Questions for your Manager - July 2016

The Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association publishes monthly topical questions to aid trustees in considering the effectiveness of their managers’ stewardship activity. We encourage funds to ask these questions during their regular manager reviews in an effort to understand their managers’ approaches and activities and to ensure that they are adhering to the stewardship policies.

JULY'S TOPICAL QUESTIONS FOR YOUR MANAGER

Background: Investors that have signed up to the UK Stewardship Code are required to issue a public statement outlining how their stewardship practices fulfil the Code’s principles of responsible investment stewardship. The Financial Reporting Council has now written to all signatories assessing how completely their statement complies with the spirit of the code, and categorising them into two tiers, depending on the quality of their statement

Question: Are you a signatory of the Stewardship Code? If not, why not? If so, have you been classified in the top or second tier and how will you be incorporating feedback from the FRC to ensure that you achieve or retain the highest possible standards of stewardship?

Background: The Association has this week published a toolkit for pension funds, providing advice on the type of information our members should request from the companies they invest in about their workforces and corporate cultures. The report recommends specific workforce-related performance indicators that investors should ask companies to report against each year, as well as suggesting specific questions to ask of boards when meeting with individual companies

Question: Do you ask the same questions of investee companies about their workforces, and request the same levels of disclosure in annual reports, as the standards outlined in the PLSA toolkit?

Read previous questions here.