The jewellery group Signet has appealed for patience from institutional investors over claims that it is not acting quickly enough to introduce a policy on labour standards.
The Local Authority Pension Fund Forum (LAPFF), which represents 26 UK local authorities with some £45billion ($65bn) in combined assets, has registered its concern at the ‘slow progress’ it claims is being made by Signet on adopting a policy statement. The company was targeted by LAPFF last year as part of its campaign to improve labour standards, and although the forum later said it was satisfied with the group’s commitments to produce a policy, it now thinks Signet is taking too long to produce one.
‘It’s disappointing that the company has not been able to give a time-scale for adopting a policy statement on employment standards or even to set out how their work on this issue is proceeding,’ said Greg Vincent, LAPFF vice-chairman.
However, Signet says it is not easy to identify the sources of raw and processed materials such as diamonds and gold from Australia, Botswana, Canada, Russia and South Africa, because it mostly buys these on commodity exchanges.
‘Clearly there is a lot of work to do across a wide range of different initiatives but it’s a question of doing it properly,’ said company secretary Tim Jackson. ‘We want to take our time and do it well rather than rushing in and doing it poorly.
‘In terms of a formal code we’ve been doing a lot of work in this area over the last 18 months and have been working with one of the big five consultancies to look not just at labour standards but the whole social, ethical and environmental area. We want to benchmark what we’ve already got in place and to identify areas we need to improve upon. This is an area where we take our responsibilities very seriously.’
Signet owns 1604 jewellery stores, of which 999 are in the US and 605 are in the UK, where it trades as H Samuel, Ernest Jones and Leslie Davis.
Earlier this year the group set up a social, ethical and environmental policy committee, headed by Jackson, which reports to the board of directors.