Too many companies take a short-term view in their annual CSR
statements, according to the judges of this year’s UK Sustainability
Reporting Awards.
The 17-strong judging panel, which last month awarded Vodafone the top
honour, says this year’s entries are of a ‘good standard’, but that
there has been no significant general improvement over the year.
The judges say this is largely because companies have failed to
advance the boundaries of reporting by looking at the longer term
impacts of their operations. ‘The core problem was that reports needed
to focus on the long term strategy that organizations are employing
from a sustainable development perspective, and any barriers that may
hinder this,’ they say.
Many large companies looked only at their operations on an annual basis
and failed to recognize some of their products and services as
‘inherently unsustainable’, the panel said. ‘Truly valuable’
sustainability documents would outline both short-term and long-term
strategies, it added. Vodafone, which details its CSR strategy for the
next five years in its report, was singled out as one of the few
looking to the long term.
The panel, which included Jayn Harding, head of CSR at FTSE Group, Mike
Kelly, UK head of CSR at KPMG, and Peter Michaelis, head of SRI at
Morley Fund Management, also noted that the companies – with the
exception of Anglo American and BT – were not considering their
economic impacts in sufficient detail.
Assurance statements needed to be written so that lay readers could
understand them, and overall the reports could have been clearer and
more concise. Too many were ‘laboriously long and, as a result, not
particularly useful’. Among the exceptions to this were those from BT
and Guardian Newspapers, with the latter also praised as one of the few
entrants exploring the negative as well as the positive aspects of its
products.
The latest awards have just one overall reporting category rather than
the three – social, environmental and sustainability – used in
previous years, in recognition of ‘the trend towards more integrated
reporting across the environmental, social and economic dimensions of
performance’.
The
short list of 19 companies for the latest North American Sustainability
Reporting Awards include Alcan, Bristol-Myers Squibb, General Electric,
Hewlett-Packard, Nexen, Starbucks and Timberland. There were 102
entries this year. The final winners will be announced in April by the
Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, which also runs the UK
awards.
