In 2011, we created a Board Citizenship Committee as a formal sub-committee of the Barclays PLC Board of Directors. The Board Citizenship Committee is chaired by Barclays Chairman Marcus Agius, and includes two non-executive Directors. It reviews and approves overall Citizenship strategy and policies, and also monitors and evaluates reputational risks and exposures. The Board Citizenship Committee will meet at least twice a year. Read more about the Committee’s terms of reference on our website.
The Barclays Executive Committee is responsible for managing the delivery of our Citizenship agenda. Antony Jenkins, Chief Executive of Retail and Business Banking, is the Executive sponsor for the Barclays Citizenship programme.
A range of management committees oversees specific aspects of the Citizenship agenda. For example, diversity and inclusion issues are managed by an Executive Diversity Group. To support our new community investment strategy, a new governance structure became effective in late 2011, including a Global Investment Committee supported by new regional committees which will drive the execution of projects within each region at scale and on a cross-business basis.
In 2012, we enhanced our management of reputational issues through the formation of a Reputation Council, which will be a sub-committee of the Barclays Executive Committee. The Reputation Council will be responsible for the effective operation of Barclays reputational risk control framework, and will meet at least four times a year.
Barclays regards reputational risk management as the responsibility of every colleague, given how pervasive reputational risk is, and given the nature of what we do. As a result, we expect every colleague, and others who work on our behalf, to conduct themselves according to consistently high professional and ethical standards. These are set out in our Code of Conduct, which is reviewed regularly and will be updated in 2012 to ensure greater consistency across the organisation and take into account changing regulatory requirements.
More information on our corporate governance can be found in our Annual Report 2011.
Measuring and managing performance
Barclays uses a robust and multi-dimensional reporting framework to measure progress across the organisation, including a number of key performance indicators. Progress against our Citizenship priorities will be reviewed regularly and formally assessed at least twice a year by both the Board Citizenship Committee and the Executive Committee.
We have a network of experts throughout the organisation who support, monitor and ensure the delivery of our objectives in specific areas. These experts are placed as close to our core business activities as possible, because we recognise that our business leaders must own our objectives in order for these to be an integral part of what we do every day. For example, the Environmental Markets team resides within the Investment Bank’s commodities business, while our Environmental Risk Management team is part of the overall Risk function.
Our Citizenship team includes a central team and dedicated divisional Citizenship leaders, environmental managers and procurement professionals across the organisation, as well as a wide range of specialist teams such as the Cleantech Group in our Corporate and Investment Banking division.
