Modernising Corporate Reporting

Modernising corporate reporting was published on 7 September 2026 by the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade and closes at 11:59pm on 30 November 2026. It is a 70-page consultation with four annexes. The announcement that preceded it put the saving at around £230 million a year. It is being reported elsewhere as the United Kingdom scrapping sustainability reporting. That is not what the document says, and the sections below quote it.

Paragraph 7 of the consultation lists, among measures already announced, a plan to “remove the requirement to produce a directors’ report, with some provisions to be removed entirely, and others relocated elsewhere in the annual report”, adding that “Statutory Instruments will be laid before Parliament in due course to give them effect”. The detail sits in Annex A, which records the policy statement of 21 October 2025.

For unquoted companies and LLPs the energy and carbon report sits inside the directors’ report. Paragraph 149 draws the consequence directly: “The location of SECR disclosures will be moved because of the removal of the directors’ report from the annual report”, and the government does “not intend to prescribe a specific reporting location” — companies “will have the freedom to place the disclosure in any area or section of the first half of the annual report they feel is most appropriate”. Nothing there touches who must report or what they must report. See SECR requirements for the duty as it stands.

“We propose to remove most existing strategic reporting requirements and replace them with a core set of baseline narrative disclosures.

These would cover a company’s business model, performance, resources and relationships, strategy, and principal risk exposures.”

Separately, the consultation asks whether a new “very large” company category should be created for certain non-financial reporting obligations — and gives no figures for it, stating that the government “has an open mind on how to proceed”.

Responses close at 11:59pm on 30 November 2026 through the consultation page on GOV.UK. Annex D lists every question by chapter, which is the fastest way to find the ones that bear on your reporting. If SECR is your concern, the questions to read are those on the strategic report and on the location of sustainability and climate-related information; paragraph 150 also invites views on what DESNZ should prioritise in any future reform of energy and carbon reporting.