FCA Establishes ESG Advisory Committee to its Board

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has set up a new committee to work on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) issues. This committee will advise the FCA's Board.

The FCA Board agreed earlier this year to make a new ESG Advisory Committee to help it do its ESG duties. This includes meeting the government's requirement that it "have regard" to the UK's promise to create a net-zero economy by 2050 when deciding how to move forward and carry out its goals and duties.

It has already done a lot of work that fits the priorities outlined in its ESG Strategy. This includes putting out proposals for measures to stop greenwashing, putting together a group to make a voluntary Code of Conduct for ESG data and ratings providers, actively keeping an eye on firms' ESG-related business, and reviewing what listed companies say about climate change.

FCA has also been an active member of the government's Transition Plan Taskforce, where it helped come up with a proposal framework and guidelines for how transition plans should be made.

As the FCA's work moves forward, the committee will help the Board maintain its focus on ESG issues that are important to the FCA as a corporate entity and as a regulator.

The Committee will also give the Board advice on new ESG topics or issues that are important and provide its opinion on how the FCA should develop its ESG strategy in line with the organisation's statutory goals and regulatory principles. This is in line with the role of its statutory panels, which give us advice without any influence from the government (for example, Markets Practitioner Panel). You can find out more about this here.

The following people have been chosen to join the Committee:

• Tom Gosling, Executive Fellow in the Department of Finance at London Business School and Executive Fellow at the European Corporate Governance Institute
• Catherine Howarth OBE, Chief Executive of ShareAction
• Tim Mohin, former Chief Sustainability Officer for Persefoni AI and formerly Chief Executive of the Global Reporting Initiative
• Desiree Fixler, Founder of RYSN Consulting and Chair of VentureESG
• Sonali Siriwardena, Partner and Global Head of ESG at Simmons and Simmons
• Harald Walkate, Senior Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Finance & Private Wealth (CSP) at the University of Zurich

The Chair of the FCA, some other Non-Executive Directors, and the Director of ESG will also be on the Committee.

Members have been appointed by the Board in a personal capacity and will abide by a conflict of interest policy.

Here you can find the Committee's Terms of Reference, and here you can find more information about the FCA Board.

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Source: FCA