From fossil fuel financing and climate resilience to access to medicines and biodiversity, EQ Investors has been putting questions directly to some of the UK’s biggest company boards.
Annual general meetings may sound like fairly dry corporate events, but they give shareholders a valuable opportunity to question the people ultimately responsible for a company’s strategy.
For responsible investors, this can mean challenging boards on issues that could affect people, the environment and the company’s long-term prospects.
Attending AGMs is one of five tools in EQ Investors’ stewardship strategy, alongside scrutinising shareholder votes, speaking directly to companies, working with other investors and engaging with fund managers.
This AGM season, we questioned boards at major UK-listed companies across five of our six strategic engagement themes.
Why attend AGMs in person?
Physical meetings give shareholders, whether large institutions or individual investors, the chance to be heard directly by a company’s board.
EQ believes this opportunity needs to be protected as more companies consider moving their AGMs online.
Hybrid meetings can make AGMs accessible to people who cannot attend in person. However, a fully virtual meeting may give companies greater control over which questions are heard and make it harder for shareholders to hold boards to account.
The future of in-person AGMs is currently being debated in Parliament, and EQ supports ShareAction’s campaign to protect them in the UK.
Banking and the climate transition
Standard Chartered
We challenged Standard Chartered over its financing of new liquefied natural gas infrastructure in emerging markets.
We asked the bank to undertake country-level transition assessments and set clearer targets to reduce the risk of locking fast-growing markets into long-term fossil fuel use.
Barclays
With oil and gas markets experiencing disruption because of the conflict in Iran, we asked how Barclays would protect its climate commitments and capital allocation plans from short-term geopolitical pressure.
We also asked the bank to assess the credit, transition and reputational risks it could face if those commitments were weakened.
Preparing for physical climate risks
BT
Storm Amy caused an outage on the Scottish island of Tiree in 2025, cutting broadband, mobile and landline services for several weeks.
Against this backdrop, we questioned why BT had downgraded its assessment of physical climate risk from “moderate” to “low”.
We also asked whether the company would provide asset-level information about resilience gaps at its highest-risk UK sites.
Vodafone
Wildfires in Spain and France have highlighted the physical risks that extreme weather can pose to communications infrastructure.
We asked why Vodafone’s climate scenario analysis concluded that its physical risk was limited without publishing the estimated financial exposure behind that conclusion.
We also asked the board to explain who is responsible for managing physical climate risks and what resources have been allocated to the work.
Improving access to medicines
GSK
GSK was recently ranked first in the Access to Medicine Foundation’s Antimicrobial Resistance Benchmark.
We asked the company to explain how much investment and resource it is putting into research and development targeting pathogens identified as priorities by the World Health Organization.
We also asked what regulatory incentives would be needed to support this work as other pharmaceutical companies retreat from the area.
AstraZeneca
Alongside another asset manager, we asked AstraZeneca to publish more detailed data on the number of people reached through its oncology patient access programmes.
This would allow investors to measure progress rather than relying on broad company commitments.
Encouraging healthier food markets
Tesco
Tesco met its target for 65 per cent of its sales to come from healthier products.
However, its replacement commitment promises only “year-on-year healthy sales growth”, without setting a specific benchmark against which that growth can be assessed.
Speaking on behalf of ShareAction’s Healthy Markets investor coalition, which represents more than 50 investors managing $6 trillion, we asked Tesco to introduce a minimum threshold for future progress.
Unilever
With a proposed combination with McCormick under consideration, we asked Unilever to confirm that its nutrition expertise and disclosure commitments would be protected during any transition.
We also pressed the company to introduce a sales-weighted Health Star Rating target, following its weaker position in the independent ATNI nutrition ranking.
Protecting biodiversity
Reckitt
We welcomed Reckitt’s progress on responsible palm oil sourcing, but raised concerns about its fall in Global Canopy’s Forest 500 ranking.
Speaking for the UN Principles for Responsible Investment’s Spring coalition, we asked the company to publish a time-bound plan covering due diligence, traceability and grievance monitoring across all commodities associated with deforestation, rather than palm oil alone.
Antofagasta
Antofagasta’s Los Pelambres mining site has a well-developed biodiversity programme aligned with the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures.
However, it is the only one of the company’s four mines with such a plan.
Centinela, Antucoya and Zaldívar do not currently have biodiversity management plans, despite their proximity to recognised Key Biodiversity Areas and the presence of endangered species. Centinela is also undergoing an expansion.
We asked Antofagasta to provide a timetable for addressing these gaps.
What happens after the AGM?
Asking a question at an AGM does not guarantee immediate action. The quality of the answers given on the day can vary considerably.
However, AGMs allow investors to put their concerns directly to company boards and create a public record of the issues being raised.
They are also one part of a year-round engagement programme. Many of our questions support collaborative campaigns through which investors will continue to repeat their requests and ask companies for more detailed responses.
Our engagement themes run over several years, and the information gathered at AGMs also shapes the questions we put to the managers of the funds held in our portfolios.
For investors, this is a useful reminder to look beyond the companies a fund owns. It is also worth asking how actively the fund manager uses its votes, its voice and its influence once it becomes a shareholder.
We will report on the progress made through these engagements in EQ’s forthcoming impact and sustainability reporting.
