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.

The Financial Mail on Sunday recently launched their 'Investment Stewardship' campaign. This call for action builds on and heavily references tomorrow's Comapny's own work on stewardship and our Stewardship Campaign. The Financial Mail on Sunday's recent press coverage of stewardship is detailed here.

"All of us whose money is going into the system need to be given the opportunity to exercise some simple choices about stewardship. A consumer who walks down the supermarket aisle can choose to buy Fair Trade coffee, and they know what that means. The same should happen when we look at products offered us by fund managers: we should be able to tell the stewardship content," – Mark Goyder, Founder Director of Tomorrow’s CompanyAn article published in The Guardian newspaper (on 21/6/11) - featuring contributions and comment from Mark Goyder - sets out the expectation that Business Secretary Vince Cable will use his speech to the Association of British Insurers on Wednesday (22/6/11) to renew his calls for UK plc to take a more long term view of its activities.

People around the world are embracing Green Capitalism because it is now possible to create a higher standard of living for every person and community throughout the world, by shifting from resource-wasting industrial development to resource saving industrialism. In the 21st Century, people, places, and organizations will literally “get richer by becoming greener,” earning more money by using fewer resources and reusing more.

 The 2007-2009 financial crisis was a perfect "black swan" event: unexpected, a rarity, with broad and deep impacts; and, with the benefit of hindsight, it was also retrospectively rationalised by many "experts". We got it all "sensationally" wrong: bankers (like myself), policy-makers, supervisors, auditors, research analysts, economists, civil society itself. And even as the crisis was unfolding, many initially did not consider its seriousness. We saw dangers of shocks, but underestimated the confluence and impact thereof.