Our approach to voting adopts best-practice corporate governance and ties in with our wider stewardship priorities to reflect our clients’ values. We take a strong position on excessive and poorly aligned executive remuneration proposals, gender diversity in company leadership and environmental sustainability.
As part of our active ownership programme, we aim to vote at all public meetings held by our investee companies. In the year to June 2023, we voted on 3,092 resolutions at 196 company meetings.
To increase the impact of our votes we write to all companies prior to the meeting about our plans. We place particular focus on any resolution where we do not propose to support management and provide an overview of our concerns.
To air our dissenting voice, we use our votes when relevant directors are due to be re-elected. For instance, we vote against the chair of the remuneration committee where we have concerns about executive pay plans, the chair of the nomination committee if the company has a poor approach to gender diversity, and the chair if the business is not adequately addressing climate-related risk.
Our voting activity is managed by Institutional Shareholder Services. However, we use a bespoke template which led us to oppose nearly five times as many management proposals as the standard ISS template. The records below illustrate the impact of our template (data for the year to 30 June 2023).
