Consultation: New UK Sustainability Reporting Standards

The UK government has proposed their own UK Sustainability Reporting Standards (SRS) for which they are consulting on between the 25th June and 17th September 2025. This is part of the first phase of consultations to modernise the UK’s framework for corporate reporting. It’s published alongside consultations on the government’s transition plan manifesto commitment & oversight of sustainability assurance providers.

The UK SRS is going to be based on information from the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS):

• IFRS S1 – General Requirements for Disclosure of Sustainability Related Financial Information
• IFRS S2 – Climate-related Disclosures

These are a set of accounting rules that explain how public companies should report on sustainability in their financial statements, and was introduced to ensure reporting is consistent and comparable across companies.

However, six minor amendments have been proposed to make this more applicable to UK reporting. 

  1.   Removed transition relief so no delayed reporting allowed in Year 1: Companies will be required to report within their financial statements with no delayed reporting.

In the IFRS S1 there is a transition relief which allows companies to publish disclosures in line with the International Sustainability Standards Board’s (ISSB) standards at a later date than their financial statements for the first year. This has been proposed to be removed so companies are required to report within their financial statements.

  2.   Extension of the transition relief that permits a ‘climate-first’ approach: Firms can focus just on climate-related topics for 2 years before reporting on other ESG topics.

This would look like the following:

• Year 1 – climate related risks and opportunities (excl. scope 3 emissions)
• Year 2 – All climate related risks and opportunities (inc. scope 3 emissions)
• Year 3 - Climate related risks and opportunities (inc. scope 3 emissions) & additional wider sustainability related risks and opportunities

  3.   Removal of the requirement to use the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) in IFRS S2: Firms can use other classification systems instead of GICs.

Currently these GIC codes are required to be paid for by companies to use them, so it’s been proposed that they should be able to use any appropriate classification standard that they use within existing reporting practises to avoid additional costs.

  4.    Removal of ‘effective date’ in IFRS S1 & IFRS S2.

As SRS will not initially be mandatory, no effective date for reporting is relevant. A statement will be added to say that a reporting timeline will be set later by law or regulators.

  5.   References to the SASB standards made optional: Changed wording from “shall” to “may” when referring to SASB materials to reduce perceived obligation.

SASB (Sustainability Accounting Standards Board) was established in 2011 to develop industry-specific standards for the disclosure of financially-material sustainability information, primarily for use in US corporate filings. Essentially this may mean this is not relevant for UK based companies so it’s under a company’s discretion to decide if the standards are relevant to their business, sector etc.

  6.   Treatment of transition reliefs: Reliefs (e.g. extra time to report Scope 3 emissions) will only apply when reporting is legally required, not whilst reporting is only voluntary.

It was proposed that companies can facilitate the use of the reliefs for any mandatory reporting while avoiding penalising any early voluntary reporters. For voluntary reporters, the government believes it will be a business choice to decide whether to report against some, or all, of the standards and it would not be appropriate for government to define how and when certain requirements within the standard apply. As a result, entities that do not fall into the scope of any future reporting requirements would not be bound by any restriction on applying transition reliefs.

Next Steps

Beyondly intends to submit a response to this consultation and will provide any further updates following the consultation.

For more information on proposed changes please see here on the government website.