Sunday Herald, Scotland - 25 June 2006
Study slams
‘trivial’ social responsibility reports
By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor
Attempts by multinational corporations to talk up their social and
environmental responsibility are so threadbare and misleading that they
are preventing progress towards a sustainable future.
That is the conclusion of a trenchant new study by one of the Scottish
Executive’s leading environmental advisers, Jan Bebbington, a professor
of accounting at St Andrews University.
Less than 4% of the world’s 50,000 major companies produce reports on
“corporate social responsibility”, she points out. And the quality of
the reports that are produced is “almost universally trivial”.
A forthcoming study with a fellow professor from St Andrews, Rob Gray,
brands most companies’ claims to green credentials as “crass”. Firms’
assurances that they have properly assessed their social and
environmental impacts are “at best useless and at worst highly
misleading”, it says.
The study warns: “The danger is that the very concept on which the
future of the planet depends – sustainability – will be emasculated,
appropriated and destroyed by assertion in the interests of
corporations.
“We believe we must treat the current crop of ‘sustainability reports’
with the profoundest mistrust as one of the most dangerous trends
working against any possibility of a sustainable future.”
Bebbington is a member of First Minister Jack McConnell’s Cabinet
subcommittee on sustainable development. She is also one of the main
speakers in a series of major environmental debates at The Big Tent
2006, a festival of stewardship and sustainability being held at
Falkland in Fife next weekend.
Bebbington’s study doesn’t name any individual companies, though other
researchers have. The environmental records of Shell, BP, Scottish &
Southern Energy, the Royal Bank of Scotland and the fish farming
multinational Marine Harvest have all recently been criticised by
environmentalists.
Bebbington told the Sunday Herald: “Unless we change the way the world
is organised, we risk even greater social injustice and more ecological
disasters.
“Driven by globalisation, problems of pollution, waste and global
warming are all threatening to disrupt humanity in unprecedented ways.
Controlling the multinational corporations that cause some of these
problems is not going to be easy.”
More regulation was required, she argued, and attempts by Chancellor
Gordon Brown to abandon plans to make companies report their social and
environmental impacts were “particularly disappointing”. In his Mansion
House speech last week, Brown stressed that industry needed “a
light-touch regulatory environment”.
But Bebbington argued that some progress was being made in Scotland with
the introduction of strategic environmental assessments and calculating
ecological footprints.
“In the face of global corporate power, these are small steps,” she
said, “but they are important ones.”
Her study was praised by the Corporate Responsibility Coalition (Core),
which brings together campaign groups including Friends of the Earth,
Oxfam and Amnesty International. “This report reveals the true colours
of big business,” declared Duncan McLaren, chair of Core Scotland.
The fact that some powers for regulating companies are reserved to
Westminster should not be used as an excuse for inaction by Scottish
ministers, he said, adding: “They should be using the massive power of
public procurement to ensure that taxpayers’ money is not given to big
companies that fail to meet high ethical and environmental standards.”
The Confederation of British Industry (CBI), however, said Bebbington
didn’t understand how the heavy burden of red tape stifled business. The
wealth that companies created helped pay for universities, it pointed
out.
The CBI’s deputy director-general, John Cridland, welcomed the
Treasury’s withdrawal of compulsory reports on social and environmental
impacts.
“The auditing requirements would have promoted an overly legalistic
approach,” he said. “Social and environmental reporting is to be
encouraged, but the proposed statutory requirements risked putting this
in ‘tick box’ form with a pressure to report to norms, rather than the
real issues for a particular business.”
Copyright © 2006 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088 |
