Freedom Upgraded to IIP Bronze - 22 February 2010

We are very pleased to announce that following a nine month programme and then re-assessment we have achieved IIP status at Bronze level.

There are three awards (Bronze, Silver and Gold) beyond the Standard and organisations that achieve this status represent the top 1% of recognised Investors in People.

The team was led by Richard Harris, Spice's Group Services Director and the "Champions" for the duration of the exercise were: Michelle Clay, Joanne Sexton, Mark Lowe, Jane Bloomfield, Vanita Parmar, Brian Guest, Shane Stook, Kate Abbott, Debra Armitage and Christine Shaw. Head Office support came from Sarah Kelly and Ed Brown. All put in a substantial amount of work to ensure the achievement of the Bronze award.

We would like to thank everyone for all their hard work in achieving the standard and well done to everyone involved in the process.

Having achieved the standard we still have a long way to go and will be preparing a people plan in order to reach the next stage. Our recent acquisitions need to be looked at and incorporated into an action plan which will be rolled out. This will involve communicating with people to ensure that they are aware of the company's values, beliefs, ethics and feel apart of the Group.

Investor in People feedback helps us to gauge and improve our performance through better employee engagement, providing us with a framework for continuous improvement and giving us a sharper competitive edge.

We are committed to developing our people and hope that we can improve upon the areas that have been highlighted.

Wayne Hayes Managing Director of Freedom Group stated "This is the reward for the work put in by every single employee of Freedom, but special thanks has to go to the Champions, whose work on this project was additional to their own workload, we will continue to develop and look forward to adding to this prestige status in the future."