6 June 2025
James Corah, Head of Sustainability

Every city has its source of pride, heritage and identity. Growing up in Nottingham in the 1990s focused on two things, the world’s oldest professional football club (there’s only one football club in Nottingham) and Robin Hood.

While the famous football team was about to begin a catastrophic (and in many ways unprecedented) 30-year decline, Robin Hood mania was stronger than ever. This was due to the hit film, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves.

While this cinematic dirge has fortunately faded from the memories of most people, the headline song from its soundtrack has not. “(Everything I Do) I Do it For You” by Bryan Adams, strangely, lives on in the public consciousness.

You might think that this is an odd introduction for our stewardship newsletter, but it shouldn’t be. We firmly believe that as the guardians, not the owners, of the assets we manage we have to make sure that what we do aligns with the values and priorities of our clients.

But, as times change, we know that the priorities of our clients change too. So, we have begun our regular client consultation process. This isn’t about lessening our commitment to stewardship in the face of a changing political environment. It’s the opposite. It’s about making sure our work is properly prioritised so that we can continue to focus on areas that are important to our clients.

Beginning with a series of focus groups (please email events@ccla.co.uk if you would like to participate) and then followed by an online survey, we are hoping that as many clients as possible contribute to the discussion this summer.

This is not an academic or a PR exercise; we genuinely believe that if we can better connect the values of investors with how their money is managed, we will be able to more effectively contribute to building a better world.

So, please do participate in this process because, “You know it’s true, everything we do, we do it for you”.

Global Modern Slavery Benchmark

At CCLA we believe in the power of benchmarking as a tool for driving positive change. By comparing businesses with each other, and producing a public ranking, we’re able to create a competitive race for the top on some of the most important issues of our time.

For this reason, we are proud to release our first Global Modern Slavery Benchmark. Building upon the success of our UK benchmark, this pilot assesses 100 of the world’s largest companies’ approach to compliance with modern slavery legislation and how effective their policies and processes are for finding, fixing and preventing modern slavery in their operations.

Sadly, only 23 of the 100 companies disclosed finding a case of modern slavery, and just one of those businesses confirmed that the victim was satisfied with the redress provided. This reflected our longstanding finding that companies focus on disclosing policy and process, rather than detailing how effective their approaches are for helping these vulnerable people. 

Download benchmark

Key milestones

  • We attended the McDonald’s AGM to express our concerns about the treatment of victims of modern slavery who were found working in the UK. This was part of our longstanding engagement with the company on the issue.
  • We recommenced our engagement with portfolio companies on their CDP (formerly Carbon Disclosure Project) climate change score. The CDP programme provides one of the most comprehensive and compelling assessments of businesses’ climate change practices. By encouraging companies to actively seek to improve their CDP scores we are hoping to encourage them to not only disclose more information but to further develop their plans for the energy transition.
  • We voted against the re-election of Non-Executive Director, Edith W Cooper, at the Amazon AGM, due to our ongoing concerns about the company’s approach to compliance with the International Labour Organization’s standards regarding trade unions and collective bargaining. This followed the Securities and Exchange Commission, sadly, upholding Amazon’s request to remove a shareholder resolution that we had co-filed on the issue.  
     

CCLA in the news

Links to external content may require a subscription.