In preparing this month’s newsletter, we thought long and hard about the attention we should give to the impact of Covid-19 on our clients, on investors and the wider business community.
While we can say with certainty that impact will be profound and long-lasting, we feel that as businesses and communities are struggling to cope with a landscape that would be have been unrecognisable only days ago, and which is changing every day, now is not the time to be making observations or talking about lessons learned.
There will not only be plenty of time to do that further down-the-line but we will also be better placed to act.
Instead, we wanted offer you something different and hopefully more valuable by way of a briefing on the sustainability challenges which will still need our attention when we emerge from the current crisis.
The first of these focuses on the new plastic packaging tax coming into force in April 2022 whose details were announced in the March Budget. We provide a rundown of how it will work, what it will cost and how you can respond to the relevant consultation.
Five years on from the introduction of Modern Slavery reporting, there is pressure for businesses to go further on how their operations impact on people across their supply chains through Human Rights Impact Assessments. With companies typically struggling to understand where to start, we’ve come up with a checklist of what to consider.
You will also find an appraisal of the factors holding sustainability back in the construction sector and a reflection on what we learned at our recent event featuring Carbon Tracker’s Mark Campanale and Kingsmill Bond.
These may all seem like distant issues today but as surely as the pandemic will subside and allow us to get back to working and living normal – albeit forever changed – lives, we will find ourselves addressing these challenges – perhaps with greater urgency – before too long.
Whether your business needs help with challenges you face in the short-term or the longer run, we remain ready to support you.
In the meantime, I hope you, your colleagues and your families remain safe and healthy.
