Leading firms in the institutional investor community have joined forces with Tomorrow’s Company to launch a working party which aims to improve the quality of engagement by institutional investors with UK companies. The practitioner-led group aims to identify engagement styles and practices that seem to be most effective and to share that intelligence with the aim of making engagement more rewarding for investors and companies alike. The group also intends to make a significant contribution to the 2012 revision of the Stewardship Code which the Financial Reporting Council is proposing will take effect from 1st October 2012. The group includes some of the world’s largest and most active investors – Aviva Investors, BlackRock, Governance for Owners, Railpen Investments, Ram Trust and USS.

In 2002 Mark Goyder wrote "Lessons from Enron". It was a story about the culture of fear and greed at the top of the company, and how Enron's non-execs, who were there to hold them to account, failed to restrain it.  In this article Mark looks at the similarities between Enron's corporate culture and that of News Corp, in the light of recent events. He asks what lessons can be learned from these failings and spells out the need for a greater measure of stewardship throughout the investment chain.  

In 2008 Tomorrows Company published “Tomorrow’s Owners – stewardship of Tomorrow’s Company”. This was a review of the principles of good ownership from private equity and family business to institutional investment in listed companies. The report concluded that shareholders had four roles – being a member, a provider of finance, a trader of shares and a steward, but that in listed companies it was this fourth role that was being neglected. The publication of this report coincided with the failure of the banks in October 2008. Sir David Walker picked up the theme of stewardship in his 2009 report for the UK government on the governance of banks and other financial institutions. Here we set out Tomorrow’s Company’s definition of stewardship and the four principles that make up effective stewardship.    

Tomorrow's Company has played an important and leading role in developing the argument for stewardship, and in so doing has helped to create the conditions which have led to the establishment of the Stewardship Code in the UK.   We are now building on this impact, to establish a new momentum for stewardship and understanding of what this means in practice - by tackling both the demand side (setting out  'Why Stewardship Matters' and developing toolkits to help each participant in the system to be more effective in their pursuit of stewardship) and the supply side (working with fund managers, investment consultants and FRC to develop the “stewardship spectrum” and establishing criteria through which excellence in stewardship might be identified and rewarded in the market). Normal 0 false false false EN-GB X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 DefSemiHidden="true" DefQFormat="false"...

For Unilever the business case for integrating sustainability into our brands is clear and persuasive.