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March 13, 2003
New UK Index Rates Corporate Social Responsibility Performance
by William Baue
UK-based Business in the Community launches its Corporate Responsibility Index, which benchmarks
corporate social responsibility performance.
SocialFunds.com --
In London yesterday, the Corporate Responsibility Index was launched by Business in the
Community (BITC), a U.K. consortium of 700 companies devoted to improving their positive impact
on society. The index, which is the first of its kind, benchmarks the corporate social
responsibility (CSR) performance of companies. This year's index includes 122 companies that
volunteered to be assessed.
 The index rates a company on its CSR
strategies and how well it has integrated those strategies into its overall business operations.
The index also rates company management practices that impact the community, environment,
marketplace, and workplace.
"[W]e've got an index which is comprehensive, accessible in
terms of what we measure, and. . . the benchmarking exercise will provide a service to investors as
well," said David Varney, chair of BITC. Mr. Varney is also chair of mm02, an indexed
telecommunications company.
"The companies that do corporate responsibility and do it
well . . . perform better economically, have a better sense of innovation, and they're more in
touch with the communities in which they live," said Mr. Varney.
Instead of publicly
disclosing companies' individual scores, the index lists companies alphabetically within five
groups, or quintiles. First quintile companies earned scores over 82 percent, and fifth quintile
companies all scored under 52 percent. The rest fell somewhere in the middle. The average score
was 67.87 percent, which falls into the third quintile.
Companies in the top quintile
included BP
(ticker: BP), Dow
(DOW), Shell
(RD), and Unilever (UN). Dow topped the
chemical sector with a score of 90.14 percent. The index rated Dow highly on its corporate
strategy and environmental performance. Areas of improvement for Dow included formal
community-based objectives and targets for board members.
"We are proud of our
accomplishments to date but realize we still have much to do to reach the Triple Bottom Line
objectives of economic prosperity, environmental stewardship, and corporate social responsibility,"
said Scott Noesen, Dow's director of sustainable development.
Companies ranked in the
fifth quintile, such as the construction and building materials company RMC (RMC.L) and media companies British Sky
Broadcasting (BSY.L) and Reuters (RTR.L), expressed
disappointment over their ratings. RMC noted that it reported on its international operations, as
BITC's questionnaire requested, while other companies in its sector reported only on their UK
operations, according to RMC group environmental director Noel Morrin.
Reuters received a
"C" in management practice on the environment, which means that the company is beginning to measure
progress.
"Reuters is an information company, and as such, CSR measures concerning the
environment, health hazards, or global warming are not particularly relevant to us," said Yvonne
Diaz, Reuters's director of public relations. "It's absolutely unfair to rank us in areas that are
not really relevant to us at all."
Reuters received "A's" in management practice in the
community, in the marketplace, and in the workplace, which means that the company is measuring and
reporting progress in these areas. Ms. Diaz pointed out that Reuters has trained approximately
3,200 non-staff journalists in about 87 countries. Many of those countries do not have freedom of
speech. Reuters also ranked highly for its generous charitable donations, such as its sponsorship
of fellowship programs at Oxford and Cardison in the U.K., Stanford and Missouri in the U.S., and
Bordeaux in France, Ms. Diaz added.
"For the survey to be taken more seriously, it really
has to allow for some flexibility for companies to be measured on things that are relevant to our
business," Ms. Diaz told SocialFunds.com.
BITC did allow companies the flexibility to
choose seven of the eight social and environmental impact areas to report on. Reuters chose not to
report on the impact area of global warming.
BITC expects the index to serve as a tool for
companies to compare their performance to best practice, as well as a tool for investor analysis.
Toward this end, BITC is developing links with the National Association of Pension Funds and the Association of British Insurers as well as investment fund
managers and financial analysts to encourage the use of the index for benchmarking.
©
SRI World Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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