Distribution Network
Content
Malcolm Wicks, the UK’s CSR minister, has retained his corporate
responsibility brief in the recent government reshuffle despite some
discontent about the amount of time he spends on that part of his
portfolio.
In the May reshuffle, Wicks kept the CSR brief along with energy, sustainability and the environment, nuclear security and export control. He also acquired a new boss – Alistair Darling, who replaced Alan Johnson as trade and industry secretary.
Of the five ministers who have held the CSR brief since its inception in 2000, (EP1, issue 11, p1) Wicks has kept by far the lowest profile on corporate responsibility, despite having held the post for a year. None of his eight key speeches posted on the Department of Trade and Industry website since he came into office has been about CSR, and he is rarely seen at corporate responsibility events.
A senior corporate responsibility specialist told EP: ‘Malcolm just seems to be bored by CSR. I saw him at a recent event and he looked like a man who wished he was somewhere else. He said some words with about as little emotion as you could imagine, then disappeared. It struck me how much of a contrast he was to predecessors such as Kim Howells and Stephen Timms, who showed real enthusiasm for the subject.’
A senior Labour politician with a longstanding interest in CSR added: ‘It was noticeable at the UK government’s European Union presidency conference on CSR that Malcolm, who is, after all, the CSR minister, came for only a short spell, while Stephen Timms, who didn’t need to be there at all, spent the whole evening talking to people. While you felt that Timms owned the agenda when he was CSR minister, I’m not sure that Malcolm is engaged by the subject at all.
‘Of course he has big issues to deal with on the energy front, but he really has shown little interest in corporate responsibility. I’m simply not bumping up against him in CSR fora all the time as I did with some of his predecessors. With Douglas Alexander and Stephen Timms, CSR was a central element of their portfolio and I used to have meetings with them on a regular basis, which is not the case with Malcolm. I would have welcomed a new CSR minister in the reshuffle as an opportunity to get things going again.’
Critics also say that the civil servants with whom Wicks now works appear to regard CSR as less of a priority.
Mark Goyder, director of the Tomorrow’s Company think-tank, said Wicks could readily improve the government’s CSR credibility by looking to its own operations. ‘The most important thing Mr Wicks could do is actually to get the government to practise CSR and not just to preach it.
‘There are all kinds of areas, such as procurement, supply chain management, and consistency of treatment of stakeholders, where the government’s CSR practice is rather embarrassing,’ he said.
The DTI denied that civil service cover on CSR had been reduced. Wicks had ‘undertaken a number of meetings and speaking engagements on CSR issues’ over the past year. One of his main achievements has been to increase financial support for the CSR Academy, the training provider, an official said.
In the May reshuffle, Wicks kept the CSR brief along with energy, sustainability and the environment, nuclear security and export control. He also acquired a new boss – Alistair Darling, who replaced Alan Johnson as trade and industry secretary.
Of the five ministers who have held the CSR brief since its inception in 2000, (EP1, issue 11, p1) Wicks has kept by far the lowest profile on corporate responsibility, despite having held the post for a year. None of his eight key speeches posted on the Department of Trade and Industry website since he came into office has been about CSR, and he is rarely seen at corporate responsibility events.
A senior corporate responsibility specialist told EP: ‘Malcolm just seems to be bored by CSR. I saw him at a recent event and he looked like a man who wished he was somewhere else. He said some words with about as little emotion as you could imagine, then disappeared. It struck me how much of a contrast he was to predecessors such as Kim Howells and Stephen Timms, who showed real enthusiasm for the subject.’
A senior Labour politician with a longstanding interest in CSR added: ‘It was noticeable at the UK government’s European Union presidency conference on CSR that Malcolm, who is, after all, the CSR minister, came for only a short spell, while Stephen Timms, who didn’t need to be there at all, spent the whole evening talking to people. While you felt that Timms owned the agenda when he was CSR minister, I’m not sure that Malcolm is engaged by the subject at all.
‘Of course he has big issues to deal with on the energy front, but he really has shown little interest in corporate responsibility. I’m simply not bumping up against him in CSR fora all the time as I did with some of his predecessors. With Douglas Alexander and Stephen Timms, CSR was a central element of their portfolio and I used to have meetings with them on a regular basis, which is not the case with Malcolm. I would have welcomed a new CSR minister in the reshuffle as an opportunity to get things going again.’
Critics also say that the civil servants with whom Wicks now works appear to regard CSR as less of a priority.
Mark Goyder, director of the Tomorrow’s Company think-tank, said Wicks could readily improve the government’s CSR credibility by looking to its own operations. ‘The most important thing Mr Wicks could do is actually to get the government to practise CSR and not just to preach it.
‘There are all kinds of areas, such as procurement, supply chain management, and consistency of treatment of stakeholders, where the government’s CSR practice is rather embarrassing,’ he said.
The DTI denied that civil service cover on CSR had been reduced. Wicks had ‘undertaken a number of meetings and speaking engagements on CSR issues’ over the past year. One of his main achievements has been to increase financial support for the CSR Academy, the training provider, an official said.
Super Featured
No
Featured
No