Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what assessment he has made of the potential merits of incorporating and implementing just transition principles into plans for Sustainable Disclosure Requirements as part of the Green Finance Roadmap.

The document ‘Greening Finance: A Roadmap to Sustainable Investing’ sets out the Government’s plan to introduce coordinated Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR) across the economy.

As set out in the Roadmap, the Government intends to green 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 sustainability factors from corporates to financial market participants. 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 investment sector – investors, asset managers, asset owners, and the service providers that support them – will have the data to act as effective and responsible stewards of capital.