Is the Green Party’s new co-leader. The former PwC consultant has advised Shell, Cadbury Schweppes and HSBC Bank on sustainable business development

James Shaw

You’ve been an MP for 10 months so far. Has Parliament been what you expected? I told my wife Annabelle there’s a difference between knowing you’re going to get hit by a truck and the experience of it. The first five or six weeks were one of the most stressful, disorienting periods of my life. How were you involved with Shell oil? Shell’s obviously a very dirty company but they were trying to clean up their act, at least a little bit. When I was working at PricewaterhouseCoopers they actually did us a favour by extending their sustainable supplier policy to include their professional services. At that time PwC earned something like a billion dollars a year from Shell globally. That’s a driver for change. Supplier policies have had an extraordinary effect in lifting environmental and labour standards around the world. Not consistently, not everywhere, they’re hard to audit and dodgy stuff goes on but it made a difference to us at PwC.

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