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.’
