Council in initiative to gauge green credentials

HOUNSLOW council has joined forces with proxy voting agency Manifest to promote GreenCard, a new system for evaluating how well companies look after the environment. Alan Steele, Hounslow's borough treasurer, hopes GreenCard will bring consistency to the questions investors ask companies about environmental issues.

"If companies receive a plethora of questionnaires from different investors, they'll get fed up and not answer," he said. The GreenCard questionnaire asks companies about their environmental policies, the seniority of the people responsible for implementing them and the system available to support implementation. It looks at how the company communicates its policy to its employees and how it communicates environmental matters to its shareholders.

Each bespoke questionnaire is supplemented by independent assessments of the company and its industry sector. These include a review of the Environmental Agency's register of prosecutions and an annual ranking of companies, according to how well they have developed environmental management systems, by Business in the Environment. The information is combined to give each company a score. Individual company scores can then be combined to assess the environmental risk in a portfolio.

Hounslow has just completed a survey using the GreenCard questionnaire. "We had a 53pc response, which is pretty good," said Steele. Sarah Wilson, managing director of Manifest, said the survey revealed a very wide range of corporate behaviour. "There's a lot of window dressing," she said, "with many companies having no board director responsible for the environment, or having no formal procedures in place."

Professional Pensions
24 February, 2000

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