The truthful and correct representation of a company's current performance and its future prospects needs to account for a variety of sustainability issues, given that they are exerting an ever greater impact on strategic and operational decisions, risk profiles and balance sheet item valuations.Nowadays, companies operate in a context in which such issues as sustainable development, environmental policy, and stakeholder engagement are of increasing strategic importance.While such issues are also addressed in regulatory provisions, they require further study to meet the challenge of representing social and environmental factors, as, in the context of annual report disclosures, it is not possible to proceed simply by analogy.The present study compares sustainability disclosures from the annual reports of the top 50 listed firms (by number of employees) in two countries – Italy and the United Kingdom – which have different legal systems. The objective is to analyze whether different territorial contexts might affect, under different headings, the qualitative aspects of the non‐financial disclosures contained in the annual reports of the firms under examination. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment