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.
