Back to Work
I hope you have all enjoyed a restful summer.
Our engagement with the new government is stepping up ahead of the October 30 Budget but in the meantime several issues have kept us occupied.
The first disclosure of investments made under the Mansion House Compact underwhelmed, totalling just £793m, or 0.36% of the relevant DC default funds’ value.
I’ve written to the project’s 11 signatories plus the City Minister to raise our concerns that it is not obviously taking effect quickly enough and its focus is heavily skewed to private assets over public when AIM and Aquis shares fall squarely within its remit. You can read the letter here and coverage in Investors’ Chronicle here.
This week we also issued our report “Publish and be Damned: the Problems with Proxy Advisers”, which is available here.
Thanks to many QCA members for sharing their experiences with us. They deserve better.
Our proposed solutions are feeding into the Financial Reporting Council’s Stewardship Code Review. I wrote about what we found in City AM.
And the Financial Conduct Authority’s report into its competitiveness and growth objectives was encouraging. We need regulators that support the economy. But accompanying statistics indicating that at least one in four of the firms the watchdog monitors don’t believe it acts proportionately show it has work to do. For larger, “fixed” firms the figure is more than one in three.
I wrote to the FCA’s chief executive, Nikhil Rathi, offering to help with outreach to our small and mid-cap members, plus their advisers and supporters.
I look forward to catching up with many of you at our Annual Dinner in a few weeks’ time, where I’m delighted that Justin Webb, co-presenter of Radio 4's Today programme, will be our guest speaker.
It will be a busy autumn but the QCA is raring to go, campaigning for growth companies that are the backbone of our economy. Ideas from members about what we should focus on are always welcome.
Kind regards,
James Ashton
Chief Executive
Non Executive Chairman and NED of various listed and private companies
3moJames, Thank you and thanks to everyone at the QCA for at least having the confidence to try and develop a debate with regard to proxy shareholder firms. It remains a mystery of my life and my long City career that an oh-so-over-regulated economy such as the UK can allow these unregulated uncommunicative companies to develop into the veritable nuisances that they have become. As those that sit on boards that I chair know well, unless forced to do do, my policy now is to ignore the implications of AGM voting where it is clear that shareholders have blindly followed proxy advice - such votes often cast not realising they are in fact following proxy firm rules and not LSE or CA rules. The more people that shout about this the more likely something might be done. I doubt it however. Sadly.