As the Sustainable Development Commission loses its funding, its chair and chief executive look back with Joshua Chambers at how the government’s sustainability has improved – and at what remains to be done.
“We’re the first stick on the bonfire of the quangos,” quips a decidedly cheerful Andrew Lee. As one of the two men heading up the doomed Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), I didn’t expect him to be so sanguine about losing his job.
Will Day (pictured left) and Andrew Lee (pictured far left) are respectively the chairman and chief executive of the SDC, and make a good double act. Day is didactic and looks studious in his tank-top and tie, while Lee is in shirt sleeves, sports a wry smile and seems almost conspiratorial whenever he leans towards me to make a point.
Their organisation was launched in 2000, although both joined much later – Lee in 2006, and Day in 2009. Beginning life solely as an advisory group, the SDC took on a second function in 2006 as the government’s climate watchdog, scrutinising how well government performs against the sustainability targets it sets itself.
Civil Service World reported two months ago that the SDC will lose its funding from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) at the end of the year. While it also receives funds from the devolved administrations, Lee admits that it is “highly unlikely” the organisation can survive without its core funding.
The coalition argues that scrapping the SDC is a sign of the body’s success: the new administration wants to internalise its functions to demonstrate its support for the sustainability agenda. Cabinet ministers Chris Huhne at the Department of Energy and Climate Change and Caroline Spelman at Defra will be championing the issue across government, while the environmental audit committee in the House of Commons will take on the SDC’s scrutiny role.
Past performance, and problems
One of the functions of the SDC has been that of an outrider, allowing government to explore ideas that ministers avoid as politically dangerous. “We’ve been asked to look in detail at issues by departments because if a minister or department were to look at them, it would frighten the horses,” says Day. “If a minister starts talking about a 20 mile-an-hour speed limit, that will bring out the worst in the blogosphere, the worst in the media, and the risk is that perfectly reasonable options become no-go zones.”
Diet is another example; one that, as with many sustainability issues, falls under the remit of more than one department – in this case Defra and the Department of Health. Lee tells me that under Labour, officials were pressing the SDC to “get out and say some difficult things about needing to reduce the amount of carbon-intensive meat and dairy in our diets.” This capability is one of the strengths of non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs), and illustrates why it has been so difficult for past governments to cut their number.
As well as putting uncomfortable messages into the public domain, the SDC supports those charged with pushing sustainability within departments – “literally providing tea and sympathy sessions”, Lee says. Working behind the scenes, commissioners meet with politicians, officials, special advisers and working groups, offering support and bringing people together. “We try to model what government needs to do more of but struggles with, because of the relentless drive back into departmental silos,” he adds.
Lee is cynical about how much those within departments can achieve, because they often “run up against the reality of systems and processes and structures”. Even when progress is made, he says this is “in spite of the system, rather than because of it”. Day and Lee seem to view the SDC as a catalyst of debate on environmental issues in government, and an agent backing those who sidestep or overcome civil service systems in the pursuit of greater sustainability.
In policymaking, one problem identified by Day and Lee is the effect of individual departmental budgets. Where issues run across departmental responsibilities, they argue, buck-passing between departments can leave good ideas without a backer: cycling schemes, for example, can fall between the stools of health and transport – and it’s the environment that suffers as a result. While Day notes that there have been cross-cutting initiatives and ministers with responsibilities in other departments, “when push comes to shove it comes back to turf,” he sighs. Unfortunately, this issue may be exacerbated with the pressures that the spending review brings.
Day and Lee believe it’s important that the need for sustainability comes right from the top of government. Government should be looking at all decisions – be it a new runway at Heathrow or the building of a coal-fired power station – through the lens of sustainability, they argue.
However, while performance appraisals now hold permanent secretaries to account on sustainability objectives, Lee doesn’t think they have been taken seriously enough. “Getting sustainable development into the performance framework for permanent secretaries was a big development,” he says, “but I would like to be a fly on the wall in the meetings they have with [cabinet secretary] Gus O’Donnell to see how important failure to perform on the sustainable development target is [considered]”. I push him: what does he suspect? “That it doesn’t count nearly as strongly as we’re told it does”; that if targets are missed, “nobody’s going to be in the firing line.”
The vision
In setting out the problems they have faced, both men seem slightly downcast – a contrast to their earlier upbeat moods. But as the conversation goes back to what needs to be done, they become more optimistic and purposeful again.
Government should enthuse the public about sustainability, they say, rather than talking prosaically about cash savings. One problem is that the government fails to communicate how issues interact; and it needs to highlight the potential gains to be made from tackling climate change, as well as the risks of deferring action. “Things can be done in a positive way,” says Day, “but the longer we leave it, the steeper the catch-up curve becomes and the harder it will be.”
Bringing society on board, they argue, requires government to lead from the front. Currently, Day says that while public ad campaigns like ‘Act on CO2’ change public attitudes and behaviours, “everywhere else it is business as usual”. So people are encouraged to switch off their lights, but coal-fired power stations continue to provide the energy.
They believe that government needs to invest now to make savings in the long term – by insulating houses, for example. “We looked hard at the issue of retrofitting building stock in the UK,” Day says, “which has to happen if we’re going to come close to our carbon reduction targets.” He notes that the cost will be £500-700bn, “but it’s absolutely clear that there are considerable savings if it’s done collectively.”
Finding that sort of money at a time of retrenchment will be difficult for government; but private investment could help, Day and Lee suggest. And they believe government should also seek to break issues down to a local level. Transport is a good example, says Day: “We’re always talking about how to get investment into big, glamorous infrastructure projects – whether it’s airport expansion or high-speed rail – and ignoring the fact that you get a fantastic cost-benefit ratio out of just getting the basic stuff right: texting people bus times; cycling schemes.”
Tightening up
While some objectives can be achieved through investment, both men see a clear need for regulation – although they worry that this doesn’t fit with the government’s agenda. “There is a lot of: ‘Tell us what rules you want us to get rid of and we’ll get rid of them’,” Day says, “but if we’re going to respond to what science tells us, we’re going to have to run through a process of decarbonising our economy at a pace which will be beyond voluntary.”
Lee bemoans the presumption against regulation: “Governments of all persuasions get stuck on the preconceptions that regulation is bad; it’s red tape; it costs a lot of money. Well actually, regulation is sometimes the best and most effective way of achieving change.” As an example, he cites Tory backing for a law requiring TV-makers to do away with ‘standby’ settings on televisions.
The coalition has recently set up a behavioural economics unit to look at how to encourage desirable behaviour and reward actions that benefit the whole. It is a worthwhile investment, Lee thinks, but “actually needs to be used alongside a willingness to regulate”. He adds that “one of the things that hampered the last government was [the idea] that behaviour-change is a replacement for regulation. No, it isn’t.”
Here, perhaps, is an example of the SDC being prepared to put out messages that are not politically convenient.
Green framework
The government sets itself sustainability targets, which the SDC then monitors. On his second day in office, prime minister David Cameron said that the government would aim to become “the greenest ever”, and set Whitehall much tougher CO2 targets: the reduction of departmental carbon emissions by 10 per cent in one year, representing a tripling of the speed of progress over the last three years.
Day and Lee approve of this, but don’t believe the government should focus solely on carbon: “It gets down to the nitty gritty of what indicators you use,” Lee says, “but fundamentally, you need to measure more than carbon reduction; you need to measure quality of life and environmental limits.”
The framework the government has set up to monitor its new target is still very much a work in progress. With a wry smile, Lee notes that the ‘Rio +20’ environmental summit, to be held in 2012, brings the framework “into sharp focus” – the government will have to report its progress on sustainable development to the United Nations later this year. “We’ll have to explain why it’s in this new phase, and why the government has decided to do away with the model it had,” he says, citing not just the removal of the Sustainable Development Commission but also the end of of Sustainable Operations on the Government Estate targets.
Lee thinks the coalition should have planned the new delivery architecture before removing what was in place. “You only put something new in place if it is demonstrably better than the old one,” he says, “and the old system was delivering results. We were starting to see things moving and there was a massive potential for savings – hundreds of millions of pounds – by getting this right.”
At times, the interview becomes an opportunity for them to vent their frustration – albeit very politely. They feel that they could have done more, but just as they were making progress – even gaining more powers over planning – they have “been told: ‘Thank you for your work, off you go, we’re going to do this now’,” as Lee puts it. “Sometimes we found ourselves in this organisation banging on the door of departments who didn’t really want to listen to us, for understandable reasons, and didn’t have to listen to us – there was no mandate to do so. There is definitely more that could have been done.”
Their irritation subsides whenever they start to extol the benefits of sustainability – indeed, Day doesn’t appear to want the interview to end. Despite having a meeting to attend, he lingers on, either propounding the importance of change or listening to Lee detail specific measures and their consequences.
What happens next?
Inevitably, the interview turns to what the SDC aims to do in its final few months. “The gleam in the darkness,” Day says, is the “clear statements by government ministers that one of the reasons for removing funding [from the SDC] is that such importance was placed on sustainable development that they wish to have this within government.” He sees both his and Lee’s role now as ensuring that “as little of the SDC is lost as possible”.
Currently, they are discussing with the environmental audit committee how it will pick up some of the SDC’s scrutiny work, athough Day suggests that not all of what the SDC does will be “do-able” without a dedicated environmental watchdog.
This is partly because the body works for the devolved administrations as well as Whitehall; there were complaints in the Welsh Assembly about the loss of Defra’s funding for the SDC. Lee suggests that each administration will have to create its own organisation to look at sustainability, and currently the signals from Wales are that they will indeed create a new body to replace the SDC.
These bodies won’t co-ordinate efforts across administrations as the SDC does, however, and Lee thinks they will be less efficient. “It’s very cost-effective for the administrations to share commissioners who are all experts in different fields,” he says. “The economics of this situation are completely barmy: there are hundreds of millions worth of savings to be made in efficient and effective government through sustainability, and the [UK] government has made this more difficult.”
Lee is positive about one aspect of the change: sustainability, he believes, has won broad consensus. “If you can get senior Lib Dems and Tories backing sustainability, and if you’ve got [Labour MP] Joan Walley on the environmental audit committee holding government to account, you could be signalling that all three of these parties are committed; it’s not a party-political agenda. That’s the prize.”
In the meantime, Lee says the SDC will continue working, purposefully and possibly still cheerfully, trying to “nail down as many commitments as possible before we disappear.”