Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department has taken to ensure the UK has a strong disaster risk disclosure for UK licenced companies that work internationally.

The UK has responded to the growing demand for non-financial information in UK corporate reporting, by introducing measures to increase and improve the public disclosures entities make. In 2013, the UK introduced the requirement for certain entities to produce a strategic report, an ambitious change which required directors and boards to take a broad range of issues into account in the running of their company, including on social and environmental matters.

These requirements were expanded in 2016, through the introduction of additional disclosure requirements for all large Public Interest Entities (PIEs), to require a description of the principal risks relating to social and environmental matters. In addition to this, and where relevant, the entity must also include a description of the business relationships, products and services which are likely to cause adverse impacts on risks relating to social and environmental matters, and provide a description of how the entity manages those risks.

More recently, in 2022, the UK became the first country in the G20 to mandate large public and private businesses to report their climate-related financial disclosures in line with the framework set out by the Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosure, including their exposures to climate change-based risks.