Interview – Brunel Pension Partnership
INTERVIEW – HELEN PRICE
“You cannot always measure impact by the percentage of people that have voted for shareholder resolutions.”
Helen Price, Brunel Pension Partnership’s lead on stewardship, engagement and voting, speaks to Mona Dohle about the drive for action not words on corporate climate pledges, green gilts and why the local government pension scheme pool’s influence is not limited to equities.
Brunel Pension Partnership favors engagement over divestment, so what campaigns have you led in the past year? We work with our clients and managers to outline our engagement priorities. They are focused on several themes, climate change being one of them. We also look at diversity and inclusion, human capital, costs, tax transparency and supply chain management. To give you some examples, we worked closely with the Diversity Project and par- ticipated in several work streams. One of those looked at the barriers to diversity in asset management.
Another example is our focus on banks. We co-filed the first climate resolution at a major European bank in 2019 and then continued to engage with the bank on the issue, including at their AGM last year.
12 | portfolio institutional | February 2021 | issue 100
Was that at Barclays? Yes. Our aim is for the bank to establish short, medium and long-term targets to back up their ambition to be net zero by 2050. That has been a great piece of work and something we will be continu- ing this year.
Another area that we looked at last year is the impact of Covid. We supported an engagement on mental health, led by fund manager CCLA. As part of that, we sent a letter to all FTSE100 companies to help them better understand their approach to workforce mental health. We want all FTSE100 companies to bring in a mental health plan for their employees, which might include things like line man- ager training, flexible working and being flexible with performance reviews as well as looking at how clearly they communi-
cate to their employees what provisions are available. That initiative was supported by $2.2trn (£1.6trn) of assets under man- agement and we had some good responses from the companies. Another area we have focused on is work- ing with the big four auditors to better integrate the financial materiality of ESG risks into company accounts. We have also – working with the Institutional Group on Climate Change and Sarasin & Partners [an investment manager] – engaged with energy companies on how they can better reflect climate risks in their accounting.
Is it more difficult to convince companies of the importance of ESG now that their profits are under pressure from the pandemic?
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48
