Responsible Investor

EIRIS: Peter Webster looks back at 25 years of responsible research

UK research company celebrates 25th year of corporate and SRI scrutiny.

Twenty-five years is an interesting timeframe to look back over the development of socially responsible investment. Peter Webster, chief executive of London-based Ethical Investment Research Services, known familiarly as Eiris, which celebrates its 25th birthday this month, is ideally positioned to do just that. Webster has lead the organisation since it started in 1983 as a charity foundation set up by a group of churches and charities to research their ethical investment concerns. Back then Webster and one colleague began examining 500 companies. The lesson of recent history is that some things change radically while others stay the same. In 1983, US President Ronald Reagan announced the planned ‘Star Wars’ missile interception programme and the lowest temperature on earth was recorded in Vostok Station, Antarctica. In the UK car seatbelts became mandatory while in the US Microsoft launched a little known computer programme called Word. Webster laughs: “Nowadays there are university courses in corporate social responsibility.” Casting his mind back, he says South Africa and apartheid was one of the major concerns of socially conscious investors; notably the role of Barclays, the UK bank, in the country: “Barclays came

under a lot of fire, but they, of course, weren’t only company with big interests in South Africa. Part of what drew me to the work with Eiris is that it didn’t pretend it could solve issues like apartheid, but wanted to provide a practical information service to investors and let them decide what to do. Our work was to look at who was supporting the apartheid regime by supplying computers or security. They’re the same issues you have today with the Burmese regime.”
When its founding members decided Eiris’ work could be valuable to the general asset management market they created a separate independent research company. Eiris retains its non-profit ethos, however, and still uses its income to support projects that promote socially responsible investment via the Eiris Foundation.
Webster says: “We began our research by looking very heavily at non-company sources such as NGO reports, UK government requirements and EU codes of conduct. This was essential then because companies didn’t actually provide much information. There were no environmental reports, or perhaps just a few trial-runs, along with attempts by some companies at social auditing.”

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