USS has recently upgraded its website to provide broader information on how it votes at shareholder meetings. Transparency about member’s investments is essential and this upgrade is welcome. The voting information can be found here. Votes have been categorised under 16 different headings – Environmental, Audit related, Governance, Director Election, etc.
The records only date from April 1st 2025 which makes it very difficult to assess whether past votes have influenced corporate behaviour. Nevertheless, DivestUSS reviewed all the available voting records under the heading of Environmental, which includes all climate-related motions, to assess how USS voting compared with corporate recommendations. This covered the period April 1st 2025 to July 22nd 2026.
Concerning the climate emergency, USS repeatedly claims that their policy of “engagement” with companies is the best way to encourage the transition to clean energy. One might think that this plays out in practice most effectively where USS does not vote along with the company management recommendations, so as to put pressure on the company. So let us look at this.
For data up to 22nd July 2026, in all categories, USS recorded 50,650 votes cast, of which 71% agreed with the company’s management recommendation and 28% were against or a vote was withheld. This suggest some shareholder pressure was being applied in general.
But looking at the Environmental category we see a completely different picture. Out of 244 meetings with Environmental motions put to shareholders, USS only voted against management recommendations in 9 of those meetings, in a total of 11 separate votes. Amongst those 11 Environmental votes, 2 were abstentions and 4 others were not in the Climate sub-category, leaving just 5 Climate votes against management recommendations. Only one of the companies where these 5 votes were made was an energy company, and that was an electric utility. So, as far as motions in the Climate category were concerned, USS voted unequivocally against management in precisely 5 votes in 244 meetings.
It is a similar situation with both management-initiated motions and those put forward by shareholders, in the Environment category. In only 2 of 31 management-put motions did USS not vote for the management motion, and here they just abstained, and in only 9 out of 213 Environmental motions put by shareholders did USS vote against the management recommendation. Two of these (ANZ and Macquarie) are the examples USS give in their latest Stewardship Report. One might comment that a shareholder may show disagreement with a management team over issues by voting against reappointments or on salary or performance-related motions. If those issues were climate-related this would surely translate into votes against management on Environmental motions.
On votes on the appointment of Directors, we checked USS’s records in three leading cases where organisations have egregiously backtracked on climate commitments – Santander, HSBC and NatWest[1]. At the AGMs for Santander on 26th March 2026, HSBC on 8th May 2026 and NatWest on 28th April 2026, USS in no case voted against Director appointments on these climate grounds.
In summary, in only 5 environmental climate votes in 244 meetings – little more than 2% – did USS vote unequivocally against the company management recommendation. None of these votes even involved a fossil fuel company. USS did not vote against Director appointments as a protest in three leading cases where companies were taking significant retrograde steps on their climate policies.
There are only two explanations for this. One is that USS believes that basically all of its circa 1500 public market investments have climate policies that are acceptable to them. The other is that USS’s policy of “engagement” is just rubber-stamping, and as far as the climate is concerned, there is really no point them turning up at annual general meetings at all.
Maybe we missed something, but if USS wants to continue to claim that it is influencing company behaviour on the climate emergency, it needs to explain exactly how this is working. Repeating stale cliches about engagement is not going to fix this and every day it is becoming more and more apparent that as far as responding to the climate emergency is concerned, we are running out of road.
USS’s Stewardship and Voting Policy states that “the Trustee believes that when investments are run effectively and their environmental and social risks, like climate change or health and safety, are appropriately managed, risk-adjusted returns can be improved over the long-term, and stresses that “Voting is central to effective stewardship and provides the necessary checks and balances on management behaviour and performance.” The large-scale absence of votes against management recommendations on Climate and more generally Environment motions give no indication that these “checks and balances” are being applied in practice.
USS should write a shareholder voting policy to decarbonise all companies that use fossil fuels, or keep funding it: banks, auto-makers, industry. The shareholder voting policy should have clear reasons to vote against the board: failure to have a transition plan in line with the Paris Agreement targets as a baseline, and then more ambitiously where technology is readily available and could be adopted. This should be seen as a measure to de-risk, and is about serving the long-term interests of beneficiaries.
DivestUSS, September 2026
[1] ShareAction has reported that “Santander has materially weakened its coal and oil & gas policies and significantly increased its fossil fuel financing. It has dropped its absolute emissions reduction target for the oil & gas sector, replacing this with an emissions intensity target which omits Scope 3 (~97% of emissions from O&G).”
“NatWest Group has abandoned some of the most material elements of its oil & gas restrictions and failed to provide adequate transparency while revising its climate targets. The changes made by the bank to its risk acceptance criteria for oil & gas clients removes constraints on the largest fossil fuel companies and gives the bank more freedom to support businesses pursuing oil & gas outside the UK.”
“HSBC has significantly weakened its controls on oil & gas companies, changed the standards it uses to engage with non-EU and -OECD thermal coal clients in ways that make them less clear, and diluted the ambition of its decarbonisation targets.”