Corporate responsibility at the FSA - 2007/08 report
We think of corporate responsibility at the FSA under four key headings:
- Work: how we achieve our three strategic aims of: helping retail consumers achieve a fair deal; promoting efficient, orderly and fair markets; and improving our business capability and effectiveness.
- People: how we treat our employees.
- Environment: our impact on the environment.
- Community: our impact on the local and wider community.
This CR report does not give an account of the FSA’s work in pursuit of our three strategic aims. This is described elsewhere on our website, in particular in our Annual Report and our Outcomes Performance Report where stakeholders can see in detail how we measure our performance and how we are achieving our three strategic aims.
In preparing this CR report we’ve tried not to duplicate the information contained elsewhere on our website but have, instead, directed you to other parts of the site where appropriate. This includes coverage of our work leading the National Strategy for Financial Capability.
Chief Operating Officer’s Opening Statement for the CR Report 2007/8
"Welcome to this, our second Corporate Responsibility Report. Our first report followed the CR baseline review we carried out at the end of 2006/7. We began the review by questioning whether the FSA needed to ‘do CR’ at all, as the core activity of the FSA already involves a responsibility to society.
We concluded that considering wider CR issues and acting responsibly will make us a better regulator, but only if these issues support our core function. To ensure this we set ourselves three tests, discussed further in our approach to CR. These are that any CR activity 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 think that is appropriate for the FSA.
The review highlighted several gaps between the various CR activities the FSA was currently doing and CR best practice. Therefore, the focus of last year’s CR report was on how we should fill those gaps, including establishing: a CR governance structure, what our key objectives were, and how we were going to measure performance against our objectives.
This report looks in detail at how we performed against those objectives. I would like to highlight a few particular achievements.
As Callum McCarthy explained in the Chairman’s foreword in the 2008/9 Business Review, 2007 was a difficult year for the financial services industry and for the FSA, and the conditions in 2008 continue to place heavy demands on those involved in financial markets, including our staff.
Recognising this, we decided to play a more active role in managing the wellbeing of our staff, including running personal well being sessions, and communicating all of the health care provisions available to staff, particularly on-site. In the coming year we will be setting up a health forum that brings together all our health practitioners to discuss how to improve our programme further.
Alongside formal training routes we encourage the development of our staff though our involvement in local community projects. In 2007/8 a quarter of all staff volunteered for various local community activities, including our partnerships schemes with local schools.
One of the new community volunteering schemes launched this year was the pilot Financial Literacy Project at Woolmore Primary School in the London borough of Tower Hamlets. The scheme will run over two years with 30 year five pupils (9/10 year olds) taking part. 10 FSA staff have volunteered to visit Woolmore Primary once a term over the two year period to teach the pupils about personal finance and help bring this topic to life.
2007/8 also saw the start of the refurbishment of our head office in Canary Wharf. When full, this office will house almost 90% of our staff so it is crucial that we ensure the building operates to high environmental standards. The newly refurbished building includes: a lighting management control system that uses motion detectors throughout all the office areas; an air cooling system that uses significantly less water and energy; and recycling facilities on all floors. We’re already starting to see the benefits with total electricity consumption down by 7% in 2007/8, and 67% of the waste we produced being recycled.
Finally, in this year’s annual staff survey we asked the following question: ‘Do you think the FSA is responsible with regards to work we do, the community, our people and the environment’? Over 79% of the respondents (80% of our staff took part in the survey) agreed with this statement.
So it has been busy year. We are pleased with the progress we’ve made but recognise that there is much still to be done. We hope you enjoy this report and welcome any feedback you may have.
If you do have any feedback please send it to the chair of the FSA CR Action Group, Clare Vanstone, at: clare.vanstone@fsa.gov.uk."
