Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
WEDNESDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2002
MR ROBERT
LOWSON, MS
HELEN LEGGETT
AND MR
ANDREW RANDALL
20. Although you were in the business of giving
promises and firm indications, would you firmly indicate that
that review should have indicators that can test whether we have
reversed that decline in natural resources over the next ten years?
(Mr Lowson) We would certainly be looking at how far
we can develop indicators that do just that, yes.
21. Looking at the EU level, I accept that you
cannot totally separate the two. You mentioned earlier on the
EU strategy itself and the meeting coming up in the spring to
discuss this. What view will the UK Government now be taking at
the EU level? What we saw in Johannesburg was a number of positions
taken by the EU negotiating team and on some aspects the UK was
leading. On others, it was further behind. If we take as an example
renewables where the EU position is perhaps a bit more further
advanced than eventually was agreed at Johannesburg, what position
is the UK Government taking at European level? Is it one where
we will be holding that negotiating position? In other words,
being ambitious, or are we going to retract and say, "Never
mind about that. Whatever ambition we had before Johannesburg,
we are simply now about implementing what action came out of Johannesburg"?
(Mr Lowson) We will be doing two things but this has
to be under the reserve that we are talking here about what happens
in summit meetings and the line that we take at summit meetings
is decided by Prime Ministers. In broad terms, I am quite sure
that we will first of all be seeking to maintain our fairly ambitious
position and we will also be very keen to deliver concrete outcomes.
We will be looking for ways, for example, of securing at EU level
concrete measures which promote the use of sustainable technologies.
This has been a theme that the UK has been pursuing for some time
and I cannot imagine that ministers will want to go back on that.
It is an ambitious agenda but a practical one.
22. Is there anything that you can put your
finger on now in the EU's sustainable development strategy which
you think needs to be revised in the light of Johannesburg and
the EU negotiating position at Johannesburg? Are there clear areas
now where you think you could achieve your ambitions and these
will have to be reviewed?
(Mr Lowson) I cannot immediately think of anywhere
where the two are not consistent. What Johannesburg does mean
is that there needs to be an increased emphasis on ensuring that
the words of the sustainable development strategy feature in the
policies that the EU is considering. That is not at all out of
line with mainstream EU approaches. That is quite consistent with
the conclusions that have been reached by the General Affairs
and External Relations Council.
23. There was a recommitment in the political
declaration to Agenda 21. What does that mean for involving local
authorities and the local aspect within the UK? What sort of work
would you be expecting to do on that?
(Mr Lowson) We certainly need to work with local authority
partners, regional partners and the devolved administrations.
Beyond that, I am not an expert and I am not an expert on Agenda
21.
24. Have discussions started already with the
local authorities on the outcomes of Johannesburg?
(Mr Lowson) Yes, at a fairly superficial level so
far. I have talked in the last few days to the local authority
associations about how do we ensure that there is a process that
enables us to pursue these outcomes. We have not taken it further
than that yet.
25. Is there more that you could give us now
in terms of a written memo on how that might work?
(Mr Randall) I suspect that might be the kind of thing
that would be addressed when we look at how we deal with sustainable
development within the UK. When we move into that sustainable
development strategy review next year, maybe some of the implications
will become clearer.
Chairman: It was very striking that there was
no mention of sustainable development at the Urban Summit which
Mr Prescott held in Birmingham a month ago. You were saying you
wanted to get into the mainstream of policy making and it was
absolutely absent on that occasion.[7]
Joan Walley
26. You would have expected it to have gone from
the World Summit to the Urban Summit. You would have expected
that to be the absolutely vehicle to bring it down locally and
globally at the same time. Why was it not? Did you try to get
it included? Could you give us an insight into what went wrong?
(Mr Lowson) The Office of the Deputy
Prime Minister, who was the lead minister on the Urban Summit,
was fully involved with the negotiating process up to and during
Johannesburg.
Chairman
27. That is what makes it so surprising. Mr
Prescott himself was involved in Johannesburg and yet he did not
mention any of this at the Urban Summit.
(Mr Lowson) Their approach to the Urban
Summit is something you need to talk to them about but my take
on it is that their approach is likely to be highly conditioned
by what came out of Johannesburg and the interest they take in
Johannesburg and, although the expressions "sustainable development"
or "WSSD" have been mentioned at the Urban Summit—
28. It may have been subliminal.
(Mr Lowson) It may reflect their approach to mainstreaming.
This is something you need to talk to those involved in the Urban
Summit about.
Joan Walley
29. Are you saying that it was not included
because of the timing? It was too close to the outcome of the
World Summit? Surely, the Government should have been planning,
whatever the outcome, to make sure that that could be fed through
so that you were giving opportunity for local initiatives to be
taken forward. For example, in respect, say, to the housing policy
and the pathfinder policies where I understand there are talks
going on in the Sustainable Development Commission. Surely that
should have been dovetailed together and it was not.
(Mr Lowson) You are quite right that
it does need to be dovetailed together. I am not familiar enough
with what happened at the Urban Summit to be able to go very much
further than that, I am afraid. What I can tell you is that the
Deputy Prime Minister's Office were fully engaged in the Johannesburg
process and will have taken away from Johannesburg the same key
messages that we took away and I would expect those messages to
be reflected in the policies for which they are responsible, even
if they do not use the words. It is something which needs to be
pursued with them.
30. You would not say it is something for DEFRA?
(Mr Lowson) I would see it as DEFRA's job and our
responsibility to promote sustainable development across government
to ensure it is being carried forward in the right direction.
Chairman
31. It looks as though this was something that
dropped between DEFRA and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.
How far was DEFRA involved in the Urban Summit?
(Mr Lowson) My area of DEFRA was not
heavily involved in the Urban Summit and the reason I did not
feel an urgent need to be one of the parties of the Urban Summit
was because I knew that Mr Prescott personally and his advisers
had participated fully as members of the negotiating team and
had been central to developing our position before the conference.
32. Clearly the Sustainable Development Unit
should have been involved in the Urban Summit?
(Mr Lowson) Were you involved?
(Ms Leggett) Not to my knowledge.
33. Since you have a remit to look right across
government, the Urban Summit should have been a key thing and
it seems a pity that the SDU was not involved.
(Mr Lowson) I think the Urban Summit was rather like
the Johannesburg Summit. It was at the start of the process rather
than at the conclusion. It will be our concern to ensure that
all government departments whose actions are going to impact on
sustainable development are aware of the imperatives of sustainable
development.
Sue Doughty
34. One of the big opportunities of the Earth
Summit in Johannesburg is very much education, about informing
the populace at large; it is about the press; it is about getting
messages across. I am interested in how successful this would
be. I would like your feeling in your role as the director of
communications. You will have taken a view about what messages
are getting across in the papers, what sort of press the UK was
getting and particularly the areas where you had responsibility.
How do you think it went?
(Mr Lowson) I think it went pretty well.
We have to start with the notion that the summit was the conclusion
of an ongoing process and during the preparatory phase we had
a well developed, coherent communication strategy which did not
achieve front page news status in the daily, London based media
on many occasions. However, we did secure a high level of awareness
among a range of audiences, I believe, through segmenting the
messages, being clear about the audiences and being clear about
the way those messages were conveyed to those audiences. We involved
non-governmental organisations from the start in preparing the
UK's negotiating position and as members of our delegation in
Johannesburg. We were engaged in a range of awareness raising
exercises like the WWF Joint Earth Champions Project, which appealed
to a particular kind of audience and was very successful. Ministers
placed articles of their own in the national press in the weeks
running up to the summit. It is clear from looking at the number
of visits to the DEFRA sustainable development website that interest
in that website grew and the use of that website grew as the summit
got closer. We relied, as anybody has to rely in dealing with
specialist organisations, on that website as an important element
of our communications effort. Generally, my impression was that
we ran a coherent, coordinated communication campaign, not just
focused on or measuring success by appearances or headline stories
in the London based national media. When we were in the conference
itself, my impression was that the communications effort was such
as to seize the opportunity to raise awareness among new audiences.
Here was an occasion where it was going to be possible to secure
space in the national media, printed and broadcast, and we did
so. There were about 30 UK journalists in Johannesburg. We organised
daily media briefings, several of which the Secretary of State
attended. She did a total of 35 interviews. Michael Meacher and
John Prescott both did media interviews themselves. A range of
substantial stories did appear in the written and broadcast national
media during the period of the conference itself. At the same
time as that was going on, we put a lot of effort into the outreach
to the UK organisations represented in Johannesburg. I took a
daily meeting with all those organisations and we had open house.
Anybody who wished to come was welcome to be brought up to date
with the progress of the negotiation. We had non-governmental
participants on our delegation. Members were therefore able to
be kept fully informed in the process and influence—
35. On the press side, I appreciate that you
did include that group. When you look at some of the things that
are happening in the general press - I appreciate that the press
does not always react in the way we would like, but on the other
hand we seem to have had a string of things that went on from
the prepcom at Bali, where we did not get any positive press,
where there was even a failure to have a statement in the House.
We went through then about the whole fiasco about Meacher was
not going to go, which was an absolutely appalling press story.
I was on holiday in Greece and I looked at the BBC news once a
day. It was Meacher being cut out of that and the whole fiasco
about that and pictures of Prescott in a rather smart lift. I
appreciate nothing could be done about that because that was the
nature of the lift. By the time we came home and looked at the
papers, The Independent had a list of successes and failures
which was definitely a case of damning with faint praise. All
of us who were at Johannesburg were asked to do quite a lot of
speeches afterwards, various organisations, and the better informed
people or those who were sharing the platform all had that Independent
list. I appreciate that you can be preaching to the converted.
Friends of the Earth put information on their website and it might
be slightly critical. People who read that are already up there.
Hits on the DEFRA website do not equate to what the general public's
perception is of what happened. We have this huge opportunity
to make waves about the environment and yet this is the sort of
story. You cannot be responsible for the lobster and caviar story
in the Murdoch press which may have emanated from a vested interest
but nevertheless it was not quite brilliant, was it?
(Mr Lowson) In my previous incarnation as DEFRA's
communications director, I was always held personally responsible
for whatever the press chose to print about DEFRA and it was one
of the unsatisfactory aspects of that job. With reference to your
comment about websites, I do not think anybody would pretend that
having information on a website was the way to get messages across
to the broad, general public. You use a website to inform an informed
audience. Penetrating national media with stories that you want
to get into them is always one of the most difficult jobs to do
because the national media, quite rightly, do not want to print
something just because we would like them to do it. What we can
do is what we did, which is to provide abundant interview opportunities,
to provide frequent briefings. A good deal of written material
that formed the basis of The Independent article, if I
remember rightly, was material that we provided about the way
that the negotiation was going. We took a clear view throughout
the negotiation that the way to handle it was to be open about
both the successes and the failures of the negotiation. "Failures"
is perhaps not the right word, but where we did not get as far
as we wanted to get. That I think reflected itself in a step change
in the level of interest in the fact that the conference was going
on and UK negotiators had an ambitious position that occurred
while the event was in progress.
36. I do not really feel though that we have
got much further on this in terms of the impression that the general
public has been left with. We seem to have quite a dissonance
between the letter we have received from Margaret Beckett and
the Independent list. If you put the two side by side,
have you any comments about the effects of this strategy? Would
you like to review that strategy? Would you do anything differently
now?
(Mr Lowson) I do not think I would have done anything
differently. Within the limits of what the Government can do to
lead the national media, what we had was a coherent, well-organised
approach which provided audiences at a range of different levels
from the expert through to the generalist journalists with the
material that they needed to produce the stories on this topic.
What they did with that at the journalistic level is their own
affair and a good thing too. What we are doing is carrying the
process forward. We are working on a communication strategy for
sustainable development over the months to come, as we develop
our approach to reviewing the strategy, as we try to embed the
outcomes of Johannesburg in government policy. We are already
looking at the kind of events that we might launch to reach the
specialised audience and we are looking for opportunities to get
messages across to more general audiences. A particular issue
which we need to pursue is to demonstrate the linkages between
policy steps as we take them and Johannesburg and sustainable
development. We want to be sure that the policy departures DEFRA
takes over the months and years to come are firmly situated in
our sustainable development strategy.
Mrs Clark
37. I would like to pursue some of the very
trenchant comments that Sue Doughty has just made. You have used
the 3Cs, if you like: coordinated, coherent and consistent, about
the press strategy. What amount of forward planning went into
it? I think not very much. Anybody who was going to have as successful
as possible a press strategy should have started out trying to
get into the mind of The Daily Mail before anybody even
went. Anybody who reads newspapers or is involved in politics
is aware that rightly or wrongly John Prescott has become for
many years quite a butt of some tabloid papers, so they would
obviously try and do anything to imply that his responsibility
for the environment is not serious. For example, I can remember
the two Jags business at the conference. Transport Minister, two
Jags, taking a trip in a Jaguar for five minutes etc. In terms
of anything to do with expense, the tabloids like to have a go
at John Prescott as well. The idea of the British delegation staying
in a hotel, involving John Prescott, that had lobster and caviar
on the menu seems to be insane. Looking at those papers and the
agendas, the second point is the position of Michael Meacher.
Everybody knows that Michael Meacher is Mr Environment and regarded
as so by business and NGOs. The idea that you could send a delegation
off when the Environment Minister, who many people feel should
be in the Cabinet anyway, as in fact they are in other countries—the
question over why is Michael not in the Cabinet has never gone
away—and the fact that he should be allowed to be possibly
left off and then have the humiliation of Friends of the Earth
coming forward and saying, "Well, if Her Majesty's Government
cannot pay for Mr Meacher, we will buy his ticket and maybe even
enough money for a packet of sweeties. This is absolutely insane.
It does not seem to me that you have faced up to it. I would like
assurances that never again is so much money going to be wasted
on sending a delegation to such an important conference when,
whatever you say, the average constituent, my constituent, is
not going to think about what is the policy on this, that or the
other on the DEFRA website; they are going to say, "What
is wrong with Michael Meacher?" and, "Oh dear, two Jags
has done it again."
(Mr Lowson) I can assure you that our
approach on communications around this conference was probably
regarded within DEFRA as the highest profile event that we would
be participating in through most of this year. We produced and
worked on a communication strategy to match that, which involved
clarifying the messages we were trying to get across, clarifying
the audiences we were trying to reach and clarifying the means
and opportunities which we would aim to seize. We did so. We were
clear about our messages. We were clear about the style of our
communication and we provided for ourselves and seized a whole
range of communications opportunities to reach the audiences that
we needed to reach. Communications directors within government,
no matter how skilled—and DEFRA's present communications
director is, in my opinion, one of if not the most professional
communications directors in Whitehall—cannot dictate and
rightly so what a journalist will feel will interest the buyers
of the newspaper that he writes for.
38. They do not like John Prescott though, do
they? We all respect Mr Prescott's abilities but they do not like
him so they are going to try and seize on vulnerable points of
blowing him up and making him look ridiculous.
(Mr Lowson) That is exactly right, whether we approve
of it or not. I certainly do not approve of it. It is quite clear
what line the press will be looking for.
39. What you are saying is this could have been
avoided?
(Mr Lowson) I think it would have been very difficult
under the circumstances to have avoided such stories being written
altogether.
7 A more detailed explaination can be found in the
supplementary memorandum from DEFRA on Ev 41-42. Back
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