Today we are taking part in this year’s Employee Ownership Day as we celebrate our 40^th year of being employee owned. We invite you to look back at our long history and celebrate our achievements as we reflect on the ethos, vision, and values instilled in the company by our founder, Philip Baxendale.

Our company was established in 1866 in Chorley, Lanarkshire by Richard Baxendale as a family-owned foundry, manufacturing railway carriages and gas lit lampposts. By the 1930’s the company evolved and ultimately became Europe’s leading manufacturer of heating boilers with the iconic Baxi Boiler.

The company was transferred into employee ownership by Philip Baxendale and his cousin, John Castleton in 1983 with the creation of the Baxi Partnership Trust. The creation of the trust was the culmination of years of research by Philip Baxendale and reflected the distillation of his thoughts based on his research and extensive conversations with other leaders in the field of employee ownership. His intention was to enable the employees to keep the business independent and allow them to share in the wealth they helped to create.

Philip believed that innovation and reinvestment would benefit subsequent generations of employee owners and such strategies were essential in ensuring the business would go from strength to strength. The principles of shared ownership and capital growth underpinned Philip’s thinking around providing a financial return to the current generation of owners whilst building a solid foundation for future employees.

Philip’s wish to ensure future employees were beneficiaries of the trust was enshrined in Baxi Partnership’s deed of trust: making it clear that the company should not be run solely for the benefit of its current generation of employees but also for the next generation, ensuring the business’ long-term success in employee ownership.

In 2000, the original trust deed was strengthened and enshrined in perpetuity by the Baxi Partnership Trusts Act 2000. To our knowledge, we are the only employee-owned company in the UK whose formation and aims are underpinned by an Act of Parliament created solely for that purpose.

In the same year, having sold its manufacturing activities, the company moved into capital funding and consultancy services with the name Baxi Partnership. The business specialised in supporting mutual and employee ownership, carrying on the vision of Philip Baxendale; and it is from this consultancy business that Baxendale Employee Ownership was born.

At Baxendale Employee Ownership, our employee ownership story and Philip Baxendale’s legacy provides both our vision and our purpose.  Our aim is to help business’ become employee owned with good governance structures in place and the ability for employees to have a say in the business they help create. We believe in employee ownership as a long-term stable solution to ownership succession and we believe in the power of employees to make a difference.

Our support for other businesses to become independently employee owned sees thousands of employees across the UK benefiting from the opportunity to contribute to their company as an owner and to benefit from their rights of ownership in the way that works for them.

We are employee owners working together for employee-owned businesses.