NUS Services provides commercial services and support to member Unions, helping them to generate the income required to fund the vital welfare and education services that they offer to their students.

In the early 1980s, a number of Students’ Unions came together and formed a purchasing consortium to negotiate cheaper prices for barrels of beer. The purchasing consortium was highly successful, so much so that at one time NUS Services was the second biggest buyer of beer – after the army! Now based in Macclesfield and employing 60 staff, we negotiate contracts with a limited number of suppliers, and our 150 purchasing members collectively buy over £140m of products from them each year.

In addition we offer a range of professional consultancy services aimed at helping our member Unions develop their commercial services in the face of increasingly fierce competition. We also offer a range of marketing services for businesses to access the student market, including a range of entertainment and experience-based packages, consumer-facing promotions, and the NUS Extra & ISIC discount card.

The original ethical marketplace?
NUS Services is genuinely student-led. As a result, we have been heavily involved with the ethical and environmental issues of the day. We have had an active Ethical & Environmental Committee since 1994, and my position since 1996. In the early days we were focused on reacting to allegations against our suppliers and brands, including Bass, Nestle, Bacardi, PepsiCo, and more recently Coors and GSK. Over the last five years we have actively sought a more professional and proactive approach.

To this end we have developed a seven-step supplier assessment and development process. A potential new supplier first receives our Sound Sourcing Guide, which states what ethical and environmental standards we expect from all of our suppliers. We carry out an in-house ethical screening of the Company and ask them to complete our 160-question Ethical & Environmental Accreditation.

This majors on ethics, and has a transparent scoring system, so suppliers can see how their business is performing against our expectations. All suppliers completing the Accreditation receive a final score, which is converted into a University grade for them, from a First to a Clear Fail.  Certificates are posted out annually for effect. Although we give low-scoring suppliers a period of time to improve their score before we delist them, our poor performers should beware - we have recently introduced internal targets to improve our average supplier score from a 2:2 to a 2:1.

The remaining four steps apply to companies successful through our tender process. We have contractual break clauses relating to ethical & environmental issues in all of our contracts – we have never actually had to use them, other than as a convenient lever to get access to the correct people when we have needed to investigate allegations of bad practice. The fifth step is our supplier audit process. And the sixth step is our carrot, a novel reward scheme for our First-grade suppliers - Sound Ethical Choice - which is a free POS scheme in 100 Union shops drawing attention to the fact that the products have been made by ethically and environmentally responsible companies. The final step is constructive engagement.

To the table
As a Company, we are committed to constructive engagement over boycott. However, if our major shareholder, the NUS, passes boycott policy, we will adopt it as our policy too. So why have we chosen constructive engagement over boycott? It is our experience that we can achieve a lot more from within a commercial relationship than from outside it. As a small organisation, we punch above our weight, often succeeding in gaining access to senior managers within large transnational corporations where NGOs and trade unions have failed. This ability to gain access is not due to our purchasing power, our clout comes from a combination of factors:

• due to our democratic structures, our elected student volunteers can say that they represent some 4.5m students in further and higher education in the UK
• the mention of our ethical break clauses gives us leverage. For the big brands, being ‘thrown out by the NUS’ would certainly make the headlines
• being a student-led not-for-profit organisation, we can take decisions that the likes of Co-op and Tesco could not
• the student marketplace is a sexy one; students are both the consumers and decision-makers of the future.

So how do we use our influence constructively? It is probably best to illustrate through a recent example – our engagement with The Coca-Cola Company. About three years ago, a number of UK student groups started to campaign against the Coca-Cola allegations that a Colombian bottler colluded with paramilitaries to de-unionise the workforce, and accusations that an Indian bottler had taken more than its fair share of water from a communal aquifer.

Since then we have had fourteen formal meetings with the Company to question them over the allegations, and to challenge them on related policies and procedures. As we built up trust we were allowed access to senior personnel from Atlanta, and got an opportunity to ask questions to those directly in charge of policy. Whilst we did not directly facilitate sessions between the campaigners, trades unions, NGOs and the Company, we did regularly meet with both sides, bouncing ideas back and forth from side to side, ensuring that our assertions and recommendations were representative.

I cannot underestimate the importance of The Coca-Cola Company’s consistent willingness to engage with us and listen to us. As we went into our Annual Convention this year, there had been no definitive court case in relation to either of the issues, and the ongoing legal issues could have gone either way. Due to all the contradictory evidence, our Ethical & Environmental Committee chose not to draw judgement on the issues, instead letting shareholders make up their own minds from the evidence in our briefings. The Committee did recommend that Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) should not be ruled out of the tender process because we felt that the parent company had listened to us and had embraced some of our recommendations – important traits for ongoing dialogue. Both our Convention and NUS Conference voted for continued constructive engagement with the Company instead of boycott, and we have since entered into a new 3.5 year commercial deal with CCE.

Within the last month, in a highly significant ruling, a Court in Florida has thrown out the case against the Colombian bottler and parent company. Our engagement with the Company continues, and we are now in a strong position to continue to exert a constant pressure the Company, ensuring it maintains its rapid pace of progress in relation to ethical and environmental policy and practice.
jagombar@nussl.co.uk