Celebrating B Corp Month and our continued commitment to the families and staff we work with

At Niche we are marking B Corp Month 2026 by acknowledging what it really means to run a business as a force for good.

Independence and integrity are at the heart of everything we do, and we remain dedicated to our mission to ‘safely surface the truth’ through our investigations, reviews and evaluations that are trusted by our clients and regulatory bodies nationally.  This March, we’re celebrating not only our achievements and impact as an organisation but looking back to the difference we have made over the past year.

In the year from 2024 to 2025 we completed a total of 58 projects, more than one a week, and an increase of more than a quarter on the previous year. By type of project, the single biggest proportion was investigations into serious incidents in mental health services, at 57% of our workload.

Some project highlights have included:

• Completion of a multi-year evaluation of the community mental health transformation programme, across all five boroughs in West Yorkshire. This project involved over 300 interviews, and analysis of data from a very wide range of primary and secondary care services.
• A substantial review of CAMHS for a private provider, stimulating and supporting a detailed and evidence-based review of organisational and commercial strategy.
• A review across several areas of England to understand the provision for young people with complex mental health needs. This review has taken into account national research and learning and best practice employed internationally. Supporting young minds is a vital area of healthcare delivery and one where effective early intervention matters.
• Support to the governance of two merger processes affecting four NHS Trusts in London, working to advise on post-merger organisational arrangements, and the details of a patient benefit case.
• Completion of an assurance review following an earlier investigation into inpatient mental health services for particularly vulnerable young people. This ‘closed the loop’ on the overall improvement process, by checking whether and how the provider had implemented the recommendations of our investigation report. We found that considerable progress had indeed been made in taking forward actions in response to our investigation, confirming the longer-term impact of our work.
• A major review of maternity and neonatal services in Swansea that took the evidence further in understanding data to support the ‘why it happened’ and not just the ‘what happened’ with a 360-degree perspective. The review took in the views of over 1,000 families and the most pronounced findings were around communication and how women felt unheard. Additionally, trauma was an incredibly important theme and far more women and birth partners experience trauma from pregnancy and childbirth than has been estimated.

In the last 12 months all our staff have participated in bespoke trauma training, and we are continuously working on how we can be more trauma informed in our reports and the information we provide to both families and staff through all stages of an investigation.

Over the last year we also have continued to reduce our carbon emissions and are on track to achieve Net Zero by 2050 as per our Carbon Reduction Plan (CRP). In the last 12 months our carbon emissions have fallen by 23% largely as a result of changing our electricity supply to a completely renewable tariff.

Looking ahead we are planning 2026 publications around suicide in young people and a long-planned guide to governance and tackling dysfunction.

The current government has commissioned several public inquiries, including a further maternity inquiry, and our goal is to continue to provide an alternative to lengthy and costly public inquiries, providing the same levels of accountability, but with significant advantages such as, not just looking backwards but looking forwards as well and focusing on how recommendations can be delivered and assured.

We remain one of only a very small handful of consultancy practices which are both an Employee-Owned Trust and B Corp and are acutely aware of our social and environmental impact of our work. Our B Corp certification confirms the social value of our work and the way we deliver it, and we are now preparing for our recertification in 2027.

Read our 2025 Impact Report here