Distribution Network
Content
The UK Conservative Party has formed a steering group to develop a formal corporate responsibility policy.
The five-strong group, chaired by Alan Duncan, shadow trade and industry secretary, will seek the views of businesses, NGOs and other interested parties with a view to making recommendations before June 2007. Its deliberations will inform the party’s manifesto and are likely to focus on incentives to encourage companies to take greater account of their social and environmental responsibilities.
David Cameron, the party’s leader, has already announced that the Conservatives will not countenance regulation in this area. He told delegates at Business in the Community’s annual conference last month that companies with a solid social and environmental record might be exempted from certain regulations, but did not specify what these might be.
‘Businesses that have publicly signed up to a commitment to responsible business practices would enjoy a lighter-touch regulatory enforcement regime,’ he said. ‘The same rules would apply to them as to all businesses, but the presumption [would be] that they are in conformity unless proven otherwise.’
He said companies that have taken the lead on corporate responsibility ‘have manifestly not done so as the result of a regulatory regime’, and that the Conservatives should therefore examine ‘what considerations have incentivized these companies’ and ‘how these incentives can be built upon to provide a similar spur to others’.
A short background paper on CSR produced by the party last month says they need to develop their policy in this area because ‘since the party was last in power, the issue of corporate responsibility has moved firmly to centre stage’. It says the steering group must look at ‘how CSR issues will inform the party’s wider agenda’.
The paper reiterates previous comments made by Cameron that the Conservatives must shed their image of being soft on big business and become a ‘critical friend to the corporate sector’, standing up to companies that behave irresponsibly. As well as looking at incentives, the party should concentrate on how to help companies to integrate CSR into their operations and highlight the business risks of corporate irresponsibility, it adds.
Peter Frankental, economic relations programme director at Amnesty International, said the talk of incentives ‘is positive insofar as it would require companies to internalize more of the costs that they impose on society’. But he warned the party appeared to be ‘falling at the first hurdle’ by opposing key clauses in the Company Law Reform Bill (see page three).
Jonathan Djanogly, shadow trade and industry minister, David Grayson, director of Business in the Community, and Peter Davis and Tobias Webb, staff members of Ethical Corporation magazine, will be on the steering group that the shadow trade and industry secretary will chair. The composition of the group was ‘surprising in its omissions’, according to business and sustainable development analyst Halina Ward.
She added: ‘The idea that good performers could receive light touch regulatory treatment is not new: it’s familiar from the environmental policy arena, where it remains highly contested.’
see guest column, page four
The five-strong group, chaired by Alan Duncan, shadow trade and industry secretary, will seek the views of businesses, NGOs and other interested parties with a view to making recommendations before June 2007. Its deliberations will inform the party’s manifesto and are likely to focus on incentives to encourage companies to take greater account of their social and environmental responsibilities.
David Cameron, the party’s leader, has already announced that the Conservatives will not countenance regulation in this area. He told delegates at Business in the Community’s annual conference last month that companies with a solid social and environmental record might be exempted from certain regulations, but did not specify what these might be.
‘Businesses that have publicly signed up to a commitment to responsible business practices would enjoy a lighter-touch regulatory enforcement regime,’ he said. ‘The same rules would apply to them as to all businesses, but the presumption [would be] that they are in conformity unless proven otherwise.’
He said companies that have taken the lead on corporate responsibility ‘have manifestly not done so as the result of a regulatory regime’, and that the Conservatives should therefore examine ‘what considerations have incentivized these companies’ and ‘how these incentives can be built upon to provide a similar spur to others’.
A short background paper on CSR produced by the party last month says they need to develop their policy in this area because ‘since the party was last in power, the issue of corporate responsibility has moved firmly to centre stage’. It says the steering group must look at ‘how CSR issues will inform the party’s wider agenda’.
The paper reiterates previous comments made by Cameron that the Conservatives must shed their image of being soft on big business and become a ‘critical friend to the corporate sector’, standing up to companies that behave irresponsibly. As well as looking at incentives, the party should concentrate on how to help companies to integrate CSR into their operations and highlight the business risks of corporate irresponsibility, it adds.
Peter Frankental, economic relations programme director at Amnesty International, said the talk of incentives ‘is positive insofar as it would require companies to internalize more of the costs that they impose on society’. But he warned the party appeared to be ‘falling at the first hurdle’ by opposing key clauses in the Company Law Reform Bill (see page three).
Jonathan Djanogly, shadow trade and industry minister, David Grayson, director of Business in the Community, and Peter Davis and Tobias Webb, staff members of Ethical Corporation magazine, will be on the steering group that the shadow trade and industry secretary will chair. The composition of the group was ‘surprising in its omissions’, according to business and sustainable development analyst Halina Ward.
She added: ‘The idea that good performers could receive light touch regulatory treatment is not new: it’s familiar from the environmental policy arena, where it remains highly contested.’
see guest column, page four
Super Featured
No
Featured
No