Post # 102
July 1, 2026
Claire Bodanis
Claire mourns the likely departure of Tate & Lyle from the London Stock Exchange in 2027, while taking inspiration for the future of reporting from what the company has taught her throughout her career.
In Twenty-four years and one month ago, almost to the day, I was fidgeting at my desk on the attic floor of London’s 1 East Poultry Avenue. Excited and nervous in equal measure, I couldn’t settle to anything useful, so abandoned the effort and went to make a cup of tea in the kitchen. Which had the advantage of a window into reception, so I’d be the first to see the courier.
After what felt like hours – but was really only the second cup of tea – the plain brown cardboard box finally arrived. But in that moment, I realised I couldn’t do it on my own. After all, an annual report – especially one’s first – is nothing if not a team effort. So I summoned Smith, our designer, and we opened it together.
In today’s world of PDFs and online publication, it’s hard to imagine the thrill tinged with fear that accompanies the denouement of opening the box of advance copies when it arrives from the printer.
You’ve done every check possible – the proof reads, the scatter proofs, the book proofs, the wet proofs, the sign-off on press – but still, you can’t really see the whole thing until you have the final, printed version in your hands. Did we miss anything? It’s why we always got advance copies sent to the agency – Pauffley, if you were wondering – to check and make sure nothing was wrong before the client got theirs. Just in case an error had slipped through, or something had shifted at the printer.
I will never forget opening that box. Tate & Lyle’s annual report, 2002. Printed in four colours plus two specials – Tate & Lyle’s own metallic bronze and corporate blue. Its perfect bronze spine and inside covers still shimmer on my bookshelf today. Every line in place, every headline clear, every one of its 76 pages, perfect. It even smelled perfect.
I cried.
This year, and twenty-four annual reports with Tate & Lyle later, I had another weep on publication day.
Not, this time, because of the astounding beauty of the printed copy. I’ve got used to that. And let’s face it, annual reports are not quite so beautiful now that they’re so long, and attention has shifted online.
Rather, I cried because I found out that next year’s annual report will be my last; because it will also be Tate & Lyle’s last.[1] The announcement of the takeover by US company Ingredion of this last bastion of the original FT30 (set up in 1935) came almost simultaneously with the publication of the 2026 annual report.
Now is not the time to write about my – and Falcon Windsor’s – immense debt of gratitude to Tate & Lyle (and to Rowan Adams, my client since day one), or about everything the company and the people there have meant to me personally since my reporting career began. I’ll save that for when our story with Tate & Lyle really is over. Suffice to say that I’ll do everything I can ‘to make the 2027 annual report our best ever’, to quote Tamsin Vine, Tate & Lyle’s Chief People Officer, as she passed me the kleenex.
Instead, with the UK Government’s Modernisation of Corporate Reporting review (MCR) coming our way in the next few weeks (politics permitting), I thought I’d see if there was anything I could learn from revisiting that short, succinct, beautiful 2002 publication. (I can’t send you a link to it, I’m afraid – Tate & Lyle’s online annual reports only go back to 2014! And metallics don’t really shimmer on screen anyway.)
Leaving aside the change from print to online, what strikes me most is how easy it is to understand the business and find the key information. To be fair that’s because, apart from a select few areas (financials and remuneration; safety, energy, water and waste indices; and charitable donations), there’s little in the way of numbers; and not much information about the business beyond a two-page company description and a list of Board members. But when I look at Tate & Lyle’s annual report today, the key information we reported in 2002 – albeit with a lot more detail and data behind it – is largely still the key information we report today.
Turning to commentary, the 2002 report has a Chairman’s Statement, a Chief Executive’s Review, and an Operating and Financial Review, which was authored by the Group Finance Director. (This was before British companies picked up the American habit of calling the senior finance person the CFO. Note to self – must find out when Tate & Lyle’s Managing Director was renamed CEO!) Not so very different from today then, except that there wasn’t much more in the annual report aside from those three statements plus the accounts (and they were all a lot shorter).
The real change, aside from length, is today’s more forward-looking focus on business strategy and targets – definitely an innovation worth having. I’m also a big fan of proper disclosure relating to all material issues, not just financial; as opposed to the one-liner approach of 2002.
But what we’ve gained in detail we’ve definitely lost in meaning, because today’s unwieldy, overlapping structure of strategic and governance reporting makes it difficult to find that meaning – the commentary – in the thicket of dislocated disclosure requirements. And do we really need a seven-and-a-half-page auditor’s report to tell us everything’s tickety-boo, as opposed to the three-quarter-page version we found in 2002? Just think – if the whole annual report had increased by the same proportion, Tate & Lyle’s 2026 annual report would have a whopping 760 pages, compared with its actual 188!
The MCR has promised us a ‘holistic approach’ to reforming corporate reporting. And I hope it really is holistic, because to my mind, the only solution is to look at the annual report as a whole. And in doing so, remind ourselves that it achieves its objective of sharing decision-useful information with investors and other stakeholders, by providing a set of accurate disclosures on everything that’s material; plus the truthful opinion of management, and the Board, as to what those disclosures mean for the company and its prospects.
What would that look like in practice?[2] It means adding some forward-looking, strategic discussion to 2002’s commentary about the material issues. And expanding the rest of the disclosures to provide the meaningful detail required for material information.
I will certainly be bringing that mindset to our own response to the MCR consultation, and will see what can be done within existing regulations to bring it to Tate & Lyle’s annual report 2027 as well. Now that really would be a ‘best ever’…
Footnotes
1. Subject to shareholder and other customary approvals, of course!
2. We produced our own new model for corporate reporting for the age of AI based on these principles, and submitted it to the Department for Business and Trade to help inform the MCR. Please do have a read and see what you think!