Laura O’Shea, from M&G Investments and Guy Rolfe, of M&G Life Investment Office, on behalf of Prudential Assurance Company (PAC) share their Stewardship highlights and reflect on another year as signatories to the FRC UK Stewardship Code.

Have a look at our M&G Investments and Prudential Assurance Company (PAC) Stewardship Reports for the long read.

We’re proud to share that both Prudential Assurance Company (PAC) and M&G Investments have successfully retained their signatory status to the Financial Reporting Council’s (FRC) UK Stewardship Code 2020, the gold standard for stewardship in our industry. Their respective stewardship reports cover the stewardship activities undertaken during 2024.

By considering how our clients’ investments affect – and are affected by – what’s happening in our society and environment we can better support the financial goals of our clients and customers by delivering long-term value and influence positive outcomes.

Stewardship as a lever for change

Our stewardship activities, which include engagement and voting, play a central role in supporting our M&G plc Group sustainability approach, by ensuring the responsible allocation of capital, from tackling the climate crisis to addressing inequality. Both our asset owner and asset manager run dedicated engagement programs, with the aim of influencing positive change;

• M&G Investments, our Asset Manager uses its position as a long-term, active investor to promote good practices at our investee companies; and

• PAC, our Asset Owner, works with its chosen investment managers on ESG risks and opportunities.

Laura O’Shea shares Stewardship Highlights at M&G Investmenets

1. Our 2024 engagement activity continued to support the Group net zero 2050 target through our climate engagement programme, where we focused on the most carbon-intensive companies we hold, our Hot 100. By engaging with companies on the implications of climate change and encouraging them to develop plans for the transition, we’re supporting thems to create the solutions and helping them identify how to do this in a financially resilient way.
2. In our 2024 stewardship report we included the outcomes from our new ‘Impact Engagement’ programme, which is led by M&G’s Sustain and Impact team. For holdings within our Impact Strategies, engagements focus on supporting or challenging the company to protect or increase their primary positive impact. These can cover a variety of topics but may involve challenging companies to set more ambitious targets for the impact achieved, supporting them to allocate capital more actively to impactful activities, or encouraging them to report more clearly on their potential positive impact.

Guy Rolfe shares Stewardship Highlights at Prudential Assurance Company (PAC)

1. As PAC, we act in the best interests of our policyholders and clients, one of the ways we do this is to continue to build on our monitoring and oversight of engagement activity across our investments. Engagement is carried out on our behalf by our appointed asset managers who lead the conversation with the companies we invest in.
2. Last year our Annual Letter of ESG Priorities, which is distributed to all appointed asset managers, along with our Engagement and Voting template, focused on progress toward net zero, as well as measures to address modern slavery. Our PAC 2024 Stewardship Report features case studies demonstrating our approach.
3. As part of our commitment to transparency, we introduced a new Sustainability Report for our PruFund Planet range of five funds. This provided transparency in evaluating the alignment of these funds to our customers' objectives.

Find out more about our progress

We continue to evolve our group approach to sustainability in 2025. We’ve updated our Group sustainability framework and last month published our M&G Plc Climate Transition Plan, introducing our Group Climate Action Framework.

A key lever of the Framework, outlined within the Transition Plan, is ‘Align’ – the actions we will take to engage with companies, through stewardship, to align with climate goals. We have also introduced M&G Investments Climate Engagement Roadmap, which sets out a three‑year timeline for engagement with the most carbon-intensive companies that we hold, you can find out more in our Climate Transition Plan.

Disclaimer: The value of your investment can go down as well as up and so you might not get back the amount you put in. Your capital’s at risk and you may not get back what you put in.