EDI and Social Mobility Policy

We are called MT1L, short for More Than 1 Label. The name is a deliberate recognition that people, and the institutions they belong to, are not defined by a single label. They are complex, layered and shaped by many experiences at once, and we work within that complexity rather than reducing anyone to a category.

This is why, for us, equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) reach beyond any fixed set of characteristics. We are committed to fairness, to treating everyone with dignity and respect, and to meeting our responsibilities under the Equality Act 2010. Our commitment goes further than ticking a box or matching a label: it is about understanding people and organisations as they really are.

We do not treat EDI and social mobility as an isolated workstream or a one-off exercise. They are part of how we think, how we work and what we help organisations achieve, and they run through everything we do. Rather than adding inclusion at the end, we build it in from the start.

The VAT Framework guides everything we do, and EDI is embedded within it. The framework was itself shaped by EDI thinking. It asks not just whether something creates value, but questions such as “value, for whom?”: who is included, who might be left out, and who carries any risk.

By making those questions explicit, the framework helps surface assumptions, widen whose voice counts, and design change that works for the full range of people it affects.

This is grounded in lived professional experience. Our founder’s background spans inclusion, safeguarding and co-production, alongside wider work on fairness and participation. That experience is woven into the VAT Framework and into how we engage with organisations, which is why EDI and social mobility are embedded in everything we do rather than treated as a separate piece of work.

Social mobility matters to us, and we are deliberate about what we mean by it. We define social mobility as:

the process by which individuals receive genuine, fair to be equal opportunities to improve their socio-economic status, regardless of their starting point in life and the characteristics and experiences that shape their identity.

Our work is intended to help enable those outcomes. By helping organisations improve their cultures and their services, we support them to widen genuine opportunity, remove barriers, and make fairer outcomes more achievable for the people and communities they serve.

In practice, this means we aim to:

• keep asking “for whom?” throughout our work, so that value and fairness are considered together;
• see people and organisations in the round, rather than reducing them to a single label or category;
• work with, not just for, the people affected by a decision, drawing on co-production wherever we can;
• be informed by safeguarding and inclusion, taking care over who could be harmed or left out; and
• help organisations build cultures and services that are fairer, more inclusive and more trusted.

Inclusion includes how you experience this website. We aim to write in plain language and to design for accessibility, and every page offers a high-contrast “Simplified view” control so the site can be read in clear black and white. If you find anything difficult to use, please tell us so we can improve it.

This work is never finished. We keep listening, learning and improving, and we welcome challenge. If you have feedback on this policy or how we work, please email hello@mt1l.com.