change for Greene King, which praised the project as one of their most successful ever engagements with an external consultancy. Following the roll-out over the summer of 2022, the company saw a significant increase in gross profit in the 12-month period after the new value-based pricing strategy was implemented. These benefits will be realised on an annual recurring basis, as this engagement enabled the company to build an in-house, data-led pricing capability.

Aegon asked us to help them implement an internal talent marketplace. We helped them achieve what they actually wanted – improved employee engagement scores and a shift towards a skills-based workforce model.

Rather than approaching this project as (yet another) technology implementation, we partnered with Aegon to also address the main cultural and change barriers that often erode the value of projects like this. Marketplaces thrive on the network effect. Driving adoption across all of Aegon’s business units and managing the stakeholder field would be critical to long-term success.

We provided Aegon with a small and dedicated core team of professionals that combined deep HR, talent and engagement experience with extensive change and technology capabilities to deliver a holistic programme across multiple markets. At the same time, we drew on the full multidisciplinary capabilities of the KPMG network to provide the client with insights and advice across a range of considerations.

That allowed us to help Aegon develop a holistic approach that placed the emphasis on culture and change versus technology and tools. We knew that – without engagement and adoption – their investment into the technology would be worthless. So we partnered with them on a strategy that majored in change management and performance improvement. Yes: we would help them identify the right technology solution and implement it. But that would be 20 percent of the job. The other 80 percent would come down to culture and change.

With that in mind, we designed a phased approach that allowed Aegon to roll out functionality in steps – thereby encouraging the organisation to gain familiarity with the system while building their internal capabilities. First, we would launch the ‘gigs’ functionality. Once that was up and running, we would unlock the tool’s mentoring capabilities which would automatically connect those seeking mentors to people with appropriate skills and capabilities within the organisation.

We sequenced the steps in the journey to ensure we were creating a robust platform and foundation upon which to drive the platform’s success and value (for example, by ensuring we had a critical mass of interesting ‘gig’ opportunities on the site before we went live).

We tailored the approach based on the dynamics and culture of each line of business in different markets to ensure we would get buy-in from employees and senior leaders. And then we helped them launch their new solution and measure their success.

Our work has already delivered impressive results. Employees using the system are showing stronger engagement. Gigs are being posted and filled at a fantastic rate – more than 13,600 hours of gig work was completed by Aegon employees in the first year alone – leading to estimated financial savings of more than £500,000.

Perhaps most importantly, the tool – and our approach to delivering it – provides Aegon with a strong foundation upon which to adopt a skills-based approach to talent and workforce management that will help the organisation maintain engagement and talent as they grow into the future.

Medway NHS Foundation Trust is a large organisation that had been experiencing performance challenges, leading to it being in and out of special measures in recent years.

The Trust decided to take decisive action, through a performance programme called Patient First – and appointed KPMG as its implementation and delivery partner.

Since 2022, a team from KPMG has been leveraging the firm’s established expertise in NHS transformation to help bring about remarkable change. This has involved creating clear ‘Breakthrough Objectives’ with sharp alignment and focus in the Trust’s strategy and how it is cascaded to frontline teams. It has been also about hearts and minds, supporting and enabling change rather than directing it. This means instilling a sense of purpose, motivation and energy at every level through the organisation – a ‘Board to ward’ strategy.

Throughout, the KPMG team has paid significant attention to strong programme management complimented with coaching and support at all levels, and this started with the leadership team.

KPMG worked with the executive team around the leadership behaviours that support improvement – concepts like how to lead with humility, how to use scientific thinking, how to work as a team. These principles also flow down to the middle and frontline layers. A sign of how well and pervasively these behaviours have been embedded in the Trust is that they are now reflected in recruitment criteria when advertising new positions – recognising how important it is to sustain the culture and values that have been created.

Then, working closely with staff at every relevant level and bringing deep technical skills to bear, KPMG has provided tools, techniques and a standardised approach to identifying and tracking improvement, giving staff clarity about what they need to do, every day. KPMG has supported them in analysing what the current problems are in target areas, using a data-led approach and root cause analysis. By focusing on the handful of top contributors to those problems, constantly tracking progress to unblock them, amazing leaps can be made. It is not unusual to see 40% gains in a matter of weeks. Staff at Medway have become highly enthused and developed an appetite to go further and achieve more. The innovative introduction of ‘Breaking the Cycle’ weeks, when a specific issue became the overriding centre of attention for change, further accelerated progress.

Results have improved across many key areas:

• Award-winning cardiac arrest calls approach, reducing them from five to just one a month
• Ambulance handovers improved to the best in the region
• 24% improvement in number of pre-noon discharges
• In-patient recommend rate of nearly 95%, increased from below 70% in July 2022
• Over £1 million of annual savings achieved through a review of medicines policy and procedures

With KPMG’s support, the Trust has made changes that are not quick fixes, but fundamental shifts at the heart of what they do – saving lives and driving real improvements on the ground.

Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust needed to improve performance whilst simultaneously building their improvement capacity and capability. Rather than taking a reactive, firefighting approach, the Trust wanted to empower their executive, clinical and operations teams to really understand what was holding them back from delivering on Trust objectives, create aligned solutions and deliver the improvements themselves.

Working in partnership with our firm, the Trust designed a new improvement system that was tightly aligned to their organisational strategy and values. They successfully launched the programme using tools and methodologies we developed through nearly 20 similar engagements. And then they rapidly deployed a massive training programme that empowered more than 40% of their teams to self-sufficiently deliver sustainable performance improvements in their areas.

Our training showed them how to use data analytics to identify the root causes of the performance challenges they faced and then to use that information to set clear metrics for their improvement initiatives. Then we helped them think of potential countermeasures – longer-term solutions – they could employ to achieve their improvement objectives. We showed them how to use improvement huddles to overcome barriers and how to track their progress using performance management routines.

We gave them a robust management system developed and tailored specifically for this situation. We built them a 360-degree leadership behaviour tool that allowed them to gather and collate real-time feedback and insight from their line managers, their direct reports and their peers. We also brought them into industry networks to discuss new approaches and share best practices around performance improvement.

At the same time, we focused on the leadership. We worked with their executives to create a personal and organisational culture of improvement. We encouraged them to ‘go and see’ their employees, listen to their challenges and engage in improvement huddles with them. We showed them how to be more purposeful about the way they interact with services.

In many ways, we were helping RBFT build an organisation of problem solvers with the tools, routines and behaviours they needed to apply complex problem-solving techniques to virtually any challenge they are facing. That has provided them with capabilities they can use to do their day jobs better and ensure their improvements are sustainable and continuous.

The programme’s success was predicated on a dynamic combination of experienced professionals, strong client relationships and an unwavering focus on ensuring RBFT’s leadership and people were aligned on the organisation’s strategy, values and behaviours. We helped them create a golden thread of sustainable improvement from the Board to the Ward.

This engagement met all of the objectives and requirements set out by the client. We delivered a proactive performance improvement system, underpinned by robust tools and methodologies, and scaled up a massive training programme to ensure engagement and adoption across the organisation.

However, we believe the best measure of the value we created is in the improvements that the Trust has been able to achieve using our system, tools, routines and behaviours. And those results have been fantastic.

Following the Covid-19 pandemic, the NHS faced a significant waiting list backlog due to the postponement and cancellation of elective procedures reflecting long-standing healthcare system capacity challenges.

Clearing this backlog was proving difficult due to existing, and pandemic-exacerbated challenges, such as resource constraints, workforce shortages, inconsistent data quality, and capacity limitations. The backlog prolonged patient waiting times, driving poorer patient experience, increased suffering, and potentially irreparable patient harm.

Many NHS Trusts struggled to understand the true state their backlog, due to challenges with legacy technology infrastructure and disparate unconnected data systems making it harder to establish the waiting list position. Without a trusted single view for waiting patients and theatre sessions, Trusts would struggle to effectively prioritise patients and optimise limited operating theatre capacity.

To respond to this challenge NHS England commissioned Palantir to establish the Improving Elective Care Coordination Pilot (IECCP). The IECCP programme created the innovative digital Care Coordination Solution (CCS), built on Palantir’s leading Foundry data software platform. CCS was designed to help Trusts reduce their elective waitlist by giving users intuitive access to all key data in one place. This enabled collaboration across all teams working on the elective pathway, by improving data quality and helping staff to maximise theatre utilisation with improved data driven scheduling. 

The NHS and Palantir required support in driving maximum adoption of the CCS solution to ensure it delivered it’s promised benefits. KPMG partnered with Palantir to address this challenge for six NHS Trusts (Bath, Salisbury, North Midlands, Lincoln, West Herts and NorthTees).

KPMG’s were appointed to: 

• Drive buy-in by demonstrating CCS to hospital staff, (executive management, medical consultants, management, nurses and administrative staff)
• Improve scheduling processes with the CCS (e.g. theatre planning sessions)
• Train hospital staff, using a combination of in-person workshops and bespoke training and change management support
• Ensure continued success by enabling CCS champions within Trusts, and upskilling NHS England resources to deliver ongoing training
• Leverage KPMG operational excellence expertise to rapidly translate user feedback into technical requirements for Palantir engineers to drive continuous solution improvements. 

Benefits to client

The NHS was able to successfully implement the CCS in the six NHS Trusts.

KPMG’s blend of analytics, technology implementation and NHS operational expertise added significant value to Palantir’s ability to successfully deploy the tool. In particular, the team’s NHS operational perspective and deep understanding of NHS user needs allowed Palantir to increase buy-in and adoption of the tool.

Tangible benefits included: 

• 5% increases in theatre utilisation enabling thousands of additional treatments
• 300 improvements to theatre scheduling made using automated CCS alerts
• 10,000 patient entries with potential data quality issues flagged to help to prioritise patient scheduling

“KPMG joined at a pivotal time to drive rapid user adoption in 12 weeks. Their expertise established credibility with front-line staff and their dedicated team worked collaboratively and flexibly with NHS England, Palantir and Trust staff to provide high value cost-effective. We couldn’t have met our goals without their help. The tangible benefits to patients from the IECCP programme have been pivotal to supporting the case for a much more ambitious and substantial transformation programme.”

Ayub Bhayat – Chief Data Officer NHS England (Deputy CDAO)

The energy crisis of late 2022 meant electricity and gas became unaffordable for most UK households. To enable consumers around the country and across social strata to keep using power and heat their homes, a solution was urgently needed – and the Government devised one of the biggest policy interventions in modern history, known as the Energy Price Guarantee (EPG) Scheme, as a response to cap typical household bills at £2,500 a year.

Energy Suppliers delivered the EPG but to make this enormous Scheme viable, Supplier delivery needed to be checked, monitored, and assured by a third party. The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) appointed KPMG to perform this work.

KPMG’s brief covered over 30 Energy Suppliers providing energy to more than 20 million meters. Just as DESNZ and Suppliers had to work at speed, so did KPMG. A 100+ strong, multidisciplinary, and highly skilled team was mobilised within a matter of days.

Within less than two weeks, leveraging other assets the firm had previously built such as its Cognitive Contract Management platform, KPMG stood up a technical solution that could receive huge amounts of data from Energy Suppliers.

The scope of work included reviewing Suppliers’ processes to ensure they were appropriately set up for the Scheme; detailed Discount Application testing to verify discounts were being properly applied and passed on to customers; matching data to billing information; and investigating any anomalies.

The KPMG team had to be highly agile to adapt as the Scheme evolved, and had to continuously adapt to ensure the audit programme was continuing to address new and emerging risks. For example, KPMG’s work on Prepayment Meters (PPMs) highlighted industry-wide challenges that have led to the design of a bespoke audit programme for PPMs.

In addition, KPMG was required to deviate from its original methodology during certain stages of the project, significantly changing course as the Scheme evolved. This was necessary in part because the Scheme was originally envisaged to run for 12-18 months but, due to unexpected falls in the energy price, it came to an interim close after six months (end of June 2023). This meant the firm needed to be truly agile and bring much of its work forward. KPMG also needed to produce initial Scheme reports and reconciliations for each Supplier to give to DESNZ much earlier than originally scheduled.

KPMG’s robust quality assurance framework ensured that multiple layers of review were undertaken for all client outputs so that the highest quality standards were continuously maintained. The work also involved enormous amounts of data and analysis, including:

• Analysing over 1.7 billion rows of industry data
• Assessing contract types for over 20 million meterpoints
• Reviewing over 50,000 energy tariffs

The work has had huge social value – benefitting millions of UK consumers, particularly those on lower incomes who would be disproportionately affected and vulnerable customers. It has also delivered significant commercial benefits to the public purse and protected taxpayer money – a project the firm is proud to be part of.

Solent Freeport was shortlisted as one of just eight successful English freeport bids in March 2021. Getting through the bid phase was a huge achievement. But the most challenging phase of the project was still to come – turning the ‘big picture’ vision into a fully operational entity, with the critical legislation in place and funding approved. Only then could the Freeport start unlocking the private investment that would deliver billions of pounds of GVA and thousands of jobs for the Solent region.

KPMG’s proven reputation as one of the UK’s leading teams on growth related infrastructure initiatives and freeport projects, saw the firm appointed to turn the vision into reality. 

Working with a joint private and public sector task force, including six local authorities, the Solent LEP, and multiple other organisations, the firm played a central role in helping the Solent Freeport secure the necessary approvals and legislative cover to become one of the first UK freeports to go live in December 2022.

Several key parts of the strategy KPMG designed and implemented are now recognised as best practice. In this way, the evidence base KPMG developed has enabled Solent to lead the charge for other UK freeports and drive the success of the sector as a whole.

Among the many innovative strategies developed by KPMG were: 

• New local ‘dual key’ public/private governance procedures for decisions on re-investing c£500m in business rate retention receipts over 25 years
• Demonstrating economic linkages and tax site contiguity across the Southampton Water to allow the Solent’s proposed tax site there, spread across four landholdings and 10km, to be approved as a single tax site. This allowed the Solent’s proposition to comply with the maximum three tax sites rule all freeports were required to comply with.
• Developing legally binding agreements between the freeport, local authorities, and landowners to ensure designated tax sites genuinely created additional, high value economic activity. This addressed one of the principal criticisms of freeport-type interventions, which is that they simply reroute economic activity and investment from elsewhere.
• Developing the evidence base to convince government of the need to extend the time window for freeport tax reliefs from 5 to 10 years. 

Making the case for these solutions required a rigorous, detail-oriented approach. KPMG devoted months to devising new approaches to make compelling arguments and challenge scepticism within UK Government. Its expert team drew on its considerable experience, including work within HM Treasury and on several other freeport and government infrastructure projects, to liaise effectively with the client and the government.

The firm maintained a strong relationship with client stakeholders throughout, helping them understand the government’s perspective and negotiate their differing priorities to reach a consensus. It faced a particularly difficult prospect in persuading several different local authorities to pool their retained business rates within the Solent Freeport. But working with Portsmouth, the freeport’s accountable body, and the authorities themselves, KPMG successfully convinced them it was in their collective interests to pool the money so it could be spent more strategically.

Despite concluding its initial role in the Solent Freeport ‘set-up’ phase in December 2022, KPMG continued to support the Solent during its post-designation ‘operational’ phase, including on critical questions relating to the use of retained business rates and the defrayal of Seed Capital funding.

Grain-to-glass sustainability is integral to Diageo’s strategy. As part of this ambition, the company wanted to take human-rights management beyond its Tier 1 suppliers; and embed zero waste to landfill (ZWtL) practices into its supply chain for the first time.

KPMG’s sustainability experts worked with Diageo to analyse human-rights issues further down the supply chain; and encourage suppliers to embrace ZWtL. Our multi-phase programme comprised:

1. Stakeholder engagement 

• To develop a clear picture of Diageo’s current supply chain, and gather internal and external stakeholders’ views and insights.
  

2. Human Rights assessment, prioritisation and implementation

• A risk assessment to methodically identify the salient human-rights issues in the supply chain
• A prioritisation strategy based on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs)
  
• A grievance and remediation process and governance structure for addressing human rights issues in the supply chain
  
• A human-rights supplier training programme
  

The human rights strand of the project identified 55 salient issues across 15 procurement categories – enabling Diageo to focus its efforts for maximum impact.

3. ZWtL assessment, prioritisation and implementation

• A global assessment of the potential carbon-saving opportunities from waste reduction in Diageo’s supply chain
  
• A robust definition of supply chain ZWtL
  
• A global implementation plan for the ZWtL programme, tailored to the needs of different procurement categories and suppliers
  

Our supply chain ZWtL work covered more than a third of Diageo’s multi-billion-dollar annual spend. It has the potential to remove 183 million kg of carbon from the firm’s supply chain.

Sustainability is a long-term goal: the true impact of our programme will be felt in 5-10 years’ time. But we’ve already helped Diageo make significant progress towards its ambitions.