Corporate responsibility could be a saviour of British business if larger companies embraced the idea with more enthusiasm. But too many seem to have lost their moral compass

I was recently invited to a debate about whether corporate responsibility can save British business. Organised by GoodCorporation, it was chaired by Will Hutton, executive vice-chair of the Work Foundation, took place in the House of Lords and was attended by senior figures from some of the country's biggest companies.

The debate was timely, but my own view was crystallised as I read the newspaper on the way down to London. The main front-page headline was "End of the gentlemen's club", a reference to the resignation the day before of Michael Martin, the Speaker of the Commons, amid the row over MPs' expenses.

The main story in the financial pages—headlined "Shell shareholders lead the way on day of rebellions over executive pay"—detailed investor revolts at the annual meetings of oil giant Shell, stockbroker Evolution and retailer Next over plans to award bonuses to executives who hadn't met performance targets.

The prevailing view seems to be, if it's legal, it's legitimate, even if companies and the House of Commons make the rules themselves. Some politicians and business folk still seem to be trying to get away with what they can, and face the consequences, if and when necessary. But it was this short-sightedness, by government and corporations, which led us into recession in the first place. What's more, they seem breathtakingly out of touch with the public mood.

I've written about business for over 25 years, but despite the codes and company statements I'm not sure big businesses are any better governed or any more responsible now than they were when I started. The financially driven and short-term culture endemic in so many large organisations is at odds with the more inclusive and longer-term approach to a range of different stakeholders that being "responsible" implies.

The result is the kind of moral bankruptcy that we see in corporate attempts to force through "payments for failure". It is also evident in the big pub companies' abuse of their tenants—the majority of whom earn less than £15,000 a year—as revealed in a Business and Enterprise Select Committee report.

And it is also apparent in the relatively minor—but immensely irritating—acts of commission or omission inflicted on us every day by our service providers. When spring-cleaning my finances, I was shocked by the catalogue of errors my bank, insurers and phone companies had made over the past few months.

Funnily enough, these mistakes were in their favour, not mine. Incompetence is bad enough from blue-chip companies, but could such slips be deliberate, a calculated gamble that we time-poor customers just won't notice them or be bothered to ask questions? Call me cynical, but inertia marketing, insidious though it is, is as well established in many organisations as the equally reprehensible cold calling.

If supermarkets made such mistakes, we would vote with our feet and shop elsewhere. But service companies have us over a barrel: not only is it hard to switch providers, but also we are sceptical that one will be much better than another.

If company directors concentrated less on the size of their bonuses and more on their customers, products and services, they might be able to rebuild the kind of moral underpinning that will be essential to their survival over the next 10 years. And as for the argument that cutting back on bonuses will lead to an exodus of talent, well, I'd ask: Are corporate and political mercenaries the kind of talent that this country needs?

Corporate responsibility could save British business if more directors understood what it means. But too many don't get it. So I agree with Will Hutton when he says that the global economic and financial crisis, nasty though it is, may not be serious enough to force substantive change.