The annual report was supposed to explain a company. Somewhere along the way, it became an archive. Strategy, pay, climate disclosures, governance and years of inherited boilerplate now compete for space in a document few investors will ever read from cover to cover.
Typical FTSE 100 annual reports now average about 152,000 words, up 27% since 2019, according to the Quoted Companies Alliance. Across UK public companies, the average is 98,000 words. On 7 September, the government opened a consultation on simplifying reporting obligations, reducing duplication and making greater use of digital reporting.
The clutter isn’t all compulsory
It is tempting to blame the rulebook. The Financial Reporting Council’s first simplification sandbox found duplication across chief executive, chair and finance reports, as well as strategic, sustainability and financial sections.
Lu Hur, CFO of privately held Meet The People, sees the problem as partly one of habit. “When it comes to public filing, I think duplication is the biggest piece and the easiest to fix,” she says. Removing an established disclosure, she adds, can mean justifying the decision to committees, auditors or regulators.
For Julie Shacklady, director of primary markets and corporate finance at UK Finance, the result is a “disclosure paradox”, where measures intended to increase transparency can instead reduce the “visibility, accessibility, and usefulness of vital information”. UK Finance points to governance information, director biographies and sustainability reporting as particular sources of overlap.
Meanwhile, Conran Design Group says sharper editing and visual hierarchy helped SSE remove 59 pages from its 2024-25 annual report.
A report for humans and machines
Claire Bodanis, director of London-based reporting advisory practice Falcon Windsor, thinks reform needs to go beyond trimming existing sections. Of the government consultation, she argues: “It sets out this purpose but then it doesn’t carry through the logic.” Her proposed model separates structured disclosures from management and board commentary, with other reporting moved to a dedicated digital home.
For retail shareholders, access is more limited. Bodanis describes the annual report as “the closest they are going to get to a personal view, a personal relationship” with company leaders.
AI makes the distinction harder to ignore. Hur argues useful intelligence often appears before it becomes data. “Finance doesn’t discover what’s happening by reading the ledger,” she says. “My team is on calls with agency leadership every week, and that’s where you learn a client is going quiet before it shows up in revenue.”
Meanwhile, Bodanis draws a firmer line around leadership commentary. “The act of thinking and the act of writing are part of the same continuum,” she says. “I think AI has no place whatsoever in the judgment.”
Shacklady stresses that the aim of moving static reporting online is to ensure that “only material developments are presented from year-to-year”, rather than repeat the same information annually.
Cutting pages is one thing. Deciding what still belongs in the annual report is another. The annual report probably is not dying. But the idea that it must simultaneously serve as corporate history, compliance archive, investor briefing and data warehouse may finally be running out of pages.
The annual report was supposed to explain a company. Somewhere along the way, it became an archive. Strategy, pay, climate disclosures, governance and years of inherited boilerplate now compete for space in a document few investors will ever read from cover to cover.
Typical FTSE 100 annual reports now average about 152,000 words, up 27% since 2019, according to the Quoted Companies Alliance. Across UK public companies, the average is 98,000 words. On 7 September, the government opened a consultation on simplifying reporting obligations, reducing duplication and making greater use of digital reporting.
