Reaffirming a commitment to supporting millions of public service workers

UHR today reaffirms its commitment to supporting millions of public service workers through partnership with other professional bodies. The renewed partnership with the Chartered Institute of Professional Development (CIPD), Health People Managers Association (HPMA), and Public Services People Managers Association (PPMA) will help develop a strong people profession to support the UK’s public service organisations.

UHR has renewed its Memorandum of Understand (MOU) with three professional bodies all committed to developing and nurturing a strong, diverse and high-performing people profession to support nearly six million people employed in the UK’s public service organisations.

UHR has been collaborating with the CIPD, HPMA, and PPMA since 2018. The renewed partnership is set to continue positively shaping the future of the people profession until April 2028.

The renewed partnership will see the four bodies working together to:

• advocate for important workforce issues
• enhance talent development, workforce solutions and service delivery
• facilitate networking and knowledge-sharing at regional events
• support each other's conferences, content, and research programmes
• address public policy consultations and media issues with a unified public service stance.

Helen Scott, Executive Director of UHR, said: 

"Reflecting over the period of collaboration to this point, we can’t help but remember that the pandemic brought a sense of crisis to public services and a testing of every process, including our people-based ones. Having this group of fellow practitioners to work with, during bad times and good, can only strengthen our solutions as we work together on shared problems. This collaborative learning adds significantly to us all and gives us additional confidence that we can face the cross-sector challenges of today and indeed tomorrow – career development and talent pipelines, AI and more - with broad-based and well-developed learning that facilitates transfer between the sectors.”

Gordon McFarlane, President of PPMA, said: 

“I’m delighted that the PPMA will be continuing to work in partnership with the CIPD, HPMA and UHR. We have had a number of successful joint webinars and events over the last few years, and we’re actively exploring ways that through working together, we can add value to the HR profession through networking, developing talent as well as further joint events.”

Nicky Ingham, Chief Executive of the HPMA, said:

“The HPMA team and I are so thrilled to be continuing our partnership with CIPD, UHR, and PPMA. This collaboration has supported the evidence-based practice for all of our members across the organisations and raised the profile of public service as an employer of choice and for our people profession. We have achieved a sharing of knowledge, experience, and practice which supports collaboration across the system, and I cannot wait to see what we can achieve in the future.”