Britain’s top companies have increased the number of compliance documents they publish a year by 280 per cent over the past five years amid a welter of demands for information on their environmental, social and governance behaviour.
The average number of documents, from inclusion and diversity updates to gender pay gap reports, has surged as companies react to calls from pressure groups, regulators and environmentally driven investors.
Even in the past three years, the increase in the number of documents produced by the FTSE-100’s companies increased 84 per cent. Tesco produces 46 and BT has 47, while the average is 16.
The figures were produced by an Aim-listed data science business, Insig AI. The business, chaired by corporate researcher-turned fund manager Richard Bernstein, has created an artificial intelligence system designed to crawl through corporate documents and help advise companies on their disclosures.
While the expansion of red tape facing stock market companies is a bugbear of most executives, Bernstein said much of the paperwork was being produced unnecessarily by companies unnecessarily disclosing information.
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Its new program, called Transparency and Disclosure Index, and due to launch on Monday, screens the sentences in companies’ reports and claims to analyse what is unnecessary and what is being missed out.
“It’s time to stop the nonsense of box-ticking and the endless production of reports,” Bernstein said. “We must simplify down to what actually matters — having sight of the core issues of corporate disclosure and transparency.”
The extent of information companies are now expected to produce on their green initiatives is increasingly leading them not to discuss openly the good deeds that they are doing — a practice known as “greenhushing”.
