Social and ethical reporting is even less developed than environmental reporting. Only a quarter of the top UK companies go beyond the minimum legal requirements of providing employee related information on training and health and safety issues. Since very little environmental and social information produced by companies is in a form that is consistent between companies, or is seen to be reliable by assessors, benchmarking and comparisons within and between sectors can be difficult. Formal independent verification adds to the credibility of the information provided. The Government intends to approach companies and sectors that have taken only limited steps to report openly about their environmental performance and urge them to go further.
Guidelines help companies to report on their environmental performance in a constructive manner.
A number of sectoral initiatives and guidelines are being developed to be more closely tailored to the needs of particular companies. There are a number of standards and guidelines for business on environmental reporting. A number of countries have already introduced mandatory environmental reporting. Indicators, targets and benchmarking Developing environmental indicators supports corporate planning, controlling and monitoring of performance. Stakeholder expectations are changing and becoming more demanding and they expect environmental performance to be an integral part of the business, not something separate.