The Death of CSR?

I wonder if the whole concept of CSR will become another victim of the banking crash? With great respect to those whose lives currently revolve around CSR one way or another, I sincerely hope so. For me, its become an increasingly empty and illusory notion anyway.

I rather thought CSR would die a few years ago when Enron went down in flames. The CSR community in the United States took quite a hit at the time, given that Enron had been lauded and garlanded as a leader on corporate social responsibility for several years before the crash. Off-balance sheet CSR was obviously a stretch too far.

But what value should we now attach to the concept of CSR in the UK banking sector? Every single one of these once-revered financial institutions have very impressive CSR programmes. Northern Rock was an outstanding exemplar of community-based engagement, as was the Halifax bit of HBOS; Lloyds TSB runs one of the most innovative CSR programmes in the whole world; HSBC has pioneered some of the most important climate change initiatives in the corporate world today. And so on.

Yet the truth of it is that every one of these one-revered financial institutions has been simultaneously engaged in some of most egregiously irresponsible business behaviour in the history of capitalism. Risk has been systematically mis-priced; credit has been systematically mis-sold; incentive schemes were geared to promote value-destroying personal greed; Audit Committees failed, quarter in, quarter out, to exercise any kind of proper scrutiny; non-executive Directors were suborned by utterly corrupt models of permanently rising property values, bundles of bad debt were packaged up and sold on as so many toxic time-bombs; and literally everything involved in this global scam was made more complex, more opaque, more impenetrable, less subject to scrutiny and audit of any kind – presumably for a purpose.

You can pretty much guarantee that not one of the Directors of CSR in any of these one-revered financial institutions would have been consulted about any of these strategic decisions. After all, what has CSR got to do with investment strategies? With executive remuneration? With company policy on “collateralised debt obligations”? Or hedge funds? And even if they had been consulted, you can absolutely guarantee they would have been ignored – the seductive pull of big money will always trump the platitudes of corporate responsibility.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m in no way seeking to disparage the incredible work of CSR teams in the banking sector. To a man and woman, they’re great. But they (and the rest of us) have been very ill-served by their bosses and their boards.