Examination of Witness (Questions 41-55)
Thursday 27 February 2003
Mr Trewin Restorick, Director,
Global Action Plan, examined.
Q41 Mr Chaytor: Good morning, Mr Restorick.
Can I welcome you. You have been here for the two sessions that
we have just had. We are delighted that you could be with us this
morning, because I think we want to touch on action as well as
theory. We will ask you to give us some opening remarks, but I
wondered first of all if you could perhaps include in that some
reference to how your organisation has been, and is to be, funded?
MR TREWIN
RESTORICK
Mr Restorick: Certainly. Thank
you very much for the invitation. I am Trewin Restorick, Director
of Global Action Plan in the UK. We are a charity. We have been
going for 10 years. I set up the organisation, so I have been
there from the start. We currently have a turnover of about £1
million. We employ 23 staff scattered throughout the United Kingdom.
Our funding, quickly to touch on that, is currently about 46%
from landfill tax credit, the rest is probably split equally between
companies, local authorities, charitable trusts and some public
money which is mainly European, though we get £80,000 from
DEFRA. That is how we are funded.
Q42 Your future is assured? Is that funding
secure?
Mr Restorick: Our future has never
been assured, I do not think. Our future is always quite interesting,
which is why I am going greyer quite quickly. We operate like
a small business. The more successful we are, the more successful
we are in winning contracts, the more funding we get. Landfill
tax credit is a tremendously good fund for an awful lot of initiatives.
I know landfill tax credit has many, many faults, and I think
they have been touched on numerously. What probably has not been
touched on are the benefits that the scheme has. So obviously
in a review of that, our future is a little less certain than
it was, shall we say.
Q43 Mr Ainsworth: As the Chairman said,
we have heard a lot of theory and danced around some difficult
theoretical topics, I think, but you are actually involved in
practical work to get people to engage in sustainable behaviours.
I wondered whether you could give us a few examples, to borrow
a phrase which I know at the moment will not be popular with the
gentlemen behind you, where you have actually created these axles
and joined up the wheels in people's homes?
Mr Restorick: Yes. There is an
awful lot of talking about this issue and there are very few people
stupid enough actually to try to do it, so I think we are really
classified as stupid enough to try to do it. Very quickly—and
it will be brief—I would like to put down what I think needs
to be in place to enable schemes to work successfully, and then
give you a couple of very quick examples of how we think we have
done that. The first thing that needs to be in place is the language.
Environmental issues tend to relate to people thinking you make
your own yoghurt, you are very weird, you live on your own and
it is all a bit strange. Somehow we have to make environmental
issues aspirational, modern and forward looking, and something
that people want to do. I think that is something we have learnt
very quickly, because if you do not create that aspirational element,
people find as many cul-de-sacs to shoot down and reasons not
to do something as they can possibly find. The second thing is
that within any initiative you need to find leaders within that
particular community. The analogy I use is that it is like a church
on a Sunday morning. The organist or the pianist starts up and
there is silence, then you get two or three people singing, usually
very loudly off key, but they start singing. As soon as they start
singing, the vast majority of people start joining in. You always
get the ones at the back who just mime along, but you get that
noise created. To get any form of sustainable development, you
need to find the singers and you need to give them the support,
the encouragement and the information that they need to achieve
change. That means that you have to be quite clear to them that
we do not know the science, that there are things which are complicated,
that people will have different values and different views on
things, but they have at least to be able to give a reasoned argument
and a debate, and there needs to be that social interaction. Just
giving people straight messages does not work, because people
can reject those messages very easily if it does not quite fit
with their values. The third thing is that it is long term, and
that is crucial. This is something you need to invest in over
a period of time. We have rung our hands in horror at the number
of government initiatives—the last few ones I can think
of are Going for Green, Are You Doing Your Bit—which have
come in like big firework displays, lit up the sky very briefly
and then disappeared with no long-term impact. You have to have
that long-term investment to prepare for the long haul, which
means you have to invest in it. Then I think the final two things
you need are that you need to make sure that the information is
coming from a source that people trust, so for us working with
business is a very good way of working, because the message comes
from a company that people work for and they do trust, with an
independent environmental organisation, a charity in our case.
People are receptive to messages coming from that level and they
think, "Well, there must be something behind this."
The final thing you need is that you need leadership and you need
structured support. The Government has been very good in some
instances in providing that and absolutely appalling in other
instances. You have to have that sort of leadership and structure
to enable things to happen. So those are the elements that I think
need to be in place before you are going to get anywhere. I can,
if you like, quickly touch on some examples of where that has
happened.
Q44 I would love to hear them. I think
we are going to come on to households and your work with households
and the domestic scene. You mentioned there your work with businesses.
A few examples of how you have engaged businesses I think would
be helpful.
Mr Restorick: I will give you
a couple of examples. One is the Co-Operative Insurance Society.
They have a very strong environmental and social policy. They
wanted to engage with their workers, because a lot of companies
have created their environmental policy almost like a defence
network or an information piece for investors, but they have been
very bad at engaging their employees, their stakeholders, in achieving
those changes. So what we did with CIS is that we are going through
a structured process with them where we are currently working
with their branch members, so we have found a leader or leaders
from a number of branches, we have trained them, they have gone
back into their branches, they have measured what environmental
impact their branch is having in, say, energy or waste, and they
have given that information to us. We then work out what the heck
they are giving us and try to turn it into something coherent
and understandable, and then they go back and set their own improvement
targets and engage with the rest of their employees in the process
of change. It is interesting that with the Co-Op they have actually
taken that a step further with Co-Op Insurance, in that they have
actually said now, "How can we get our insurance employees
to work within the broader community?", so they are now trying
to build links between their employees and schools. We have done
exactly the same process in East Sussex Council who have achieved
a phenomenal saving in waste through exactly the same process;
they have found their enthusiasts and trained their enthusiasts,
they have measured things, which is crucial. The number of organisations
who do not know what they actually produce is phenomenal, or if
they do it is sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere. The employees
have got involved, they have understood what is happening. They
have set their own improvement targets. They have set their own
process for engaging other employees, for looking at structural
changes they can make, and they have measured again. We have just
helped them through that whole process, but crucially we have
always had the backing of somebody very senior within the business
who has said, "Yes, this is important. Yes, I'm willing to
allocate staff time to this, and yes, we will reward in some way
or another, acknowledge in some way or another, staff's involvement
in this particular process." It is not rocket science but,
believe you me, it does not have to be to achieve the changes
that we have achieved.
Q45 How important to you is ERGO,
your magazine, which I have seen described as aspirational and
cool?
Mr Restorick: Yes, it is a great
leap into the unknown, I think. We were very concerned about it.
I have a copy of The Guardian which is fantastic. I think
it came out on Tuesday after the Prime Minister's speech on Monday.
You have this fantastic analysis of the speech, why it is important
and what he is trying to achieve, and then there is this little
sort of snippet box which says, "And 10 things you can do
to help the environment". Number eight, if I remember, says,
"Avoid flying". You just think, "Oh yeah, okay,
I'll just stop flying. I won't go on holiday, I won't do anything."
That, quite honestly, is quite a crass example, but it is an example
of the level of environmental communication at the moment. All
you get are these lists—"thou shalt" lists—and
that is pathetic. Are You Doing Your Bit slightly came into it.
They hid it because they had a celebrity saying it, which probably
made it even worse, but it was a "thou shalt" list.
We think that that is not going to work. People are looking at
"Changing Rooms", they are looking at cookery programmes.
That is where they get their information, that is where they get
their ideas from. Our view was, if that is where they are willing
to get their information from, it is not a massive step to say,
"If you're going to do your garden, think about the way you
do your garden. Or if you're going to do DIY, think about the
paints you're buying or the energy conservation of the things
you're putting in." It is not a massive leap. So ERGO
for us is, I think, the first attempt that we have made to try
to get that message across in an aspirational way. It is a magazine.
We have just signed a deal with John Brown Publishing to do it
for another year. We have only got funding for a year for it.
Q46 What is the circulation figure?
Mr Restorick: The circulation
at the moment is 10,000. It is a slow build. It is something that
we just felt, if I had a sane commercial head on me, we would
not touch with a bargepole. We probably would not touch any publication
with a bargepole. It is something that we felt was justified and
important, was actually going to take the debate forward and hopefully
would inspire others, particularly the Government and DEFRA, just
to think about the way of communicating the message, and we might
even get through to Government in general.
Q47 Chairman: Before I bring in Mr Challen,
could I ask you in respect of the businesses that you are currently
working with, or which you would consider working with, whether
or not you have had any thoughts as well about working with possibly
organisations like the football league?
Mr Restorick: The football league?
I would love to. The way we get business is that we actually market
our product to businesses, which is quite difficult, because they
do not know they want it when we go and they do not think it is
a need, so it is quite a difficult sell, and we cannot really
tell them what they are going to get out of it, because we do
not really know. So the businesses we tend to have got have not
been strategically sought. We do a lot of work with financial
services houses, because they all talk to each other, and it has
come through word of mouth. We have just managed to scrape together
enough money actually to employ a marketing manager specifically
and now we can be much more strategic. I think the football league
would an interesting one. Far more interesting would be all the
Government Departments, in terms of probably the ability of Government
to do something which shows leadership very quickly, to look at
what you are doing, the number of people you employ, the number
of households they are part of, the number of schools they are
part of, you could very, very quickly put a real stamp of "This
is a leadership thing that we are doing". That is why local
authorities are coming to us. East Sussex County Council say:
"What right have we, as a local authority, to go out spouting
Local Agenda 21?" and "Don't throw so much waste out,"
when you go to their offices and, quite frankly, it was a shambles.
Q48 Mr Challen: Good morning. I wonder
if I could ask you, first of all, whether any Government Department
has approached you for advice on public campaigns?
Mr Restorick: No. Michael Meacher
has been along to three of our conferences now and I have always
sort of gamely tried to follow it up and said: "You know,
we can really help you." I get given the publicity person:
"Are you doing your bit?" who basically tries to pick
our brains as much as they can. We have never really engaged with
any Government Department in a way that I would say was a serious
level of engagement. We have engaged a lot with local authorities
and the Commonwealth Secretariat is one organisation we are working
with at the moment but, at a corporate level, I do not think we
have really engaged.
Q49 This will be a big growth area. Can
I just look at the domestic practicalities and ask you how you
find households to conform and volunteer?
Mr Restorick: We have tried many
different routes. We had a programme called Action at Home, where
what we did was we trained people within the community. They were
found by the local authority, then we trained them and then they
recruited other households. They get sent a series of packs with
environmental information. We had about 30,000 households do that.
We did a lot of work with UCL trying to discover what those 30,000
households were getting out of the process, and we found that
a lot of them were dropping off and losing interest, partly because
of the communication methods we use, but also because there was
this complete lack of social interaction, which is crucial. While
we were doing this, our Dutch partners have this programme called
Eco-teams, where groups of six to eight households get together.
I looked at it and I thought: "The English are never going
to do that. You're not going to want to go and sort of talk to
your neighbours or anything vaguely dangerous like that,"
and I said: "Well, it won't work, so we won't try it."
While I was saying this would never work, this slightly eccentric
Dutch woman appeared—who had worked for the Dutch thing
in Nottingham—and she said: "I'm going to make this
work." She started to recruit households through church groups,
through women's and toddlers' groups, through her primary school,
and managed to get—totally voluntarily—these households
together. They managed to reduce waste by 50% and they managed
to reduce their energy consumption by about 12%. The thing I had
forgotten is that obviously the British are inherently nosey,
and if you get invited round to see what your neighbour's house
looks like, you go. I think that the Eco-team model is an interesting
model. At the moment it costs £85 per household, which is
too expensive and it is too intensive for us. The person we have
got running it is an absolute Green fanatic, lives, breathes and
probably would die it, actually. What we have got to do with the
Eco-teams is we have to find a way that we can water it down so
that it is less cost-intensive to do and can be expandable to
a wider area. Now, obviously, we have to do that without losing
the core elements that keep it successful, but I think we are
at the start of quite an interesting process there. It was interesting
when we were talking to Nottingham County Council that it cost
them £22, an additional stable price of £22 per household,
to throw their rubbish away. So if you halve that, then if you
are saying households can save 50% and then continue to save that
50%, that is £12 a year. The economics for us are, can we
get the pricing of the programme down so that it becomes viable
for a local authority to say: "Well, rather than spend that
much money to chuck that stuff in the waste, we can invest in
this." Long term, we know that it will have an impact. That
is the dilemma we face. The dilemma I face is that as a small
charity, working mainly on contract income, we are sort of running
on the treadmill to stand still. I have got no time and resource
to invest in the thinking and the testing that needs to go into
place to make this work. So I go round with a permanently exasperated
look on my face, especially when I see the millions that are going
into these top-down "thou shalt" campaigns.
Q50 What do Eco-teams incur these costs
on?
Mr Restorick: It is time, it is
our staff time. It is somebody going along and inspiring them.
They weigh their rubbish every month. People like weighing their
rubbish—it is bizarre, that is what it is—but they
do. We then get the data and then that data is sent back to them,
so that every month they say: "Well, we've managed to reduce
our waste by this figure." They get continual reinforcement
over the six months that the programme runs. So it is really time.
Obviously, one of the things we could do is say: "Well, can
we use volunteers or other people to do that?", but you need
to be a particular sort of person, you need a lot of training
and a lot of self-confidence and support from an organisation,
to be brave enough to do that.
Q51 So after six months they should be
self-sufficient in terms of costs?
Mr Restorick: Yes. The University
of Leiden, which has done research in the Netherlands, has shown
that once people make that step, they sort of go into the virtuous
circle, which is: "Oh, I can do that and I can do this,"
and they then go through, not just a pattern of continuing what
they are doing, but actually continual improvements, because they
seem to have broken through that inertia barrier. Now, whether
that happens in the UK, I do not know, but I do not think we are
that different from the Dutch.
Q52 Would it just be the cost that is
the main barrier really to extending really or rolling out Eco-teams
across the country?
Mr Restorick: It is the cost,
in the initial sense, of the exploration. It may well be that
you cannot water down the process. If you cannot water down the
process, then you are only ever going to get to a small percentage
of the population, and you just have to accept that. If you can
water down the process and get the sort of "hummers,"
if you like, in the choir, then there is no reason at all why
it should not become totally self-funding. In terms of local authorities,
particularly if landfill tax continues to crank up, which all
the indications are it will, they should be able to self-fund
it.
Q53 Mr Chaytor: You are very critical
of Government's top-down initiatives and media campaigns. Do you
think there is any role at all for that, or should the budgets
there are going to be for that be salted entirely into your bottom-up
approach?
Mr Restorick: No. There does need
to be that, but it cannot be that on its own because it is very
important that there is a sense of leadership. The Prime Minister's
speech on Monday was interesting because it was real leadership
and he has not made many speeches like that. It was quite short
on how he was actually going to get there, and it is interesting
the way the media picked it up, because they picked up the whole
nuclear and move to renewables without actually turning back to
the consumers and saying: "Consumers could buy renewables
and look at all the exciting new products there are around that
they could start purchasing." So you do need that leadership
and you do need those messages, and they need to be simple and
clear: "This is what you can do, this is why it is important
and this is the impact message." That is totally clear.
Q54 Following that speech in terms of
turning the rhetoric into reality, what are the priorities that
Government should focus on now in practicable terms?
Mr Restorick: There are a number
of levels. First, there are the internal policies. What can the
Government do itself as a major employer to move this forward?
Commitment, then to say: "We are going to sort of put renewable
energy into the Treasury or something." That would have really
shown a backing to the intention. Also consumers need help. The
Government has faffed around with eco-labelling for years. Whether
the eco-label is the right way to go or not is highly debatable.
What is really clear is that, where there are good signs and good
clear information, consumers want to know it. So the energy labelling
on white goods is excellent, but if there is something where consumers
can say: "Right, this renewable product is this much better
than buying batteries or whatever," it needs something at
that level, so that the consumers feel they are part of a process
where the Government is doing things, but they are being helped
by the Government to do things as well.
Q55 In terms of behaviour change at the
local level, what do you think are the biggest obstacles to overcome
there? You have said there is a general consensus about the objectives
to be achieved.
Mr Restorick: It is apathy actually,
and I do not think it is apathy because people do not care, it
is almost apathy because they are not being helped to care, if
you see what I mean. I was told: "Oh, secondary school children
won't be interested in environmental issues. You'll never get
into secondary schools." Okay, getting into secondary schools
is incredibly difficult because of all the pressures there are,
but once you get to the students and give them leadership and
enable them to act as positive citizens and role models within
the school, it is amazing the energy you discover; but you have
got to get to them and you have got to give them the chance. So
I have a lot of pessimism, but I am also eternally optimistic.
We have to crack this issue and I think everybody knows it. As
long as it has been communicated in a way that they can say: "Well,
okay, I don't accept that, but I do accept that," you will
start to get that gradual change which will eventually shift consumption
patterns. You only have to look back at the changes in consumption
over the last thirty or forty years to show that pretty massive
swings can occur, but you have got to start somewhere.
Chairman: I think that brings our session
to a close. We are starting this modernisation of Parliament and
we have Questions which start downstairs at 11.30. We are very
grateful for the energy that you have brought to the session and
I hope that we can keep in contact with you. Certainly if you
have any further thoughts which you think of afterwards that you
should have said and did not have an opportunity so to do, then
please do that. Thank you very much indeed.
|
