Public relations: ESG management advisory or a communication function?

Public relations must influence and drive business change within management.

You could drive an oil tanker in the say-do gap between the corporate communication from both oil & gas and energy companies and their behaviour.

British Gas was caught forcibly fitting prepayment meters in the homes of vulnerable customers. Parent company Centrica said, “it’s not who we are” and that it had been let down by a third party. The company is expected to report an almost eight-fold rise in earnings later this month.

The UK’s two biggest oil & gas producers BP and Shell have both announced record financial results in the past two weeks.

BP scaled back its commitment to reduce oil & gas production after reporting a record $28bn profit. Its CEO Bernard Looney described the company as a “cash machine”.

Shell doubled its profit to $40bn. Its renewables and energy solutions business, which includes the trading of piped gas and power, generated less than 5% of the group’s profits.

Both businesses were rewarded by the financial markets by shareprice increases.

This is a breakdown between business and the society in which it operates. It is driving a wedge deep into the socio-economic gap and will lead to a breakdown. 

The cost of the impact on biodiversity doesn’t appear in the financial results of British Gas, BP, or Shell. The Dasgupta Review published in 2019 by the UK Treasury called for a fundamental reappraisal of business success to account for its cost to the environment.

Carbon takeback, whereby businesses pay for the carbon dioxide they emit to be buried underground, has been proposed as a possible solution in the Government’s recently published net zero report by Chris Skidmore MP.

If a public relations practitioner has been advising management at BP, British Gas or Shell, in any of these situations, they’ve either been ignored or have been giving poor advice. Research shows that public relations agencies working on behalf of oil & gas companies are a key actor in the climate crisis debate.

There’s a shift in boardrooms to serving a wider stakeholder group than shareholders. This is the move to address environmental, governance and societal (ESG) concerns. ESG must be a business strategy and not a means of presentation or a limp form of corporate social responsibility.

Public relations practitioners have staked a claim in this area of business advisory. It makes sense. Relationship management is a natural area of domain expertise.

The danger however is that the role of public relations stops short of influencing and driving business change within management and is limited to a communication function once decisions have been made. Public relations must serve its higher purpose.

At a time when organisations are being called on to contribute to society and build better business too often their behaviour is the opposite. It’s simply not sustainable.