In one of my previous sustainability roles, I ran the sustainable procurement program — with the aims of collecting carbon data from suppliers and getting them to set a science-based target. I sent sustainability questionnaires to my organization’s top suppliers by spend, and eagerly awaited responses.
One thing that really stuck with me was the response from a few of the smaller suppliers — essentially to the tune of: we are 10 people all working remotely, we don’t have to do any of this (I think referring to regulations), our impact is probably very small — please leave us be. The high spend threshold still caught several small suppliers.
At the time, my instinct was to try to convince them that it is important, and that they need to figure out their carbon footprint. After a few more years in the sustainability battlefield, and engaging much more closely with the SME world through my work on howtoesg.org, I’ve completely changed my mind. I will never bother a small supplier with a technical climate questionnaire again.
So if technical questionnaires aren’t the answer, what is the right approach for small suppliers today? Mostly it’s tracking (and encouraging growth in): number of SMEs, number of social enterprises, ownership diversity statistics, and sometimes targets against these stats.
Hiring small suppliers, supporting them to grow, and ensuring they continue to actively participate in all parts of the economy, in my view, is incredibly important. Nobody wants to live in a world where three or four MNCs run everything and provide all your services. It’s within our power, as the people writing procurement policies and signing contracts, to shape the world we want.
But just because a supplier is small, or is structured to be a social enterprise, doesn’t automatically mean it treats its employees well, purchases renewable electricity, and carries out business ethically.
So how do we more meaningfully identify and support the right kinds of small suppliers to grow and thrive, by giving them our business?
EcoVadis and B Corp for small suppliers?
The mainstream responsible business certifications and ESG ratings — EcoVadis and B Corp being the two most prominent ones — are credible frameworks doing important work. But they were designed primarily for mid-market and above, and even with the SME adaptations they’ve built in, they remain a significant internal undertaking.
EcoVadis has a dedicated “extra-small” tier for companies under 25 employees, with a simplified self-assessment questionnaire (on average 10 questions), plain-language tailoring, and a more flexible approach to evidence — a letter from the company head about emissions commitments can stand in for a formal environmental policy, for example.
The assessment is still document-heavy: companies upload supporting evidence for each question, with formatting and validity requirements. There’s an annual paid subscription. For a 200-person business, that’s probably manageable. For a five-person consultancy, possibly not.
B Corp has recently gone through the most significant change in its history. The new standards (V2, launched in 2025) replace the old 80-point flexibility with mandatory thresholds across seven Impact Topics — Purpose & Stakeholder Governance, Climate Action, Human Rights, Fair Work, Environmental Stewardship & Circularity, Justice Equity Diversity & Inclusion, and Government Affairs & Collective Action. There’s no more offsetting weak areas with strong ones; companies must meet baseline requirements in every topic.
For SMEs specifically, the new standards are tailored by size — micro companies are exempt from some specific due-diligence requirements, recognising their lower risk profile — but the underlying commitment has still materially increased. Companies must legally amend their corporate documents to adopt stakeholder governance. Larger companies need verified Scope 1 and 2 emissions and climate strategies; smaller ones get more time but the trajectory is the same.
None of this is a criticism of either framework. But it does mean that for a solo trader, a five-person consultancy, or a ten-person family business, the question of whether to pursue either certification is not just about the cost, but also “do we have the capacity to make the structural changes required, and is this the right use of our limited bandwidth?” For most of them, the answer is very likely to be no.
What social enterprise certification verifies
Many corporate procurement teams already have social enterprise sourcing targets. Buy Social commitments, supplier diversity programmes, and the broader push under the Procurement Act 2023 have made “spend with social enterprises” a tracked metric for a growing number of organizations.
But what does social enterprise certification actually verify? Social Enterprise UK’s criteria — the most common reference point in the UK — are essentially structural: a business needs a social or environmental mission in its governing documents, must reinvest the majority of its profits toward that mission, and must be controlled in the interest of that mission. SEUK verifies the structure. It checks that profit is channelled to a stated purpose. For businesses with turnover above £500k, much of the wider operational behavior is self-declared via a memorandum of understanding, with spot checks.
That’s important and meaningful. But it answers a different question from the one a corporate procurement team might be asking when it talks about “responsible suppliers.” “Is this business legally structured to channel profits to a mission?” is not the same question as “does this business treat its people well, source ethically, contribute meaningfully to its community, and behave responsibly across the board?” A social enterprise can be poorly run on those measures; a non-social-enterprise can be exemplary. The structural form and the behavioral reality aren’t the same thing.
It’s also worth noting that SEUK can’t certify sole traders or unincorporated businesses at all — which excludes a significant slice of the smallest end of the supplier market.
So perhaps there’s a gap here: small businesses doing genuinely good work — paying their people well, contributing to their communities, sourcing thoughtfully, refusing to compromise on ethics — for whom mainstream certifications are the wrong shape, and for whom social enterprise certification answers a different question. ORB is one organization operating in that space, and the rest of this piece introduces what it does, for sustainability practitioners who may not have come across it.
What is the Responsible Business Standard (RBS)?
The Organisation for Responsible Businesses (ORB) is a UK-based, member-owned, not-for-profit company limited by guarantee. It was co-founded in 2009 by Jill Poet, who remains CEO. In 2022, the founders gifted the organization to its members — partly to protect its purpose from acquisition interest from parties who wanted to use the platform to sell into larger businesses, and partly to lock the membership integrity into the constitution. The Articles of Association states the company’s purpose and details the membership application process. Any changes to the Articles now require a 75% member vote to change.
ORB’s flagship offer is the Responsible Business Standard (RBS), an ESG certification developed in conjunction with Anglia Ruskin University in 2011 and validated by the university at that time. Jill positions it as a B Corp alternative for small businesses — not a competitor at scale, but a certification designed from the ground up for businesses that B Corp’s framework wasn’t built for.
The certification covers six areas:
- workplace (where the business has employees),
- environment,
- marketplace,
- community,
- ethics & values & transparency, and
- business continuity.
Assessment involves two independent assessors. Certified businesses commit to a three-year development plan with annual reporting. Companies with more than five employees receive an onsite culture check visit as part of the process. A 6-week facilitated ESG course is mandatory prior to applying for the certification, which allows the organization to determine whether it’s ready, where any weaknesses might be, and whether the certification would actually be meaningful for the company.
It’s worth noting that certification doesn’t require the ORB member to measure their carbon emissions, as is appropriate for their size. So corporates can’t rely on RBS for supply chain carbon emissions data. The certification is designed to lay foundations for sustainable behavior as the business grows, rather than to produce technical climate data.
A distinctive feature of the framework is what ORB calls the ASTI approach: Appropriate to the Size, Type and Impact of the business. Rather than scaling a corporate framework down to fit a small business, ORB asks what good practice looks like for this size and shape of business specifically. It is this unique framing that makes the certification achievable for solo and micro operators without consultancy fees, while keeping the underlying rigor.
The other distinctive feature is the membership vetting. There’s a 3-stage application process: an online questionnaire, a commitment to the Members’ Pledge, and a 1-2-1 call with the owner or senior director to check values alignment, alongside light-touch due diligence on website, LinkedIn and Companies House. Jill is clear-eyed that if they automated the process, they’d have ten times the membership. But they wouldn’t have the same integrity, and from a corporate buyer’s perspective, it’s the part that gives the membership weight.
Pricing context, for reference: membership starts at £10/month. RBS certification for a sole trader / solo director is £375 every three years, plus £175 annual admin, plus membership and (for the first year) the facilitated ESG course. The full three-year cost lands around £1,350 — well below the first-year cost of B Corp for a micro business once consultancy is factored in.
Questions worth asking about ORB membership and the RBS certification
If you’re considering using ORB membership or RBS certification with your small suppliers, it’s worth applying the same scrutiny to it as I’ve applied to the mainstream frameworks earlier — that structural form and behavioral reality aren’t the same thing applies here too.
The first thing to be clear about is that ORB membership and RBS certification are two quite different levels of signal, and procurement teams should treat them differently.
ORB membership involves an online questionnaire, a commitment to the Members’ Pledge, a 1-2-1 call with the owner or senior director, and light due diligence on website, LinkedIn and Companies House. That’s a meaningful filter, and the 1-2-1 call is a unique vetting step that automated processes can’t replicate. But of course it’s not an audit. A values-aligned founder on a call can’t guarantee how a business behaves with a freelancer six months later, or how it handles a difficult client, or whether its environmental commitments translate into operational decisions. Membership is best taken as a credible signal of values alignment.
RBS certification is a different proposition. An evidence-based submission, two independent assessors, a three-year development plan with annual reporting, a culture check visit for businesses with more than five employees, and a mandatory pre-certification course. That’s broadly equivalent in spirit to B Corp, even if the methodology is different.
A reasonable question we could ask is: could a corporate team get to a similar place as ORB membership themselves, with their own values questionnaire and a call? Probably yes, to some degree — but they’d be running that process for every supplier individually, designing the criteria themselves, and trusting their own (likely non-specialist) interpretation. ORB’s value as an aggregator is that it’s done this consistently across a vetted pool of around 250 members, against criteria that are publicly stated. For RBS certification, the answer is more clearly no — most procurement teams aren’t going to commission two independent assessors and a culture check on a small supplier.
What happens when a member’s behavior doesn’t hold up? Protecting the integrity of the membership is clearly important to ORB. There is a Report Inaccurate Content button on every member’s profile page, which allows third parties to register complaints. ORB also makes their contact details easy to find, in order to enable anyone to make direct contact by email or phone to register a complaint, anonymously if required.
Jill says that in sixteen years there have only been four complaints about members, two of which were upheld and the memberships immediately cancelled. After full investigations, the other two complaints were found to be invalid and the memberships retained.
It is also essential that the annual development update is submitted within a reasonable time frame. If not, that could invalidate certification. However, when reports are submitted, progress is viewed with ORB’s usual pragmatic approach. If targets have not been met, they will ask for reasons and help the company get back on track. But an element of slippage is not in itself reason to cancel certification providing some progress is being made. Importantly, ORB works closely in alignment with the assessors’ report, which ensures that the initial three-year development plan is realistic. ORB believes that aiming for attainable small steps is a more effective approach than big leaps that may not be feasible.
Three ways ORB could help procurement and sustainability teams
There are three ways a corporate sustainability or procurement team could utilize ORB. They scale by ambition and integration depth, and they’re not mutually exclusive.
1. Sourcing: use the directory to find vetted small suppliers. The ORB members’ directory is searchable, and members have already been through the 3-stage vetting. For service-category spend in the UK — marketing, training, consulting, design, professional services, where most of the long tail tends to sit — this is a practical route to identifying small suppliers who have a credible third-party signal of values alignment, without you having to design your own vetting framework from scratch, or relying on one that isn’t quite as meaningful or holistic. Additionally, a high percentage of ORB members are founded by people from marginalized groups, which links conveniently to existing supplier diversity programs.
2. Recognition: encourage existing small suppliers to join. At a starting point of £10/month, ORB membership is low-friction enough that suggesting it to existing small suppliers doesn’t feel coercive in the way that asking them to pursue B Corp might. For the supplier, membership gives them a community and a structure they probably don’t have access to otherwise. For you, it gives a third-party-validated signal across a tranche of suppliers without you running the vetting yourself. This is probably the most realistic entry point for most corporates — light-touch, low-cost, and meaningful if your supplier base contains the kind of small businesses ORB’s vetting catches.
3. Encouraging a higher bar: support strategic small suppliers to pursue RBS certification. For the small suppliers you want to retain and develop — the ones who consistently deliver, who you’d struggle to replace, who genuinely embody what you want your supplier base to look like — supporting them to pursue Responsible Business Standard certification is a more substantive commitment. Some corporates already fund or part-fund B Corp processes for key suppliers. RBS is the equivalent for businesses where B Corp is the wrong shape. This is where the social value reporting gets most meaningful: a certified supplier with an active three-year development plan and two independent assessors behind it is a meaningfully different proposition from a self-declared one.
Is ORB right for your procurement team?
It is great for: UK-headquartered corporates with a meaningful long tail of UK-based small service suppliers; organisations with existing social value or supplier diversity commitments looking to add substance and verification beyond self-declaration; firms asking harder questions about what “responsible sourcing” actually means in the SME tier.
It’s less of a fit for: global supply chains where the long tail sits outside the UK; product-heavy supply chains where the small suppliers are overseas manufacturers; corporates whose social value reporting is already deeply embedded in a different framework where adding another layer might create more noise than signal.
The 250-member figure is also worth noting. For a UK procurement team sourcing in common service categories — marketing, training, consulting, design — that’s a workable pool to draw from. For more specialist categories or for buyers with very large supplier bases, the directory may only be supplementary.
What this changes in how I’d approach the long tail
Carbon questionnaires aren’t the right tool for a tier of suppliers who don’t have the data, the framework, or the resources to respond meaningfully.
But that doesn’t mean the long tail is irrelevant to your sustainability story. It means the conversation needs to be about the things small businesses can speak to with credibility — how they treat their people, what they contribute to their communities, whether their ethics hold up under scrutiny, whether they’re representative of the kind of economy we want to be building.
ORB is one structured way to have that conversation, and it’s worth knowing about as a resource even if you decide it’s not the right fit for your context. There may be others operating in similar spaces too. The broader point is that perhaps the long-tail supplier conversation in most corporate sustainability programs could use a rethink.
