“In the past year, we have brought into effect a new Corporate Governance Code and – the first of its kind – a Stewardship Code for investors. We have launched a consultation paper on Effective Company Stewardship and a series of discussions on best practice in fulfilment of boards’ responsibilities with respect to risk, in order to determine what changes may be needed to bring the existing Turnbull guidance up to date. We have taken the opportunity of an inquiry by the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee into the market for audit services to express our concerns in this area, and invited Lord Sharman to conduct an inquiry into the questions raised about going concern statements. We have enhanced transparency through reports by the Audit Inspection Unit, participated in the debate on the role of accounting standards during the crisis, and consulted on the future of UK GAAP.

Our key challenge for the coming year will be to weave the disparate activities of the FRC into two functional strands: one concerned with the setting of codes and standards, the other with the conduct of companies and professionals. We will be consulting, together with our sponsoring department, on whether some elements of our current activities can be dispensed with altogether, while ensuring that our powers to discharge our core responsibilities are vested properly in the FRC, and are adequate and proportionate.

We will be keeping in particularly close touch with our stakeholders, on whom we will rely heavily for advice in our efforts to create an FRC that is:

• easier to understand, focused and clear in its purpose
• disciplined, proportionate and restrained in the execution of that purpose
• flexible, acute and sensitive to the impact of its work on companies, markets, professions and the people who work in all three.”

The Financial Reporting Council (FRC), the UK's independent regulator responsible for promoting high quality corporate governance and reporting to foster investment, has published its Annual Report for 2010/11.

Annual Report for 2010/11

The Annual Report describes the ways in which the FRC, working closely with its stakeholders, has contributed to promoting high quality confidence in corporate reporting and governance during 2010/11.

The Annual Report 2010/11 is available on the FRC website at http://www.frc.org.uk/about/annual.cfm.