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hem apart from the competition. For example the Excel centre, a large conference venue near Canary Wharf in London has achieved six awards relating to CSR, for example The Sunday Times “Best Green Companies” award (Excel, 2014). If a company is looking for a conference venue in London, and Excel is implementing CSR whereas another venue is not, this gives the client a reason to select Excel, and something extra the company can say on its marketing. So it is an advantage for Excel to support CSR which can lead to directly affecting the bottom line.

Local support and getting licences can be made easier for a company if it has a CSR policy. Such a company is seen locally as a good company and this can improve how the company is seen by locals and can help to provide support for the company's plans where local support is an advantage (e.g. a new building, opening late into the night).

Having a CSR policy which is implemented and draws people's attention to it can help to distract the public from other things that could have negative implications for a company. For example if a company have very high board members pay, this can lower the public's view of the company. However if the company is seen to put the environment first, and it puts resources directly into supporting this, this can overshadow the board members pay (Grayson & Hodges, 2004).

A company that has a CSR policy throughout the company can improve the staff's attachment to the company. They believe that their work partly helps the community and can do much to improve morale. Also they may be keener to participate in events such as fundraising which they may do in their own time and gain the company goodwill whilst costing the company nothing (ibid).

There is a trend moving towards CSR (Fiorina, 2003). With national and international standards on CSR related issues becoming more common, and laws likely to follow, there is a large bonus in getting CSR well embedded in a company before a law demands it. When laws are passed, this puts a fixed timescale on the changes to CSR. This can cause CSR to be implemented at an inopportune time, and a time when other companies are doing the same, and potentially costing many times more.

However the situation is not all good. There are considered to be disadvantages of CSR and these must be understood and addressed before a company implements CSR. There are those who say that the sole purpose of a business is to make money (e.g. Friedman, 1970). Anything that detracts from that is considered to be a distraction from the business's core function. This can make share-holders get fewer dividends because the company is involved in a scheme which costs money and resources to implement but does not directly add to the bottom line. This point can be countered by a company implementing CSR policies in order to reduce excessive inputs and wastes in their supply chain, which saves them money (Idowu & Louche, 2011).

To take a more recent example, the Commission for Green Tax Reform in Portugal put forward a proposal on 9th July 2014 for a package of environmental taxes. These would include additional taxes on fuel, air travel and the use of plastic bags (Lomas, 2014). In fact, Fleming & Jones (2012) claim that CSR is fatally compromised and, when applied to large multinational corporations, does more harm than good. The claim says that many companies ar