Our survey approach

The 2023 UK Spencer Stuart Board Index covers the top 150 companies with a premium listing on the London Stock Exchange, according to market value on 30 April 2023. Market capitalisations range from £505.2 billion (Shell) to £1.9 billion (Grafton). As with previous editions, our research excludes investment trusts and TUI, which has a German two-tier board structure.

The purpose of the survey is to provide a comprehensive review of governance practices in these 150 companies at a given point, in order to identify significant trends over time.

There are 11 changes of constituents since last year’s edition, compared with 19 in 2022.

Comments on changes:

• Seven companies are included by virtue of increased market value. They are: Balfour Beatty, Britvic, Energean, Grainger, Network International Holdings, QinetiQ Group, and WH Smith.
• Three of the new entrants (Dunelm Group, SSP Group, and Vistry Group) are returning, having dropped out of the top 150 in 2022.
• One company entered the sample for the first time by listing on the London Stock Exchange in July 2022: Haleon (consumer healthcare).
• Four companies dropped out of the top 150 during the relevant review period: Carnival, Future, IWG, and Ninety One. (RIT Capital Partners also dropped out, but as an investment trust is excluded from our survey).
• Ferguson moved its primary listing to the US in May 2022 and is no longer a FTSE 100 constituent. 
• Avast delisted after merging with NortonLifeLock in November 2022 (the new entity is called Gen Digital).
• In July 2022, Ultra Electonics Holdings was acquired by Cobham and delisted in August. Meggitt delisted in September 2022, after its acquisition by Parker Hannifin. In January 2023, AVEVA and HomeServe delisted after their acquisitions by Schneider Electric and Brookfield Asset Management respectively.
• Mediclinic International is included, although it delisted in June 2023, following its acquisition by a consortium of investment firms.
• Two companies have changed their names: Royal Mail changed to International Distributions Services and Electrocomponents to RS Group.

As in previous editions, industrial and manufacturing companies dominate the sector breakdown.

Data has been compiled from publicly available sources; we have invited the constituents to verify our data. Board composition was taken on 30 April 2023 and remuneration information is taken, for the most part, from the latest published annual report.

Minority ethnic diversity data was collected from annual reports. This data includes only those directors who have self-reported as having a minority ethnic background. While we recognise the limitations of the homogenous term “minority ethnic”, we have restricted our research to comply with the framework and targets set out by the Parker Review and the CBI’s Change the Race Ratio campaign.

Due to their unique role, we exclude board chairs from our analysis of the split between executive and non-executive directors, and we also examine their tenure separately. However, chairs are included in our data on foreign directors, age, women, and minority ethnic representation. Data on CEOs and CFOs only includes those who sit on their company’s board.

Foreign directors are defined as being of a different nationality from the company on whose board they sit. If a director has multiple nationalities, one of which is British, they are considered a UK national. The new directors category relates to those who joined the board in the 12 months preceding the cut-off date, i.e. between 1 May 2022 and 30 April 2023.

In our tables we state remuneration data in the currency used by the respective companies in their annual report. We convert all figures to sterling for our broader analysis, using the average Bank of England exchange rate for the relevant financial year.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the company secretaries of the top 150 companies with a premium listing on the London Stock Exchange who kindly reviewed data from their own boards as we prepared this 28^th edition of the UK Spencer Stuart Board Index.

Spencer Stuart contributors

London: Tessa Bamford, Suniti Chauhan, Chris Gaunt, Sandrine Roseberg, Jonathan Smith, Marie-Liesse de Chergé, Keith Fryer, Alastair Rolfe, Alice Wyatt
Amsterdam: Livia Enomoto, Erdil Sen