One of the UK’s largest consultancies is to begin CSR reporting this year, but may not initially go public with the results.
Mott MacDonald, which has 7000 consultants working in 100 countries on
areas ranging from the environment to information technology, intends
to produce CSR reports for three of its 40-odd divisions by the middle
of this year.
But Mott MacDonald sustainability consultant Chris Davis, who is
co-ordinating the work, says the employee-owned company may keep the
results out of the public eye if they are felt to be too rudimentary.
‘The intention is that each of the reports should be for public
consumption, but we’re not actually committing ourselves to that
because we don’t know whether they will be satisfactory in terms of
completeness,’ said Davis. ‘We’ll just have to see what they look like
first.’
‘Our experience of what other companies have done shows that the first
CSR report is usually pretty average and the second one gets better.
‘The three reports from our units may be incomplete and have holes in
them, which will show us what we have to work on in the next year but
might not be useful in terms of putting in front of the public.’
Mott MacDonald has been collecting information relevant to CSR
reporting – including customer feedback, health and safety, and staff
satisfaction – for the past three years, and says it is now ‘ready to
benchmark and share the data with the wider world’.
It produced a one-page statement on corporate responsibility in its
2004 annual report and aims to begin producing a full, public, CSR
report for the group in 2007.
