LONDON – May 19, 2025 – Gate One, the digital business transformation consultancy within Havas, today announced that three of its client projects have been shortlisted at the MCA Awards 2025, featuring amongst 50 finalist firms, backed by leading 100 clients.
These awards celebrate the achievements in management consulting that drive innovation and growth across numerous business sectors, both in the UK and internationally. This year’s awards highlight the vital role of consulting in shaping the future of industries, businesses, and public services and helping clients drive innovation and growth across the UK and the world. Among the finalists, 50% are SMEs, highlighting the diverse expertise in digital technology, artificial intelligence, and people management advisory services across the UK’s consulting industry.
Gate One was shortlisted as a finalist in the following categories:
Social Value
MOPAC and Gate One re-design service delivery models to be victim-centric and needs-led to adequately support victims/survivors of sexual violence in London
- The Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) is responsible for supporting victims of crime and specifically commissions support services for victims/survivors of sexual violence. However, these services faced significant strain with long waiting lists for emotional and practical support. This galvanized MOPAC to collaborate with its service providers to assess and improve service delivery, aiming to transform the service to be victim-centric and needs-led with equitable access for all.
- Gate One supported them on this journey by conducting 35 trauma-informed interviews, 40 surveys and 7 focus groups directly with victims/survivors to give them a solid understanding of what support was needed. Armed with that knowledge, they could then help MOPAC to take that insight and improve the services they were commissioning. Increased service diversity was informed by victim feedback and future services will offer shorter waiting lists, timely support, diverse provision, and smoother recovery journeys.
- Gate One’s bespoke capacity and demand model enabled MOPAC to deduce what choices could be made within the funding envelope, whilst providing an evidence base to lobby government for increased funding.
Read more about the work here.
People and Leadership
Gate One overhauls training curriculum to transform the North Central London Integrated Care Board workforce, enhancing capability and staff morale
- Following a restructure, the North Central London Integrated Care Board (NCL ICB) needed to enhance its transformation portfolio. They set three key objectives: simplify and standardize the workforce’s approach to transformation, develop a continuous improvement culture, and address low staff morale by investing in learning and development.
- Gate One was appointed to design and deliver a capability development programme, and over 9 weeks, 72 NCL ICB employees participated in a four-module training course, the first of its kind for the organisation. This resulted in several benefits for the NCL ICB:
- Enhanced staff capability and confidence, equipping them with practical skills to deliver impactful change
- Eight ‘Trainers’ graduating with the ability to train the workforce, ensuring long-term sustainability
- Streamlined learning resources, reducing tools and templates from 130 to 30, ensuring clarity and efficiency
- A capability assessment tool for managers to quickly identify development areas for their team members
- Empowered internal leadership through a ‘train the trainer’ model, reducing dependency on external consultants
- Improved employee engagement and morale with a tailored learning and development programme
- Saving North Central London (NCL) approximately £1.325m over 2 years by taking this in-house.
Read more about the work here.
Technology Transformation
Gate One supports Premier Inn (Whitbread), Europe’s largest budget hotel chain, with booking platform transformation to enable future growth
- Whitbread needed to replace its ageing Premier Inn booking platform handling over £2 billion in revenue annually, a challenging technology transformation of huge scale, but with minimal impact to its online customers.
- Gate One was engaged as the trusted transformation advisor for the programme, and was tasked with:
- Helping Whitbread to retire the 40-year-old system that was deeply embedded
- Manage the migration and change management of transferring all 900 hotels from the old platform to the new.
- Drive the Project Management Office (PMO), leading the development and delivery of training 15,000 employees on the new platform.
- In 18 months, Gate One contributed to Premier Inn’s continued growth and operation by revolutionising an aging end-to-end technology stack improving business processes and automation. This has also laid the foundations for future changes and initiatives and is held up as the single best example of a successful business transformation programme, and therefore the governance, approach and structures are now embedded in all future change programmes at Whitbread.
Read more about the work here.
At Gate One, we tackle your toughest challenges and accelerate your boldest ambitions. Our mission is to deliver meaningful change.
