Government has proposed developing a voluntary set of metrics for businesses to use to report on their corporate social responsibility as part of a consultation into improving CSR more generally.
Launched just before this week’s Parliamentary inquiry into growing giving, which focused on corporate philanthropy and payroll giving, Liberal Democrat MP Jo Swinson announced the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills opening up a consultation into precisely how companies can be encouraged to engage more in positive action in their communities, and how they can better report on it.
The BIS consultation puts forward the business case for such activity and reportage: “Customers have increasing expectations about the ethics and behaviour of businesses. UK firms can potentially take advantage of this if they embrace corporate responsibility at least in part.”
Companies present at the Parliamentary inquiry on Wednesday, including BT, McDonalds and Google, said they had experienced a distinct business benefit to their CSR programmes and, in some cases, to offering payroll giving.
But at the inquiry some charity participants wondered whether the business case for corporate philanthropy had been made adequately – or whether it indeed undermined the expectation that companies engage with charity simply because it is “the right thing to do”.
Questions raised over DSC guide
Politicians and other charity representatives present questioned the robustness of the Directory of Social Change’s recent guide to company giving which found that philanthropy had fallen in spite of increased profits. But DSC research director Dr Catherine Walker replied that the organisation works with what is sometimes poor and inconsistent data from company reports as they pertain to corporate social responsibility and, in particular, philanthropy.
The Directory of Social Change counted neither staff nor employee giving in its record of company giving, and also excluded cause-related-marketing income. Dr Walker said that this was controversial to some, but that more clarity is necessary. “We need to come to an understanding of what company giving is,” she said.
This lack of consistency in reporting is one of the issues the BIS consultation is looking to address, but former MP Tom Levitt suggested that standardised corporate social responsibility reporting could be a consideration in the review of the Companies Act 2006, which presently requires only the largest companies to report on their social impact in their annual reports.
Blunkett: stop boasting and provide evidence
Chair of the inquiry Labour MP David Blunkett (pictured) told the group: “We’d like companies not to boast about what they’re doing, but to put it in the public arena.”
This sentiment the consultation echoed: “We want to encourage greater transparency on corporate responsibility and for information to be more accessible to a range of stakeholders.”
The consultation closes in late September.
