Reflections from the roundtable: what are sustainability leaders asking about UK SRS?

We held a breakfast briefing on seizing the UK SRS opportunity in a room full of forward-thinking sustainability leaders. Here, we discussed how voluntary adoption of sustainability standards can be a strategic move that pays off.

While UK SRS reporting is expected to become mandatory in the near future, and we are eagerly awaiting the draft standards to be released this month, our discussion focused on the question, ‘Why should a business choose to adopt these disclosures voluntarily?’

The energy in the room was fantastic, and the questions from the group really highlighted the real-world hurdles businesses are navigating.

Below are the key questions and takeaways from our session.

How can I align with UK SRS and CSRD?

Something many people in the room were facing was a future of reporting against UK SRS and the EU CSRD, and this varied across Group level and entities falling in scope.

It’s worth noting that the foundations of UK SRS and CSRD are different. UK SRS focuses on financial materiality, CSRD focuses on double materiality, making its disclosures more complex. Therefore, if you begin by benchmarking your current reporting against the more granular CSRD, you can begin to identify key gaps and opportunities and, most importantly, create a roadmap for compliance across the Group and entity level disclosures.

Complying with these standards requires a business shift in how sustainability risks, metrics, strategy and governance are integrated into the business – this takes time and planning.

How can I integrate sustainability? Should I be following the Integrated Reporting Framework?

At Gather, we know that integrating sustainability is done best when it’s approached authentically. This means including sustainability in your business strategy and showing how sustainability can create value. Best practice also includes sustainability as a key thread throughout a company’s communications.

At a compliance level, the UK SRS encourages integration through its requirements to disclose how sustainability is represented in governance, risk and strategy. While it is not necessary to follow the Integrated Reporting Framework, you should be considering how sustainability creates value for your business. By articulating how sustainability risks and opportunities can impact your financial resilience, integrating your communications will feel authentic.

UK SRS requires disclosure of detail many haven’t reported before. How can I ensure my reporting remains readable and understood by humans and AI?

New disclosures can add complexity to an already lengthy Annual Report, and finding the right balance between detail and readability remains a challenge for many businesses.

The tide is changing, and in many cases, humans don’t read your report first; AI does. Therefore, you need to create disclosures that are AI-fluent. We recommend considering how to embed disclosures in relevant sections or create an index to highlight where specific disclosures can be found. XBRL tagging will also help with this, acting as the bridge between the human and AI audiences. AI groups content and searches for patterns when formulating its output, so ensuring your sustainability content is both clear from a language perspective and consistent in delivery is crucial.

Complying with these standards isn’t a box-ticking exercise; it’s a business shift. It takes time to build the foundations required for these disclosures. Starting voluntarily now ensures that when the draft standards come into effect, your business is already ahead of the curve.

Get in touch

If you’d like to discuss this, or any other subject, please get in touch with Katy Heather, Head of Sustainability, at katy@gather.london

We’d love to know what you think.