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.

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.    

 In November 2009 AISEC along with Kairos Futures conducted a survey of over 3,000 young people from around 122 countries about their views on climate change. The results were telling. 73% of respondents believe climate change to be a greater threat to society than the war or terrorism, and nearly all see their main responsibility as being to leave the world in better shape than their parents did. Here is a run down of their findings.

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"...

I've listened carefully to the discussions of the past two days and tried to formulate these remarks as late as possible. Let me suggest four concrete action points which reflect Commissioner Andor's commitment to what he called 'a new and modern EU CSR policy framework'.