|
In December 2005, the Daily Telegraph published their ‘Corporate Responsibility’ supplement. In Barclays we have devoted a lot of time and resource to developing our corporate responsibility principles and activities. But my pride in our achievements to date deflated somewhat when I read in the article that Sectors such as banks are generally much further behind on CSR*. It was clear to me that, despite our efforts in the past, we still had a lot more to do to convince our stakeholders that we are absolutely serious about corporate responsibility. The best way I can transmit this is to say that everything we do under the ‘corporate responsibility’ banner is directly relevant to our business goals. For too long, the term ‘corporate responsibility’ has had something of an abstract quality to it, with few people knowing what it looked like in practice. In Barclays, our objective is to make it recognisable and meaningful which is why we write about it in some detail in this report.
By incorporating CR principles into everything that we do, we aim to be leaders, not followers, in corporate responsibility. In support of this approach, we have recently appointed Alastair Camp as our Corporate Responsibility Director. Alastair has successfully run a number of businesses in Barclays and his appointment demonstrates our commitment to provide leadership in the CR arena.
We firmly believe that we make our greatest contribution to society by being good at what we do, and doing it in a responsible way providing products and services that help customers realise their financial goals, that drive economic growth, and that sustain a healthy financial system. This is the context in which a major bank like Barclays has its most important role to play. Areas such as financial inclusion, responsible lending, and the financing of large-scale development projects are questions of acute social interest and rightly so. And they are also areas where Barclays can make a significant and enduring impact.
To take two examples, I am proud of the fact that Barclays has one of the most extensive financial inclusion programmes in the UK. And we were also one of the four banks that helped to develop the Equator Principles, which have transformed the way in which the banking sector as a whole approaches project finance across the world. We think of this as ‘responsible banking’, and I believe it gets to the heart of what it means to run a bank at once profitably and in a responsible way. Responsible banking is an integral part of the way we do business, and a central element of our overall strategy to make Barclays one of the world’s leading banks. It also underpins the way we have presented this year’s report: the following pages describe what we have achieved in 2005, but they also set out what we mean by responsible banking, and how we seek to make it real for our customers, for our colleagues and for the communities we serve.
| 