Stephen Timms has become the UK’s CSR minister for a second time,
raising hopes that the post will regain some of the importance it has
lost in the past three years.
Timms, who resumed the role in the first cabinet reshuffle of Gordon
Brown’s premiership, is widely regarded as the most effective and
enthusiastic of the six ministers to have held the post since it was
created in 2000.
After he was shifted from the job in 2004, the prominence of corporate
responsibility within the government diminished, and the last two
incumbents – Malcolm Wicks and more recently Margaret Hodge –
introduced no major initiatives.
Timms’s brief embraces business investment, competitiveness, small
businesses and e-commerce, but he is also known to be personally
interested in corporate responsibility and SRI. In his previous tenure
between early 2002 and late 2004 he created the now ailing CSR Academy,
a government-sponsored body offering corporate responsibility skills
training. He also produced a global framework that committed Britain to
become a pioneer in the field and signed a bilateral agreement on CSR
with Italy. As pensions minister in 2000 he introduced a disclosure
regulation requiring pension funds to state their SRI stance.
Timms, MP for East Ham in London, held a cabinet position as chief
secretary to the Treasury before his recent move. He has also been
minister for pensions reform, financial secretary to the Treasury for
two terms, and school standards minister.
Before becoming an MP in 1994 he worked for 15 years in the
telecommunications and computing industry, first for Logica and then
for Ovum. He is a patron of the Christian Socialist Movement.
Timms has already emphasized that he will not take a regulatory
approach, stating recently that ‘the strength of the corporate social
responsibility movement is that it is business-led’.
His post is in the new Department for Business, Enterprise and
Regulatory Reform, which has replaced the Department of Trade and
Industry. The new ministry will have joint responsibility with the
Department for International Development on trade policy and will work
jointly with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to support UK
companies trading internationally. Both the Foreign Office and the
Department for International Development have taken a greater interest
in CSR during the past year.
Halina Ward, director of the Business and Sustainable Development
Programme at the International Institute for Environment and
Development, said that making competitiveness and corporate social
responsibility part of the same ministerial brief ‘sends positive
signals to business’. She added: ‘What we really need is a government
commitment to corporate responsibility that recognizes the importance
of eradicating the worst forms of exploitative business behaviour, not
only of encouraging good behaviour. We need to make harmful business
practices uncompetitive – not just make good practice competitive.’
