More women at helm in top firms but EU quotas opposed

Prime Minister David Cameron’s official spokesman said Brussels should not dictate legal limits on the issue and claimed efforts to encourage a voluntary shift in the UK were proving successful.

The boards of FTSE 100 companies were now 17.3 per cent female, he told reporters, up from 12.5 per cent in February 2011 when an independent report warned that a lack of women was damaging firms.

In that report, former Business Minister Lord Davies recommended that quotas should be imposed if firms failed to bring the proportion up to at least a quarter by 2015.

Mr Cameron has complained that male-dominated boardrooms are “failing our whole economy” and promised to learn lessons from countries with better records, some of which impose quotas.

But in a letter obtained by the Financial Times, Business Secretary Vince Cable warned European Commission President Jose Manuel Barosso that there was widespread opposition to EU legislation. It was signed by a sufficient number of his counterparts from other EU states to suggest any bid to impose a minimum could be rejected under the EU’s complex voting system.

Mr Cable hopes the message will persuade the Commission to drop a quota of 40 per cent by 2020 at all listed companies reported to be part of package of measures due out next month.

The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “We certainly don’t see the case for the adoption of legally-binding quotas for women on company boards and we don’t see the case for doing that at a European level.”