The UK Sustainability Reporting Standards (UK SRS) set the bar for the sustainability information that companies should disclose to key financial stakeholders. B Corp provides a robust framework and community for achieving and demonstrating strong performance, taking into account various stakeholders and sustainability topics.
Together, these frameworks combine focused action and decision-useful disclosure, ensuring your reporting directly aligns with your responsible business practices.
The UK SRS: A New Standard for Transparency
The UK SRS is soon to be a foundation stone of corporate disclosure in the UK. Rooted in the globally recognised International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) standards, the UK SRS will provide a consistent, comparable, and decision-making framework for disclosing general sustainability information, specific climate-related risks and opportunities, and articulating how related material topics are embedded into your business strategy, governance, and operations.
What does it mean for business?
Drawing heavily from IFRS S1 (General Requirements for Disclosure of Sustainability-related Financial Information) and IFRS S2 (Climate-related Disclosures), the UK SRS will require businesses to:
- Disclose Financially Material Sustainability Information: The core of UK SRS lies in financial materiality. This means companies must identify and report on sustainability-related risks and opportunities that are reasonably expected to affect their cash flow, access to finance, or cost of capital over the short, medium, or long term. This isn’t just about environmental impact; it extends to all sustainability topics that are financially relevant to the business.
- Climate-Specific Disclosures: UK SRS will closely mirror IFRS S2, focusing specifically on climate-related financial disclosures. This includes detailing risks and opportunities, and importantly, a mandatory disclosure of Scope 1 and 2 emissions, with Scope 3 emissions reporting strongly encouraged.
- Integration with Business Strategy: Businesses will be expected to demonstrate how identified sustainability risks and opportunities are considered and integrated into their general business strategy and decision-making processes. The standards are empowering businesses to move beyond mere compliance to strategically embedding sustainability.
- Robust Data and Governance: Accurate and reliable sustainability data will be essential. Companies will need to establish robust processes, procedures, and internal controls for data collection, which may be subject to independent third-party assurance.
Who does this affect?
While initially voluntary, the UK SRS is likely to become mandatory for listed and large companies in the near future – signalling new expectations for integrating high-quality sustainability disclosure into corporate reporting.
B Corp New Standards
B Corp is a global movement of businesses using profit for purpose. In April 2025, B Corp updated its certification standards, raising the bar for social and environmental performance.
The current B Impact Assessment (BIA), a free online tool that will be replaced at the end of 2025, evaluated a company’s holistic ESG performance using a scoring system. With the new standards, which will come into effect in 2026, businesses are required to demonstrate impact against a set of minimum performance requirements, across seven topics:
- Purpose & Stakeholder Governance: Acting in accordance with a defined purpose, contributing to an inclusive, equitable, and regenerative economic system for all people and the planet.
- Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion: Building inclusive and diverse work environments and contributing meaningfully to just and equitable communities.
- Fair work: Providing good quality jobs with positive workplace cultures.
- Human Rights: Treating people with dignity and respecting their human rights.
- Climate Action: Taking action to combat climate change and its impacts, aligned with the latest science.
- Environmental Stewardship and Circularity: Demonstrating environmental stewardship and contributing to the circular economy in their operations and value chain.
- Government Affairs and Collective Action: Leading the way to foster shared understanding and solutions for an equitable, inclusive, and regenerative economy.
What do the minimum requirements look like?
For example, a minimum requirement within ‘fair work’ might include the annual evaluation of employee engagement and workplace culture. These will be tailored to a company’s size, sector, and geography of operation, ensuring applicability and relevance across diverse businesses.
Key Similarities Between UK SRS and B Corp: Interoperability
Despite their different origins and primary aims, there’s a degree of overlap – or “interoperability” – between the UK SRS and the new B Corp standards. In particular, there is a shared emphasis on how businesses can understand and integrate impacts, risks, and opportunities into strategy.
Both frameworks require businesses to:
- Understand Climate Impacts, Risks, and Opportunities: Both the UK SRS and the B Corp “Climate Action” impact topic require a thorough understanding of a company’s climate impacts, the risks they pose, and the opportunities they present. This involves assessing exposures to both physical and transition climate risks.
- Integrate into Strategy and Decision-Making: Once these impacts and risks are identified, each framework requires businesses to explain how these considerations are integrated into their strategy and decision-making. For UK SRS, this information must be disclosed; for B Corp, businesses will be assessed on how they adopt this approach, based on the information they disclose publicly and directly with B Lab.
Key Differences: Transparency vs. Performance
- UK SRS: Focused on Transparency (Financial Materiality): By adopting the ISSB standards, is primarily concerned with providing transparent sustainability-related financial information to investors and capital providers. SRS requires a single materiality assessment focused on financial materiality, determining the sustainability matters that affect the company’s enterprise value, be that through revenue, costs, or investment factors. This is an “outside-in” perspective: how the world impacts the business.
- B Corp: Focused on Performance (Impact Materiality): B Corp certification, on the other hand, is about demonstrating and improving performance across social and environmental impact areas. Its assessment focuses on impact materiality – assessing a company’s significant impacts on people and the environment, with less attention on the immediate financial impact. This is an “inside-out” perspective: how the business impacts the world.
This difference in materiality perspective highlights a crucial point: the UK SRS asks “What sustainability issues affect our bottom line?”, while B Corp assesses “What impact are we having on the world, and how can we do better?”.
Where to start?: Embracing Double Materiality
No matter how mature your businesses’ ESG strategy is – whether you’re already a leader or just getting started – there’s much to learn from these frameworks and how they’re shaping the future of business. One clear lesson learnt from regulatory and B Corp changes in the past is to focus on careful preparation and seeking expert guidance. Working with a trusted partner and asking the right questions now will ensure that you’re fully prepared for requirements to come.
Our recommendation is twofold: completing a double materiality assessment, and then using the B Corp framework to continually evaluate your efforts.
Once risks and impacts are identified through a double materiality lens, the UK SRS requires disclosures on how these are integrated into business strategy and decision-making. B Corp echoes this but goes one step further, offering a best-practice framework for what this integration should look like – sharing insights into how businesses can embed purpose and stakeholder considerations into core operations.
By conducting a double materiality assessment, businesses can:
- Achieve Comprehensive Understanding: Gain a complete picture of their sustainability landscape, identifying both financial implications and broader social and environmental footprint.
- Ensure Compliance and Beyond: Meet the specific reporting requirements of the UK SRS while building a foundation to pursue or maintain B Corp certification.
- Drive Integrated Strategy: Develop a more robust and truly sustainable business strategy that addresses financial resilience and positive impact.
- Optimise Resources: Avoid duplicating efforts by streamlining data collection and analysis for both frameworks.
Leveraging B Corp for Long-term Success
The B Corp Framework provides strategic direction for building sustainability into your business model, providing recommendations on policies, principles and processes that will support data collection and reporting practices.
- Build a Culture of Continuous Improvement: The B Corp framework fosters a mindset of ongoing progress, pushing companies to continually enhance their social and environmental performance.
- Prepare for Future Regulation: By proactively adopting best practices, aligning with the B Corp standards will help businesses adapt to future sustainability regulation.
For more information on B Corp certification, preparing for UK SRS or completing double materiality assessments, please get in contact with us here.
