Boardroom Bellwether 2025 - key observations

The Chartered Governance Institute recently published the results of its annual Boardroom Bellwether report.

The report takes a yearly snapshot of trends, attitudes, concerns and emerging developments that are occupying the minds of boards and governance leads across multiple sectors. From economic and geopolitical factors to technological innovation and societal shifts, the Bellwether survey takes the pulse of UK boardrooms and garners invaluable insights as to how organisations are responding.

For 2025, the Institute adopted a slightly new approach, including in the survey responses from a wider cross-section of the economy. Alongside FTSE and smaller quoted companies, we can now get a sense of what’s on the minds of boards in private companies, charities, the broader not-for-profit sector, housing associations and health trusts.

The survey was conducted in spring 2025 and, naturally, the ‘conversational context’ of news cycles and prominent stories plays some part in colouring the preoccupations of respondents. However, one of the (many) strengths of the governance community is the ability to balance the immediate with the longer-term, to respond to what is happening now while keeping an eye on strategic, future developments.

These are just a few observations that jumped out from the report.

 

Economy

Boardrooms’ outlooks for both the global and UK economies have returned to pessimism after a couple of years of improved expectations following the world’s emergence from the Covid shock. Two-thirds of governance leaders now anticipate a decline in domestic economic conditions in 2025/26, while almost 70% expect the same on an international view. The main drivers of pessimism appear to be US policy, particularly the lack of predictability (always favoured by boards), and domestic policy coupled with low expectations of UK competitiveness in the medium term.

 

Risk

72% of respondents see overall board exposure to risk as rising: a jump from 57% in last year’s Bellwether. Many of the drivers seen as ‘fairly important’ in 2024 are the same factors in 2025, but are now felt to be ‘very important’, reflecting a general elevation in perceived levels of risk. Principal among the issues on the minds of boards as they consider their risk profile are cybersecurity and reputational risk, followed by ‘people/talent’, the global economy and regulation. Almost three quarters of respondents are of the view that cyber risks are increasing this year – the survey took place against the backdrop of high profile attacks such as that against M&S – yet curiously, a lower proportion of boards are increasing their cybersecurity spending in 2025/26 than in the previous year.

Perhaps surprisingly, artificial intelligence features somewhat lower down the list of drivers of risk than perhaps might have been expected. While 78% of organisations reported the deployment of some kind of AI in their operations and activities and almost two thirds of quoted companies have formal AI policies in place, several respondents noted its uneven adoption as a critical area of concern. Nearly half of boards, according to the survey, have implemented policies and processes on the ethical use of AI.

The topic certainly feels prominent across organisations of all stripes. At last week’s annual conference of the Chartered Governance Institute, Governance 2025, the discussions and presentations were shot through with talk of the challenges, risks and opportunities that AI technology presents to business in general and to the governance profession specifically. Among the many important takeaways from the two days was some sage advice from Claire Bodanis of Falcon Windsor to treat artificial intelligence as you would a “precocious intern”: a bright, enthusiastic, resourceful addition your team, but one that you wouldn’t allow to work unsupervised and whose output you would certainly check before releasing it.

 

Climate

At first glance, it is perhaps surprising to see climate featuring relatively low down on the list of risk factors. Only around 17% of respondents rate it as ‘very important’. On the one hand, its placing might owe something to the prominence of other issues on the list, pushing environmental sustainability down the agenda. Another analysis also views it as a positive indicator of a certain maturity among board conversations and presents the view that climate change is a ‘known known’ in 2025 and as such attracts less urgency than emergent risks demanding reflexive action.

On a less positive note, the survey found that, among non-quoted organisations, 58% of boards have discussed climate change fewer than four times in the past year. Less positive still, of these, more than a third had not discussed climate at board level at all. This stands in something of a contrast to the importance we see being attached to environmental sustainability in the sports sector and the centrality to much of their activity that the Sports Councils have given to the issue, not least of which is the requirement of the Code for Sports Governance that boards factor the impact on wider society and the environment into their decisions. Perhaps also the very direct relationship between many sports and the natural world and the impact which climate has on delivery, participation opportunities, event staging and participant wellbeing, coupled with an acknowledgement of the advocacy role that sport can play, bring the issue to the fore for organisations in our sector to a greater degree than in others.  

 

Diversity

The vast majority of respondents reported that their boards were ‘very diverse’ or ‘somewhat diverse’ on gender and a smaller majority recorded the same with regard to ethnic diversity (though only 20% felt that their board was ethnically very diverse). 

65% of organisations are making some sort of change, and the majority of those who are not doing so are drawn from the non-corporate organisations. There are multiple potential reasons for the impact on emphasising EDI, from the fallout of President Trump's executive orders to what is seen by some respondents as return of focus to core strategic talent issues.

In terms of outcomes, sport’s performance on diversity is broadly comparable to FTSE companies. Last year’s Diversity in Sport Governance report showed that women made up 40.8% of board positions. This compares with 39.1% in FTSE 100 and 36.8% in FTSE 250 companies, according to the FTSE Women Leaders Review (the successor to the Hampton-Alexander Review) in 2022. Similarly, the latest update from the Parker Review showed ethnic minority representation on FTSE 250 boards (15%) was in line with the figure for sports boards (15.11%) as reported in Diversity in Sport Governance. FTSE 100 companies are a little way ahead on 19%.

Respondents to the Bellwether survey noted challenges in terms of achieving diversity of socio-economic background and disability representation on their boards. This has some resonance in the sports sector. The 2024 Diversity in Sport Governance report saw progress on the representation of disabled people on boards (16.04%), but also revealed that less than a quarter of board members identified as being from a lower socio-economic background (a trend also reflected in the composition of senior leadership teams). The Bellwether report indicated that while 46.7% of organisations had addressed socio-economic diversity to some degree and a fifth have implemented policies, over a third of respondents’ boards had no plans to discuss wider EDI policies, into which efforts to address socio-economic diversity would fall.

 

Get involved

On the one hand, it is difficult to make direct comparisons across multiple sectors and between organisations of vastly different sizes, complexity and global interconnectedness. Yet, it offers some interesting insights into what is occupying the minds of boards and governance leads, and affords an opportunity to consider what common challenges our counterparts and peers are facing. Hopefully, in future iterations of Bellwether, we will hear even more from the sports sector. With so much work currently in train that addresses many of the themes in the 2025 report and the central importance our sector has in public life, sports organisations have plenty to add to the conversation, as well as plenty to share with others across the economy. Keep a look out for our prompts ahead of next year's survey.

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Read the Boardroom Bellwether 2025 report