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PLANNING - legal and regulatory analysis and management - P2
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Key Questions
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‘What are we committed to?’
‘What must we do to be a responsible organisation?’
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Alignment with principles
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Organisations should ensure that:
| They comply with relevant legislation, their vision, mission and any operating principles they have adopted. |
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When
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Either after or as part of the performance review process (depending on the level of immediate detail required) and drawing on the organisation’s work to understand its actions, impacts and outcomes.
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Who
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Project Champions, Senior Management Team, SIGMA Implementation Team, Legal Department and advisers.
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Legal and regulatory assessment
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Key activities
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Establishing the organisation's level of conformity with/performance against relevant current (and anticipated future) legal, contractual, regulatory and voluntary requirements, including:
| - | Local, national, regional and international law and regulation |
| - | Internal corporate standards and initiatives |
| - | Contractual requirements laid down by customers, where they contain environmental, social or economic criteria |
| - | Best practice codes of conduct or practice and other voluntary instruments (e.g. the UN Global Compact) |
| - | Customer's contractual requirements |
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Suggested resources
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| SIGMA Guiding Principles |
| Actions, impacts and outcomes report (developed in P3) |
| Performance review report |
| Reference texts and software tools/databases for social, ethical, governance, environmental and economic (including financial and accounting) law and regulation |
| The UK Environment Agency's 'NetReg's' web-resources covering environmental law www.environment-agency.gov.uk/netregs |
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Outcomes & outputs
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Map of relevant legislation, self-regulatory and contractual requirements and associated regulatory bodies (including regulatory contacts list), showing current state of alignment/compliance/performance with same. |
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Legal and regulatory management
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Key activities
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| Assigning roles and responsibilities to manage the above and achieve improvement targets |
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Suggested resources
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| Reference texts and software tools/databases for social, ethical, governance, environmental and economic (including financial and accounting) law and regulation |
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Outcomes & outputs
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Process for managing and updating legal, regulatory and other relevant knowledge, including organogram showing roles and responsibilities for legal and regulatory management |
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Compliance reporting
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Key activities
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Drafting, maintaining and communicating organisational compliance reports and plans (to ensure future compliance) |
Note: This activity should ultimately be linked to the establishment and testing of internal and external controls, mechanisms and technologies - see Control and influence sub-phase D3.
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Suggested resources
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Outcomes & outputs
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Summary compliance/improvements report |
| Communication of compliance/improvements report to relevant stakeholders |
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Preventive, corrective or innovative actions
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Key activities
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| · Undertaking and completing any urgent preventive/corrective or innovative actions identified as required to maintain compliance or avoid future non-compliance |
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Outcomes & outputs
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Preventive, corrective or innovative action plans, including timeframes for completion of actions and subsequent review of effectiveness. |
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Strategy and tactics for improvement
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Key activities
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| Agreeing the strategy and tactics to ensure that (known or potential) future legislation and regulation and any changes to self-regulatory initiatives are managed to ensure compliance and performance improvement |
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Outcomes & outputs
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| Mechanisms in place to periodically review the implications of future legislation, self-regulatory and contractual requirements and regulatory frameworks and their implications for the organisation. |
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Key Issues
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Useful documents:
In order to provide robust information in support of this sub-phase, organisations should ensure they have appropriate related:
| Site-level documentation |
| Records |
| Compliance plans |
| Monitoring data and analysis |
In addition to the legal issues, implementing organisations will need to capture information concerning:
| The number, nature and scale of internal initiatives, including related self-regulatory actions |
| Areas of overlap, if any |
| Internal or commercially available databases |
| How information relates directly to their sphere of operations and impacts |
| Compliance auditing procedures |
| How continual improvement initiatives relate to identified legal and regulatory requirements |
| This level of information could be included in the performance review and any subsequent report. Alternatively, implementing organisations may wish to submit the review to senior management at an earlier stage. |
Real-world tips:
Within the scope of the implementation programme, organisations will need in-depth knowledge of the key requirements in relevant social, environmental and economic law. They will also need to know how they can keep this information up-to-date, how to keep track of legislative and policy developments and how to communicate these issues internally to the appropriate line management for further analysis and in support of decision-making.
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