By Rob Edwards, Environment Editor, 25 June, 2006

Attempts by multinational corporations to talk up their social and environmental responsibility are so threadbare and misleading that they are preventing progress towards a sustainable future. That is the conclusion of a trenchant new study by one of the Scottish Executive's leading environmental advisers, Jan Bebbington, a professor of accounting at St Andrews University. Less than 4% of the world's 50,000 major companies produce reports on "corporate social responsibility", she points out. And the quality of the reports that are produced is "almost universally trivial".

A forthcoming study with a fellow professor from St Andrews, Rob Gray, brands most companies' claims to green credentials as "crass". Firms' assurances that they have properly assessed their social and environmental impacts are "at best useless and at worst highly misleading", it says.

The study warns: "The danger is that the very concept on which the future of the planet depends - sustainability - will be emasculated, appropriated and destroyed by assertion in the interests of corporations.

"We believe we must treat the current crop of 'sustainability reports' with the profoundest mistrust as one of the most dangerous trends working against any possibility of a sustainable future."

Bebbington is a member of First Minister Jack McConnell's Cabinet subcommittee on sustainable development. She is also one of the main speakers in a series of major environmental debates at The Big Tent 2006, a festival of stewardship and sustainability being held at Falkland in Fife next weekend.

Bebbington's study doesn't name any individual companies, though other researchers have. The environmental records of Shell, BP, Scottish & Southern Energy, the Royal Bank of Scotland and the fish farming multinational Marine Harvest have all recently been criticised by environmentalists.

Bebbington told the Sunday Herald: "Unless we change the way the world is organised, we risk even greater social injustice and more ecological disasters. "Driven by globalisation, problems of pollution, waste and global warming are all threatening to disrupt humanity in unprecedented ways. Controlling the multinational corporations that cause some of these problems is not > going to be easy."

More regulation was required, she argued, and attempts by Chancellor Gordon Brown to abandon plans to make companies report their social and environmental impacts were "particularly disappointing". In his Mansion House speech last week, Brown stressed that industry needed "a light-touch regulatory environment". But Bebbington argued that some progress was being made in Scotland with the introduction of strategic environmental assessments and calculating ecological footprints.

"In the face of global corporate power, these are small steps," she said, "but they are important ones."

Her study was praised by the Corporate Responsibility Coalition (Core), which brings together campaign groups including Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and Amnesty International. "This report reveals the true colours of big business," declared Duncan McLaren, chair of Core Scotland.

The fact that some powers for regulating companies are reserved to Westminster should not be used as an excuse for inaction by Scottish ministers, he said, adding: "They should be using the massive power of public procurement to ensure that taxpayers' money is not given to big companies that fail to meet high ethical and environmental standards."

The Confederation of British Industry (CBI), however, said Bebbington didn't understand how the heavy burden of red tape stifled business. The wealth that companies created helped pay for universities, it pointed out.

The CBI's deputy director-general, John Cridland, welcomed the Treasury's withdrawal of compulsory reports on social and environmental impacts.

"The auditing requirements would have promoted an overly legalistic approach," he said. "Social and environmental reporting is to be encouraged, but the proposed statutory requirements risked putting this in 'tick box' form with a pressure to report to norms, rather than the real issues for a particular business."