Rigorous, Credible,
and Robust

We deliver work that meets the standards of community scrutiny, legal review, planning inquiry and judicial review. We carry out our work and write our analyses with that in mind. Our medical and public health qualifications allow us to produce work that is rigorous, credible, robust, sensitive, in-depth and insightful.

Let’s Negotiate

We’re happy to negotiate and discuss what you would like from us, and how we can add value to you.

We don’t do discounts, unless you’re a long term client, or as a new client, you give us work across three years minimum.

We’re here to give you the highest quality work, that meets your objectives, aligns with your vision and values, and protects your reputation. Our experience, over the last 10 years, has shown us that new clients are best served without discounts.

We want to be your community, environmental, and public health expert of choice. We’re not here to make a quick buck and we know the value of our expertise so we don’t under-price them.

Health is not a Commodity

It’s easy to see population health as abstract, a commodity, weighing positives against negatives and going for overall benefits. A commodification of flora, fauna, and in particular, human health leads to poor choices, designs and decision-making. It’s what leads to community concern and protest, and the breakdown of trust and dialogue between communities, proponents and regulators.

Recognising that health is not a commodity means that health impact assessment, healthy urban design and healthy policy work creates policies, plans, projects and services that improve, and are perceived to improve, community health and wellbeing in an equitable way, long term.

Scope of Value
vs Scope of Work

We work with clients to make explicit the scope of value that clients are looking for. It’s often easy to develop a minimal scope of work, to save money short term, without thinking through the potential reputational, time and financial implications long term, This is especially the case when the issues is community health and their are regulatory bridges that need to be crossed for projects to get the green light.

Our experience is that in hindsight, clients often see the obvious but in the moment when their are objectives to be met, costs to be contained and delays to be overcome, issues and insights are missed when it comes to protecting, supporting and improving community health and wellbeing.

Three Value Options

We develop a Scope of Value not a Scope of Work. We believe clients should focus on the value we can create for them and not the cost. Cost without value is not useful for most clients and it’s what a traditional Fixed Cost Budget focuses on.

We develop Three Value Options for you at three different price points. They set out three different ways of working together to achieve the value you’re looking for.

Where your requirements change, after we have signed an agreement, and started work, then we’ll come back to you with a change request.

We build in short scope review meetings, at no extra cost to you, every week in Month 1, every fortnight in Months 2 and 3, and then monthly from Month 4 onwards.

Getting Appropriate Visible Credit

Our past experience, when working with some clients is that our consultancy’s and authors’ names do not appear in the final document.

We expect to have appropriate credit with the authors of other impact assessment reports.

Where no such authorship is displayed we expect a reasonably prominent statement that the project was done in partnership with Public Health by Design.

These should be searchable in the final electronic document.

Want a Fee Proposal To Test Current Market Prices

We know many organisations need to get three proposals, and prices, as part of their organisation’s standard operating procedure, or for regulatory reasons, to test value-for-money. We’re happy to provide an outline pricing proposal,

However, we’re not going to be the cheapest consultant, so if you have a preferred consultant in mind, and you’re just looking to drive down your costs, and their fees, then we aren’t the best option for you.

We’d recommend you go to medium and large-sized, all-in-one end-to-end, consultancies, as they can do loss-leader work, in order to get other, more high value, projects from you. Ring Salim if you want names of other consultancies that do health work.

Hourly Rate

We occasionally take on hourly rate-based work. We use this option for ad hoc, on demand, advice, support and guidance. Some clients also require an hourly rate for internal, and external, proposal development, when we are part of their proposal team.

When we do hourly billed work, we bill to the nearest 15min unless otherwise agreed.

Working Days

We work a 7 hour day, 09:00-17:00, with a 1 hour uncharged lunch break, 5 day week. We generally don’t work weekends or out of hours, unless this is a client requirement. Weekend and out of hours work is built into the scope, price and timeline of a project. We charge more for weekend and out of hours work, two times our weekday rates.

There is good evidence that a long hours working culture is not conducive to individual and team productivity, health and wellbeing. See World Health Organization and UK Government.