By CivilServiceWorld

02 Jun 2011

In her role as chair of the environmental audit committee, Joan Walley MP is responsible for scrutinising cross-departmental work on sustainability. Edward Davie hears her take aim at the coalition's green performance.


From locally-produced crockery to a photograph of a nearby coal mine, Joan Walley's (pictured above) Westminster office is filled with reminders of her Stoke-on-Trent constituency’s industrial heritage. Yet whilst she evidently values this legacy, she wants no return to the smoke-belching factories of the industrial revolution. Instead, in her role as chair of Parliament’s environmental audit select committee (EAC), she is looking to foster new, greener ways of working.

Prime minister David Cameron is also a keen advocate of a more environmentally friendly approach, pledging on taking office that his would be the “greenest government ever”. Strict national carbon-reduction targets have been set in place (see p17), and each department has had to cut its carbon emissions by 10 per cent over the past year. This latter action is crucial to realising the carbon targets, says Walley: “This is really important, not only because government is a large part of the economy; it also has to lead by example, and if it is asking business and domestic users to cut their carbon, it has to be seen to be practising what it preaches.”

In connecting the government’s own CO2 emissions and the UK’s carbon budgets, Walley is right on EAC territory: established in 1997, the committee scrutinises the ways in which government operations and policies across Whitehall affect the environment. And currently, Walley is worried that the government is not living up to its rhetoric: spending cuts, she fears, are taking precedence over sustainability. “Those of us who want to encourage sustainable development are trying to convince people to change their behaviour,” she says. “The problem with the government is that it is so focused on deficit reduction that the green growth agenda has been sidelined.

“For civil servants, the question is how they balance cutting short-term costs with long-term environmental and economic gains,” she adds; currently, “the bottom line is: ‘Make the cuts, make the cuts, make the cuts’, leaving the green growth agenda to wither.”

In particular, the government wants to cut regulation – and thereby boost economic growth – through its ‘Red Tape Challenge’. But Walley cautions that many regulations exist for a good reason. “Businesses need certainty about regulations if they are to adapt their business in the long term; chucking all regulation in the air is unsettling and not good practice,” she warns. “Many of the threatened regulations are perfectly sensible ways of protecting the environment”.

Walley is also critical of the government’s ‘bonfire of the quangos’, which cut funding to 191 public bodies regulating particular policy areas or markets. “Having a ‘bonfire of quangos and red tape’ sounds great, but actually you need a lot of these bodies, or something like them, to ensure good practice,” she says.

Government efforts to reduce the number of arm’s-length public bodies led to a high-profile casualty in the environmental world: the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC). Since 2000, the SDC had provided advice to government on policymaking, and helped departments to better understand sustainability. From 2005, it also took on a watchdog role, reporting on the sustainability of government operations and policies.

Last December, Walley’s committee published a report warning that the SDC’s abolition would “leave a gap in the structures for embedding sustainable development across government”. Six months on, have her fears been borne out? “It is early days,” she replies, “but the government did not take account of the resource and the capacity that was in the commission – including civil servants seconded from other departments – when they decided to axe it. To take out that body of knowledge and professionalism without checking that that specialist work can be picked up elsewhere in government makes it very hard to keep up momentum.”

Post-SDC, the role of advising ministers on sustainability moved inside government, along with just two former SDC staff members. Walley says that “what [government] is doing as a result is starting from scratch on a different tack; and it’s hard to think, having lost all that expertise and experience, that the work will be as effective as it was”.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has overall responsibility for championing and advising on sustainability policy across government. However, Walley argues that “the Cabinet Office is a better place to co-ordinate this work. [That work is] happening to some extent at a political level, but my concern is that these things are not being matched with resources and specialist staff.”

The Cabinet Office is responsible for holding departments to account against their business plan commitments – which include, for example, implementing the departmental carbon reduction policies set out in the energy department’s Carbon Plan. Meanwhile, with Defra, the Cabinet Office has taken on the SDC’s role in assessing departments on the sustainability of their own operations.

However, Walley argues that since the SDC’s demise, the focus on measuring operational sustainability has faded fast. “Previously, we had the SDC properly auditing and picking up departments where there may have been a lack of understanding, or a danger of missing their targets, and the commission cajoled and encouraged them to do it,” she says. “Now there is little happening. Measuring and monitoring is the first step in delivering your objectives, and that simply doesn’t exist any more.”

And so, says Walley, her committee “will be carefully monitoring what the government is doing to replace the auditing and implementation functions of the SDC that they did away with”. Part of the auditing function has, in fact, transferred over to the EAC – and Walley says that her committee “simply do not have the resources to do the checking that the commission did, but we will note and follow how the government is managing the sustainability agenda”.

Stoke’s coal mines may be long gone, but their constituency MP retains the spirit of the foremen who used to monitor production. In those days, careful measurement was used as a way to increase the amount of carbon extracted – and if Walley gets her way, equally-scrupulous monitoring will prove an important tool in meeting today’s challenge: to achieve the exact opposite.

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