We want to be fair and consistent in our relationship with our accredited organisations and get the balance right between being friendly and approachable whilst ensuring we take steps where required to uphold the robustness of the accreditation itself. We are committed to being polite and fair in all our communications with stakeholders.
Our commitment for applications is to process them within 10 working days. If we have any queries about your application, we will email the contact provided on the application. If we do not hear anything back after one month, we will assume you do not wish to continue with the application and delete it from our system. You can start an application and work on it over a period of time, and we will reach out to offer help. After three months, if there has been no engagement with us, and the application has not been submitted, we will assume you do not wish to continue with it and delete it from our system.
We will endeavour to respond to any queries within 5 working days. We have a responsibility to uphold the accreditation and where there are concerns raised about your accreditation, we will be fair and reasonable in how we investigate those concerns. We reserve the right to suspend your accreditation during investigation and revoke it where we believe the 10 components or the spirit behind the Good Business Charter have not been adhered to.
Where renewal or payment is not done promptly, we will need to revoke the accreditation in line with our prompt payment ‘values’, or where emails related to this do not receive a response, we again will need to terminate the accreditation in the absence of any engagement with us. It is in your best interest that we take this approach to each individual organisation so that we have confidence that those that are accredited are committed to the Good Business Charter.
Our Expectations
You will apply in good faith and answer the questions honestly about your organisation and comply with the terms of the licence to use our logo if your application is successful.
You will let us know if you are no longer able to commit to one or more of the components.
You will place our logo on your website – this is a key part of ensuring the robustness of the accreditation – ultimately it is the public and other organisations that will want to give you their business as a GBC signatory, but also to hold you to account that you are complying with the GBC’s standards.
You will respond to our emails where there are queries about your accreditation. You will engage with us in order to assess compliance and embedding and to discuss support needed and/or impact and good practice.
You will let us know if there is a change of contact for the person responsible for your organisation’s accreditation.
You will renew before or on the anniversary of your accreditation. Please note that after 7 days have passed, your application will be archived and you will need to start a new application and pay the sign-up fee again to achieve accreditation.
Pay your invoice promptly in line with your Prompt Payment commitment – we are a small charity and our payment terms are 30 days.
Raising a concern or complaint
If you have a concern about an accredited organisation, we want to hear from you. Please use this form and supply as much information as possible.
If you have a concern or complaint about the GBC team, again we want to hear from you to understand where we have let you down and what we can do to resolve it. Please email jherrera@goodbusinesscharter.com setting out your concerns.