The Committee on the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance, better known as the Cadbury Committee, was set up in May 1991 to address the concerns increasingly voiced at that time about how UK companies dealt with financial reporting and accountability and the wider implications of this. The Committee was sponsored by the London Stock Exchange, the Financial Reporting Council, and the accountancy profession, and published its final report and recommendations in December 1992. Central to these was a Code of Best Practice and the requirement for companies to comply or to explain to their shareholders why they had not done so. The recommendations and the Code provided the foundation for the current system of corporate governance in the UK and have proved very influential in corporate governance developments throughout the world. While academics and practitioners have explored and discussed the developments in corporate governance since 1992, little attention has been paid to the
processes of code and policy development. This book explores the origins of the Committee, provides rich insights in to the way in which it worked, and documents the reaction to the publication of the Committee's report.

The issues which the Committee addressed are still of great concern: the complex relationships through which corporations are held to account have profound effects on all our lives. The Committee provided a framework for thinking about these issues and established a process through which such thinking could be articulated and continue to evolve.

This book represents a major contribution to the history of the development of UK corporate governance in the late twentieth century: the why, how, what, and when of governance development.

About the Author:
Laura F. Spira, Professor of Corporate Governance, Oxford Brookes University, Judy Slinn, Business Historian; Formerly Reader in Strategy and Business History, Oxford Brookes University

Laura Spira is Professor of Corporate Governance at Oxford Brookes University. Laura trained as a chartered accountant with Peat Marwick Mitchell & Co (now KPMG) in London. She subsequently worked in the National Health Service at regional level in Oxford before joining the Business School at Oxford Brookes University where she has taught on a wide range of courses and undertaken a variety of leadership roles. Laura is Research Relationships Adviser to the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, and a member of the ICAEW Research Advisory Board. Laura was founding treasurer and membership secretary of the British Accounting and Finance Association Corporate Governance Special Interest Group and remains a member of the executive committee. Since 2007, she has acted as co-chair for the annual European Institute of Advanced Studies in Management workshop on corporate governance, held in Brussels.

Judy Slinn has researched the histories of a wide range of companies and organizations, including ICI, Unilever, Morgan Grenfell, and the electricity supply industry. She has researched and written histories of four major City law firms (Freshfields, Linklaters, Clifford Chance, and Ashursts), as well as those of pharmaceutical companies (Glaxo, Abbott Laboratories in the UK) and of other significant UK companies, including Grand Metropolitan (now Diageo) and Booker. Her interest in corporate governance has developed in the last 10 years as Reader in Strategy and Business History in the Business School at Oxford Brookes University. She retired from this post in 2011 and continues to research and write as a business historian.