Poor Tesco Performance in New Corporate Ethics League Table

On January 31st 2005, a fresh ethical ranking of all the companies in the FTSE 100 will be published by Ethical Consumer Information Systems. Topping the table are real estate companies, pubs and hotel chains, and a copper miner. Bottom of the pile are supermarkets, food multinationals and oil and gas.
Interestingly, Tesco, who only two weeks ago reported to be on target to achieve profits in excess of £2bn this year, sits rather uncomfortably at the foot of this ethical league table.

As well as screening against traditional ethical issues such as nuclear power and pollution, the ranking is also based on the levels of criticism by citizens groups attracted by each company. This has produced a new type of ethical rating, unlike any seen before.

According to Rob Harrison from the Ethical Consumer, “Our basic ratings give quite a lot of weight to animal issues like vivisection and factory farming. This means that food companies and supermarkets fare particularly badly. Land and hotels only do well because, by their nature, they avoid controversial areas like genetic engineering and nuclear power.”
Users though can choose to rank companies or products by any of 20 ethical criteria and create ‘personal’ rankings which best fit with their own ethical priorities.

The league table is one part of the Corporate Critic database project which is designed to promote social change by informing purchasers about corporate ethics. www.corporatecritic.org automatically calculates new ‘ethiscores’ for 30,000 companies daily, according to information added by researchers in Manchester.

“Like schools league tables,” says Rob Harrison, “the new corporate ethical ranking is not the whole story. Nevertheless league tables have a good track record in helping to promote public debate about what good standards are, and we believe this product to be both timely and important for improving corporate behaviour in 2005.”

For further information regarding the Corporate Critic database and the work of Ethical Consumer, please contact:

Rob Harrison
Ethical Consumer Information Systems Limited
Tel: 0161 227 9099
Email: rob@ethicalconsumer.org