Examination of witnesses (Questions 429
- 439)
TUESDAY 28 APRIL 1998
LORD TOPE,
MS PATRICIA
HUGHES and MR
TIM EVERETT
Chairman
429. Good morning, Lord Tope and colleagues,
and welcome to our Committee. Thank you very much, first of all,
for presenting us with some very succinct answers to our questions
in a very short report, which we are grateful for because we already
have a lot of paper and we are glad for brevity, and also for
the enclosures you sent with it. As you know, we are glad to see
you not only because of your general reputation in the environmental
field, and you obviously grasped this whole area quite early back
in the mid-1980s, but also because you are, I think, the first
council to be formally registered under the EMAS system, although
not all of your departments are yet accredited, as I understand
it.
(Lord Tope) No, but we are working towards it
and we are on target to make it by the year 2000.
430. So in view of that fulsome praise,
and obviously you would not criticise that before the local government
elections are out of the way, I take it, but welcome, and if there
are any introductory remarks you have got to make, we would be
delighted to hear them before we go into the questions.
(Lord Tope) Well, thank you, Mr Chairman, and
I know from experience that you would wish me to be brief in my
introductory remarks as I know from experience that you would
have wished us to be brief with our paper, but if you want more
paper, we have an endless supply of things that we can give you.
Can I start with some introductions? Sitting on my left is our
Chief Executive, Patricia Hughes, and on my right is Tim Everett
who now rejoices in the title of Borough Public Protection Officer,
but in fact leads our environmental work and sitting behind me
is Tansy Wenham-Prosser, our EMAS Co-ordinator. You have been
kind enough, Chairman, to say that we have acquired, deservedly
or otherwise, something of a reputation in the environmental field,
but can I say at the outset that I have asked my officers who
are going to answer most of the questions to answer them to you
honestly and frankly, warts and all, if you like, because I always
take the view that actually you can learn more from the things
that do not necessarily go very well than you can from the things
which are easy successes, so I hope we will be able not only to
sing our own praises, which we are naturally prone to do, especially
a week before the election, but also to tell you honestly some
of the things that we have learnt from things which have gone
less well. One of the keys, I think, to the work that we have
done for the last twelve years has been community involvement.
What we are trying to do is actually to involve our local communities,
business, residential, the voluntary sector and so on, as much
as possible in all the work we do. Now most of the focus for that
of course is through the work we do on Local Agenda 21. We have
tried to do it as well in the various environmental initiatives
we have taken right back since 1986 with the recycling and a whole
range of other matters, but I think today it, as is the main remit
of your Committee, is focused on the internal, and it is up to
you, but I think we are going to focus primarily on EMAS which
is really primarily an internal management system, but I did want
to put that in the context of the wider work that we do and say
very briefly that in 1986, as you said, we did adopt a comprehensive
set of environmental policies and I think one of the most important
items that we added to that annual report, as a result of a consultation
on its draft actually, was the requirement to produce an annual
report. Actually I can say that that has been very important to
us over the years, that we have required all our officers to come
together to produce an annual report, of which perhaps more later
on. From the start, there was a recognition that councils do have
to consider many other things as well as the environment, but
the important point is that wherever there are choices, we seek
to minimise the harm and maximise the positive environmental effects
and, in our view, this approach is valid for government as well.
All such changes need champions, both at political and officer
level, and champions, I think, have been another key to such success
as we have had, but champions are not enough to embed any policy
initiative. The objective must be to make environmental issues
a part of the everyday management of the organisation. If they
remain a separate, add-on initiative, then sooner or later the
process will fail. To build on our early work, a programme of
environmental audits was set up. Apart from obtaining more and
better information on performance, these provided a way of involving
more people. From that we moved on to adopt an environmental management
system. Why EMAS? Well, in our memorandum that we have submitted
to you, we have set out four reasons why we chose EMAS in 1994.
We were clear that only an independently verified system would
give us that credibility and help us provide leadership to others.
EMAS offered what we thought was the best way forward. As I said
just now, we are on course to accredit all the Council's units
by the year 2000 and I should mention, as I suspect Members know,
that we are an all-purpose unitary authority as a London borough,
so we have rather more responsibilities than a district council,
and I suppose, for that matter, a county council. Whilst the rigours
of accreditation are not without some pain, we do not regret that
decision. Environmental issues remain a key corporate policy aim
of the Council. Elected members continue to take a direct interest
in maintaining progress. The personal performance objectives of
the Council's senior officers from the Chief Executive downwards
continue to reflect this commitment. The management system serves
to connect the achievement of the Council's policy aims right
down to the targets and performance of individual service units.
Important environmental gains have been achieved as a result.
EMAS and other such systems are not an answer in themselves, but
they are useful tools, and it has helped us to strive towards
delivering the Council's contribution to improving the local environment.
Our work with our partners on the Local Agenda 21 Forum represents
the major other strand in creating a sustainable Sutton. In Sutton,
EMAS and LA21, therefore, complement each other. We see our work
on LA21 as a three-way partnership of the community, the business
sector and the Council through the Local Agenda 21 Forum. We do
not seek to dominate that Forum, and that is again very important,
hence the LA21 Forum reports its action plan and achievements
separately. So just to summarise, Chairman, as I said before,
the Council's work on sustainability is three-fold: it is, first,
to support and empower LA21; secondly, to carry out services in
as sustainable a way as possible; and, thirdly, to keep our own
house in order and to set a good example through EMAS. Thank you,
Mr Chairman.
Chairman: Thank you
very much. Well, our first questions will be about the mechanisms
for addressing environmental policy in the Borough and I know
that Dr Iddon wants to lead on that.
Dr Iddon
431. Could I just go back to the beginning
and ask what was the engine that drove the environmental agenda?
Was it political or were there pressures from outside organisations,
the environmental lobby, or was it officer-led? Who pushed the
boat out?
(Lord Tope) Back in 1986 it was wholly political.
We won the 1986 Council elections and we put forward a draft environmental
statement at our first Council meeting which was then put out
for consultation and changed and improved as a result of that
consultation. I have to say, I think, that Ms Hughes' predecessor
reported back to me from our directors' team that they thought
we were crazy in putting up a statement like this as a hostage
to fortune, so in the early days it was strongly politically led
and politically driven. We were fortunate in identifying a few
champions amongst the Council officers who, I think, frankly were
relieved to see us doing something, but in the early years, which
is before my two colleagues joined the Council, it was something
of a struggle to get it started and it did have to have a strong
top-down political lead. That began to show fruits and Sutton
began to be recognised for something and people began to realise
that it was something that did not just happen in what was then
called the Technical Services Department, that it did apply to
the Council as a whole, and it has built on from there, but you
asked me about the origins and those are the origins.
432. Did it come out of the top of the political
system or did it come from pressure from below in the political
system?
(Lord Tope) I do not know that we have such a
hierarchy in our Party! It was a commitment in our manifesto and
in fact in our last year in opposition we had proposed it as a
motion to Council. It was something that the whole Council group
was committed to, I have to say, and, as you would expect in any
group of people, the level of commitment varies of course because
different people have different political priorities, education,
social services and so on, but it was something to which the whole
group subscribed and it was something we did take a deliberate
decision on in that, if you like, we wanted something that would
make an otherwise anonymous London suburb become a little more
recognised and this was the issue that we chose, and I do stress
that this was twelve years ago.
433. Can I next explore the relationship
between the Policy Sub-Committee, where the environment seems
to be a strong agenda item, and the Environment Committee? I presume
you have an Environment Committee?
(Lord Tope) Yes.
434. What is the relationship between the
Policy Sub-Committee and the Environment Committee where this
agenda is concerned?
(Lord Tope) The Policy Sub-Committee actually
is a Sub-Committee of our Policy and Resources Committee. The
reason it goes there is again to emphasise that this is a whole-Council
practice and it is not something which is just done by environmental
services, but it is as relevant, in different ways perhaps, to
education or to social services, so in fact these things will
go through all our service committees. Most, I think, but not
all, of the staff concerned are basically from environmental services,
but the reason it comes to the Policy Sub-Committee is because
that has the overall responsibility for the Council's corporate
policy and this is part of the corporate policy, not just an environmental
services policy.
435. Having been a chair of housing myself,
I will focus on housing, so do you find that the chairs of those
other committees, particularly housing, are also leading or do
you have to put any pressure on the rest of the political system
to make sure that the environmental agenda is addressed?
(Lord Tope) I would be foolish to tell you that
the chair of housing spends all of her time discussing environmental
issues with her director; of course not. The priorities are different.
We do have to have—"pressure" is the wrong word—but
we do have to take a lead and to drive that. There was some years
ago, it is not a problem now, but there was some pressure as to
whether the responsibility should rest with the Environmental
Services Committee or the Policy Sub-Committee and political pressures
you will all be well aware of. That now happily is long in the
past and I do not think that is an issue any more, but it was
earlier on.
Chairman
436. That is an interesting point actually,
where the authorship or leadership of the policy resides, whether
it is with the Environmental Services Committee or whether it
is with the Policy Committee. As you say, your policy sprang from
political leadership back in the 1980s and you have tried to make
it central, but it is rather strange, therefore, that it is through
the Environmental Services Committee rather than through the Policy
Committee, is it not?
(Lord Tope) No, I am sorry, but maybe I am misunderstanding
you. The responsibility for it now and for some years has been
with our Policy Sub-Committee.
437. So what role does the Environmental
Services Committee fulfil then because you said that it is led
by the Director of Environmental Services who chairs an environmental
co-ordination group?
(Lord Tope) That is an officer group. Patricia,
do you want to answer that?
(Ms Hughes) Yes, the Policy Committee co-ordinates
the proposals for the strategy and action that takes place arising
from the strategy coming from each department. Obviously that,
coming from the Environmental Services Department, is a rather
larger and more comprehensive agenda than coming from some of
the other service departments and indeed other parts of the Council,
but you would find that the Housing Department, for example, would
be extremely concerned about energy efficiency in council houses,
so they would focus very sharply on that important part of the
policy. As it happens, we choose directors to lead on a number
of Council initiatives and the Director of Environmental Services
is the one who has hitherto been chosen to be the lead officer
on environmental matters, as the Director of Education might,
say, lead on young people. We have been thinking from time to
time whether we ought to reconsider that, so it is not necessarily
the key expert who is actually the lead officer. But that is the
reason, because the Environment Director is the person who is
actually in control of the largest number of initiatives.
Dr Iddon
438. Can I just clarify that, Chairman?
Government has appointed "Green Ministers" who drive
the agenda within their own Department and what you are saying
is that there is a key person who has that responsibility in each
of your key departments, service departments?
(Ms Hughes) There is a key person, a key officer
in the Council, who is a chief officer, who is charged with the
delivery of particular policies. The Director of Environmental
Services happens to be charged with the delivery of environmental
policies. In addition to that, there is a champion, if you like,
a project manager, and that is the job that Tansy Wenham-Prosser
does at present. In addition to that, there must be a champion
in each department and the level of that champion depends rather
more on the person than on the status, so that you will find that
in some departments it is an assistant director who is the champion
of EMAS, but in others it is not and it is somebody else.
439. And where it is not, where it is somebody
further down the hierarchy, forgive me for using that term, do
they have the same clout in that department as somebody at the
top of the hierarchy?
(Ms Hughes) It depends. We are looking again at
our co-ordination group, plus it very much depends on the personality
of the person. If it is an assertive enough person who will get
the ear of the director and make sure he or she hears that is
fine. We have taken the view that it has gone too far or we have
moved too far down for champions and we do need now to make sure
that the post is at a sufficient level in the department to make
sure that their voice is heard because champions go. They are
head-hunted.
|
