Press Release

Become a Golden Supporter

For Immediate Release: Sunday 16th November 2003

Photo Opportunity: Sunday 16th November 2003, 1400h-1500h, A team of "CBI businessmen" playing football with planet Earth while a Birmingham FOE referee issues red cards: outside the International Convention Centre, Centenary Square, Birmingham.

Balls to the CBI!

Environmental campaigners will be hosting the first leg of the CBI-sponsored World Unaccountability League Play-offs outside the ICC on Sunday 16th November, the day delegates arrive for the annual conference of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the UK's most powerful industry group. The League's return leg will be held on Wednesday.

Birmingham Friends of the Earth's protest will aim to expose the CBI's record of scuppering environmental legislation, advancing destructive development projects, scare-mongering about green taxes, and undermining workers' rights and pension provisions.[1]

The CBI League match will see a suited team of CBI businessmen kicking the Earth around as a football.

Birmingham Friends of the Earth campaigner Karen Leach said:

"We want to highlight the way powerful industry lobby groups like the CBI are putting the boot into the planet and its people, by relentlessly pressing Government for lower social and environmental standards in pursuit of profits. The Government should show them the red card and Ministers attending this week's conference should not heed the false promises and scare-mongering threats of the CBI."

The CBI favours a voluntary, "market-driven" approach to corporate responsibility, but it has become clear that this approach is not enough to adequately safeguard people's rights and the environment.2 Instead, Friends of the Earth is calling for international rules to make corporations accountable for all their practices both at home and abroad, through the Corporate Responsibility (CORE) Bill.[3]

Editor's Notes

[1] The CBI stands accused of:

• Lobbying against environmental protection The CBI views environmental legislation not as an opportunity but as a burden and sees its efforts as a "continuing…struggle with the ever-growing cumulative cost of environmental legislation covering areas such climate change, pollution and water".
• Undermining efforts to tackle climate change The CBI continues to oppose the Climate Change Levy, a tax on businesses for their greenhouse gas emissions, which encourages greater energy efficiency and could help wean the UK off fossil fuels and on to energy efficient technologies.
• Shirking business liability for oil spill impacts The CBI, both directly in the UK and through its European body UNICE, is trying to weaken a European Union draft liability directive on oil spills that would make oil and shipping companies take full liability for disasters such as the Prestige spill. The CBI want to ensure that liability cannot be applied for impacts on biodiversity and are also trying to prevent public interest groups and individuals from having rights to pursue liability.
• Lobbying for destructive airports expansion The CBI is a founder member of the industry front group "Freedom to Fly" who are lobbying intensively for a huge expansion in air travel and airport capacity, including airports in internationally important biodiversity areas, despite huge local protest and global environmental implications.
• Scare-mongering The CBI repeatedly issues bogus warnings about loss of competitiveness and jobs even when there is no evidence that environmental regulation harms an economy's job-creation capacity, or its growth.
• Being backward on transport CBI continues to push for more roads and, while Europe forges ahead with an integrated rail network, the CBI helps reduce the competitiveness of rail transport by "securing reductions in fuel duty (£1.6bn) and vehicle excise duty, especially for lorries (£0.3bn)".
• Being anti-democratic The CBI's view of democratic government is clear: "The CBI will ensure that business is in the driving seat of any alternative government proposals to improve and regenerate local areas."
• Dodging corporate accountability The CBI impedes proper business accountability by favouring voluntary "corporate social responsibility" initiatives, which companies frequently ignore, while at the same time undermining the rights of communities. It "secured....a framework of guidelines and voluntary accreditation for consumer codes of conduct for e-business…[that] prevent the need for regulation". The CBI also secured several safeguard in the Criminal Justice and Police Bill which otherwise would have resulted in UK directors being prosecuted in the US for corporate wrongdoing.
• Pushing for an unequal world trade system As part of the UK delegation to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) the CBI helped to secure a new round of negotiations of 'real potential gains' for British Business while pressing the Government to ignore calls for a more equitable system of global trade.
• Undermining workers' rights and pension provision As a result of CBI lobbying, the government proposal for a statutory right to part-time working for parents of young children was dropped. They made sure that the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights is only a statement of principles, not a legally binding set of rights and that the charter didn't extend into areas like collective bargaining and right to strike. And they successfully persuaded the government not to introduce a statutory requirement on employers to undertake equal pay audits, as sought by the Equal Opportunities Commission. They attacked the government for increasing public sector wages by 5.1% (compared to 3.0% in the private sector), and on pensions they secured the abolition of the minimum funding requirement (MFR) for occupational pensions.
• Working to remove citizens rights from planning The CBI proudly boasts that it pushed the government into announcing pro-business Planning reforms. Friends of the Earth has criticised the reforms for trying to squeeze out the public's right to object to damaging development proposals. The CBI was instrumental in the creation of "business planning zones" in which business does not need to apply for planning permission, utterly undermining communities' rights to oppose new developments.

For more information see:

• Friends of the Earth's 'CBI Dossier' www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/20021124223216.html
  
• CBI and Green taxes www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/20020412000303.html
  
• CBI website www.cbi.org.uk/

[2] The CBI says its lobbying ensured the European Union White paper on Corporate Social Responsibility was entirely voluntary for business, despite the fact that business voluntarism has failed to secure sustainable development. In May 2002 the United Nations Environment Programme concluded from an assessment of 22 industry sectors that only a few corporations had embraced sustainable development and for the "majority" it is "business as usual".

[3] The CORE Bill's 4 Principles

1. companies with a £5m+ turnover will publish reports on their economic, environmental and social impacts;
   
2. companies will carry out proper consultation with local people before embarking on major projects;
   
3. company directors consider the wider impacts of their business;
   
4. a new Standards Board will be created to set standards and ensure effective implementation of (a), (b) and (c).

See www.foe.co.uk, www.foei.org and www.corporate-responsibility.org