FINANCIAL STRATEGY

“ It will allow our finance people to add value, in addition to some of the more transactional activities they deliver.” The travelling was not for show either. The world, she notes, is“ 40 % overweight or obese”, while roughly a third of greenhouse gases come off the end of a fork, and a company claiming to rebuild the food supply has to prove it line by line, in the one document where the numbers sit under an auditor’ s eye. Sustainability has migrated out of the appendix and into the strategy, and Rowan Adams, Tate & Lyle’ s Chief Corporate Affairs and Sustainability Officer, has spent 25 years watching the subject climb from the back pages to the front.“ The thing I’ m most proud of is that sustainability is now a core part of our strategy and everything we do,” she tells Sustainability Magazine, with a word for the sceptics in the boardroom.“ Board buy-in is about having credible, economically beneficial projects that are clearly part of your strategy. Strategies come and go, but purpose should stay the same.”

From shower trays to the national grid The other two winners show how far good habits stretch, which matters because the wider field is patchier than prize night suggests. The Financial Reporting Council, which polices company accounts, reviewed company reports reviewed by the FRC in the 2024 / 25 cycle

impairment has been the FRC ' s most-queried issue three years running, with zero restatements for it in 2024 / 25

222 of them in its latest cycle; the share requiring follow-up letters fell from 47 % to 37 % and restatements hit a multi-year low, though companies outside the FTSE 350 still lag. The FRC’ s argument for closing the gap is plain enough, good reporting wins“ investor confidence and access to the capital they need to scale and grow”. SSE carries the heaviest brief, a £ 17.5bn( US $ 23.6bn) clean-power programme that must persuade income funds,

74 October 2026