Our approach to CR
Corporate responsibility (sometimes referred to as corporate social responsibility) is the action a company takes, beyond what it is required to do by law, to address the ethical, social and environmental impacts of its daily operations.
Many commercial companies believe that by embedding CR into their business they can reduce their operational costs, protect their reputation, and improve employee morale and community relations.
Many of these benefits are available to the FSA but, unlike many commercial companies, our core activity already involves a responsibility to society. Our principal purpose is to benefit society by fulfilling our aims of promoting efficient, orderly and fair markets, helping retail customers achieve a fair deal and improving our business capability and effectiveness. We also have a responsibility to the industry we regulate to be efficient and economic in our use of resources, as the industry funds our activities.
So any CR activity we undertake must support our purpose as set out in the Financial Services and Markets Act (FSMA). It must support the achievement of our statutory objectives, or enable us to become a better regulator, by reinforcing the principles of good regulation. Many of the things we do easily pass these tests – for example our environment programme helps us reduce costs, as well as environmental impact. Our community and staff development work helps us to recruit and retain the best staff and is also of benefit to the community.
We also need to practise what we preach. For example, we need to model high standards of governance in the way we run the FSA, in order to encourage firms to improve their own practices. Similarly, we need to have first rate processes for managing employee competence.
So all our CR activity must pass one of three tests. It must:
- support our statutory objectives;
- make us a better regulator as defined in our principles of good regulation; or
- follow industry best practice where we consider that appropriate for the FSA.
