SUSTAINABILITY FEATURE
Life of Baroness Cohen of Pimlico
Professional Life
Public Life
2007
Chancellor BPP University College
2000 to present Labour Peer House of Lords
2001 - 2013
Non-Executive Director London Stock Exchange Group
1999 - 2005
Non-Executive Director Defence Logistics Organisation (Ministry of Defence)
After decades adapting to changing attitudes, businesses face a post-carbon economy In a career spanning 50 years, Baroness Cohen of Pimlico has enjoyed spells as deputy chairman of the Yorkshire Building Society, a non-executive director of the London Stock Exchange and a governor of the BBC. Here, she describes how business attitudes to ethical trading have changed, and why organisations will have to adapt to renewable energy sources.
1993 - 2005
Chairman and NED BBP Group
1994 - 1999
Governor BBC
1991 - 1999
Deputy Chairman Yorkshire Building Society
1993 - 1997
Member Sheffield Development Corporation
1988 - 2005
Crime fiction writer
1982 - 2001
Director Charterhouse Bank
1969 - 1982
Civil Servant Department of Trade and Industry
1965 onwards
Solicitor
pressure. It is clear that they also feel some responsibility to future generations and want to see the planet in a fit state to sustain their business in the decades to come. Ten years ago, businesses did not make decisions about where to get their energy on anything other than price. The shift away from hydrocarbons will be painful, but economies have made similar transitions in the past. The law will follow behaviour, and we as private consumers and businesses may be forced to use more expensive forms of energy. Demand will become more predictable and prompt more investment in the new sources and technologies which will make energy from those sources more affordable. Combined with continual research in energy- saving technologies, investment in new sources of energy will act to mitigate the effect of price rises, but it cannot happen without some pain. Since so much of what business does is outsourced, they will expect suppliers to make these investments with them. It is going to be better to anticipate the coming changes and work with suppliers now than have to catch up once the train has left the station.
south and into affordable housing in the north, where we were not involved in business.
At the London Stock Exchange, where I was a non-executive director, we were looking to outsource our IT system – the very core of our business – to a provider in Sri Lanka and in the end, instead of just buying the trading system, we bought the company, MillenniumIT, in 2009. We all visited Sri Lanka for a Board meeting because we knew we needed to know what conditions out there were like. We already knew that we were paying our employees in Sri Lanka properly, because we had to. Most of them had degrees from places like Harvard or MIT or Imperial and if underpaid did not need to work for us. Indeed cost had not been our major consideration in moving the IT system offshore, it was the flexibility and speed of reaction we were after and the access to a large pool of highly qualified people. We were concerned about stability of the country which was just recovering from a damaging civil war and was at that stage deeply divided between the remnants of the predominantly Muslim insurgents in the north of the island and the Hindu south. In the end, we decided that while many of the problems that had caused the insurgency remained, we should believe that they could be ameliorated, and we put money into our new headquarters in the
People now talk about ethical trading, but 40 years ago, nobody really gave it much attention. People may have campaigned on ethical issues, but it was rare for anyone senior in business to be concerned. You just called up a subcontractor to tell them what you wanted or find out where it was, but a great deal has changed in the last couple of decades. Firstly, businesses are now contracting out the guts of the company. Functions that once seemed vital to the running of the organisation – HR or IT – are now carried out by third parties to the point where this is now normal for global businesses. That makes relationships with these third-party suppliers vital. And ethical trading is becoming engrained in business as the public, governments and business leaders all change their attitudes. Bringing ethics into business is really about sustainability, in the true sense. If your supplier can’t pay its workforce properly, if there is corruption in the supply chain, if you’re over - reliant on finite natural resources, then either the whole or a key part of your business is not now sustainable.
But it was a sign that trading has become completely global. When the eyes of your customers and shareholders are on you, you need to be very careful in terms of ethical sourcing and the deals you make around the world, and indeed closer to home. If you draw a lot of unwelcome attention to your business, you are not going to sustain it for long. Australian investment fund told me he was getting out of coal, despite the fact that Australia has such an abundance of cheap coal. It is however clear that both customer and governmental pressure is starting to have an effect, the transition away from coal is underway and it is a market that will struggle for investment in the future. The investment community is also taking an interest. Two years ago, a friend who runs an For now, businesses are of course largely reviewing energy supply options to save money, but the move to alternative sources recognises how shareholder value can be impacted by public
Baroness Cohen
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STATE OF FLUX
2018 GLOBAL SRM RESEARCH REPORT
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