We’re delighted to launch our latest Annual Stewardship Report where you’ll find even more information about our stewardship and engagement activities from the last year.

We hope this report demonstrates the importance of stewardship and engagement throughout  Castlefield, and goes some way to explain why we’re known as the thoughtful investor ®.  

UK Stewardship Code signatories

We successfully retained our status as signatories to the Financial Reporting Council (FRC)’s UK Stewardship Code (following their review of our report covering 2020) and have developed our reporting further still, with the aim to renew our signatory status this year.

The report closely follows the FRC’s reporting requirements and covers a wide range of topics but is primarily designed to outline our approach to sustainable and responsible investment and how we use our role as active owners to reflect the values of our clients. As long-term investors, we believe we have a duty to represent our clients’ values as we build relationships with company management and investor relation teams. We feel that these actions can have influence and will support the adoption of best practice across the market over time. A number of case examples from investee firms have been included, to showcase these in practice. You can find these in the ‘Stewardship & Engagement action’ section here.

Demonstrating our investment impact and positive themes

Other new sections in this year’s report include a summary of our first impact assessment, which has been conducted by an independent third party (Impact Cubed), to provide an external analysis of how our funds fared on metrics such as carbon efficiency, executive pay, and social and environmental good when compared to a relevant benchmark. In addition to this external assessment, we have also conducted our own exercise to map all of our holding to our positive investment themes, so our clients can see which sustainable themes their investments contribute to.

Net zero commitments

We are also happy to announce Castlefield’s Net Zero Policy which includes a commitment to be net zero for our own operation and supply chain by 2030 and our aim to be net zero in our investment portfolio by 2040. The report goes into more detail about what this means for our business and explains some of the initial work we have done to assess how our investee companies are approaching the move to a lower carbon economy.

We hope this report provides insight into how we consider the principles of responsible and investment at all stages of our investment process and illustrates the importance of taking a ‘thoughtful’ approach.

Read the full report below or download the pdf