Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what assessment he has made of the projected efficacy of Sustainability Disclosure Requirements in changing the behaviour of UK banks.

The document ‘Greening Finance: A Roadmap to Sustainable Investing’ sets out an indicative pathway to introducing coordinated Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR) across the economy.

This set out our framework for greening the financial system in phases. The first is informing investors and consumers – addressing the information gaps in the market and ensuring a flow of decision-useful information on environmental sustainability from corporates to financial market participants, including banks. This is the main aim of SDR: to increase transparency for market participants to ensure they have the information they need to factor sustainability into their investment decisions.

Phase two in the Roadmap is about acting on that information. The government set out its expectation that, as this information becomes available and develops over time, the UK’s pensions and investment sectors – asset managers, asset owners, and the service providers that support them – will have the data to act as effective and responsible stewards of capital.