Select Committee on Environmental Audit Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40 - 59)

WEDNESDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2002

MR ROBERT LOWSON, MS HELEN LEGGETT AND MR ANDREW RANDALL

  40. What about the business of Mr Meacher? Where did that come from, this whole business of was Michael going to be a Cinderella?
  (Mr Lowson) I know where that came from. It came from the journalistic treatment of what appeared to be developments on the ground during that pretty brief period when the size and shape of the delegation was being discussed.

  41. With respect, it seemed to go on for ages. Mrs Doughty has mentioned that she heard about it when she was in Greece and I remember a totally unacceptable delay in stamping out this issue. I remember it being at the top of every radio programme for about two or three days, whether Mr Meacher was going or not. There was too much slack in the event and it was not stamped out. Of course Mr Meacher is going; do not be so ridiculous.
  (Mr Lowson) We are beginning to stray, if I may say so, into areas where these are clearly issues that were discussed among ministers. I can tell you about our approach to a communications strategy and the mechanisms of the process which, in my view, was conducted in a very well organised, exemplary, professional manner.

  Joan Walley

  42. In terms of the accommodation that the UK delegation had, they along with everybody else stayed in the conference centre and I do not think any delegates could be responsible for the fact that the conference centre had restaurants. As somebody who was there, one would expect our delegates to stay in the conference centre. Can I get back on to the post-summit machinery in terms of what is happening now that everybody is back? Who is responsible for coordinating the follow-up and what monitoring systems have you for checking that there is progress and, more important, delivery?

  (Mr Lowson) We are working on that still. This is one of the things I can imagine Mrs Beckett might have more to say about when she sees this Committee in January. You have seen, among the notes that we sent you, the grid that is headed "Sustainable Development Commitments Originating from WSSD Outcomes." This is one which DEFRA has taken the lead to produce because we have been the lead department in the negotiating process and which has tried to identify what commitments emerged from the negotiation and to identify which department should carry those commitments forward. We are still in discussion among departments about how this is going to be done in detail. We regard it as our job to identify the commitments and to identify which departments should be carrying them forward and to satisfy ourselves they are being carried forward. Going back to what I said earlier on, this is with the objective of embedding sustainable development in general, including Johannesburg commitments, within the weave of what all departments are doing within government.

  43. I understand that and I am grateful for the fact that you have set out what needs doing and where the gaps are but what I cannot quite grasp is what the overall coordinating mechanism is. Going back to what I was saying earlier on about the Urban Summit, where is the mechanism that would have instantly spotted that there was a gap there? What overall mechanism have you introduced to make sure that, whether it is the Foreign and Commonwealth Office or International Development or the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, they are pulling their weight?
  (Mr Lowson) We are not writing on a clean sheet of paper. We already had a range of policies designed to move towards sustainable development and we already had a range of interdepartmental consultation mechanisms. We have to think over the weeks to come whether these mechanisms are adequate to mainstream the sustainable development messages and the Johannesburg outcomes within them. That process has not reached its end yet.

  44. As part of that process, could you give the Committee some indication of when since Johannesburg the Cabinet Committee, MISC 18, met and what account that committee has taken of the need to get all this set up?
  (Mr Lowson) MISC 18 was created to prepare for Johannesburg and ministers still need to decide whether it is going to continue or whether the existing structure of interdepartmental committees without MISC 18 are adequate for the job.

  45. Has it already met?
  (Mr Lowson) It has not met since Johannesburg, although there has been interministerial correspondence and pretty intensive work among officials specifically about follow-up to Johannesburg.

  46. When is it intending to meet?
  (Mr Lowson) It does not have a meeting schedule at the moment.

  47. It has basically been a committee that prepared for Johannesburg but has not met since?
  (Mr Lowson) That is right.

  48. Do you think it should have met?
  (Mr Lowson) From observing the process so far, I do not think that events post Johannesburg have ripened to the extent that it was necessary for the committee to meet. The work has been carried forward at official level and it has not yet reached the point where the need for ministers to get together in the structured way that they do in the Cabinet Committee, has emerged.

  49. If MISC 18 has not met to discuss this, has the Green Ministers' group met to discuss this?
  (Mr Lowson) Not since Johannesburg.

  50. There is no overall political direction as to how it is being taken forward at this stage?
  (Mr Lowson) No. There has been no meeting of those committees.

  51. In the absence of that, do you think the Sustainable Development Commission or yourselves should be coordinating an effort, because where is the direction coming from? Is it really left to civil servants?
  (Mr Lowson) There are a number of elements to the answer. First of all, the fact that the committees do not meet does not mean there is not political direction. It is clear that, from the Prime Minister downwards, there was a high degree of political commitment to making progress at Johannesburg and that level of commitment is still there. As to should the Sustainable Development Unit or the Sustainable Development Commission do the coordination, there is an easy answer with regard to the Sustainable Development Commission, which is definitely not. It is not the job of the Sustainable Development Commission to coordinate government activity. It is the job of the Sustainable Development Commission to advise on promoting the sustainable development agenda and we in DEFRA, for example, are working hard with the Sustainable Development Commission at the moment to identify ways in which they can develop their work programme to yet further improve the impact they have and to take account of the outcome of Johannesburg. As far as the Sustainable Development Unit is concerned, it is a unit within one government department and I would regard the role of that unit which sits within my directorate as being to provide expert advice and to provide proposals for pursuit with other departments about how we should be carrying the agenda forward. That is what we have been doing.

  52. Where is the leadership?
  (Mr Lowson) The Prime Minister has the leadership. The Prime Minister started very committed to Johannesburg. He is one of the first Prime Ministers to express his personal commitment to Johannesburg. That commitment did not dissolve with his leaving Johannesburg.

  53. I am not suggesting that. What I am concerned about is where is the mechanism and the overall responsibility for the leadership of that mechanism post-Johannesburg?
  (Mr Lowson) I am not clear whether there is a need for a new bit of bureaucratic machinery bringing together ministerial consultation or whether the existing pieces of machinery are adequate to the task. That is for ministers to decide and they have not yet decided.

  54. In that case, what is going to be the format for that decision to be made? You said you were not sure. Is it that you will be advising ministers on how it should be done? How is this going to be brought to the attention of ministers? Because MISC18 has not met, because the green ministers have not discussed this, there seems to be a vacuum really as to where the responsibility and leadership is for driving this through? Yours is a kind of technical expertise from what you are saying, it is not the political side.
  (Mr Lowson) We mislead ourselves if we think the fact that a cabinet committee has not met means that there is not political leadership. Political leadership comes from individual politicians getting together and identifying the key issues to which they are committed. They do not need to have a committee structure to be able to do that. I am quite confident that ministers have been thinking very hard about how to carry this work forward and to make sure that the political commitment is not lost. The message I would leave is that one should not confuse the existence and the meeting of cabinet committees with the existence of a political will to make progress. The second of those is undoubtedly there. A cabinet committee structure is only there to provide a means of ensuring that political will is, in fact, expressed. It is a tool, it is not a thing which itself generates the commitment but the commitment is certainly there.

  Mr Challen

  55. Could I just ask if DEFRA, or should I say the environmental section of DEFRA, has gained any clout at all from the Summit within government?

  (Mr Lowson) I think it has. I am talking now as an official because you talked about the environmental area of DEFRA. My perception is that the professionalism and efficiency with which my colleagues—it was not me that did it—in DEFRA co-ordinated our approach to the Johannesburg Summit and the preparation for it led many of our colleagues in Whitehall to recognise us as a department which has got expertise, leadership and efficiency to do this kind of job and it has put us in a strong position, I think, to ensure that the follow-up is properly co-ordinated.

  David Wright

  56. I am interested in the tables that you have produced for today's meeting. Were they produced specifically for this meeting? Will they be produced by yourselves in the future at intervals? What status do they have and who is going to monitor them?

  (Mr Lowson) These particular versions of these tables were produced specifically for this meeting because they are living documents, they are amended—I do not know how many of these drafts of documents have happened before—they are designed as working documents which we are sharing with you. We have not identified these documents as something which is specifically designed for this Committee, although it is a version which we did specifically for this meeting because we needed to prepare something on this occasion. They have the status which I described, which is that they are working documents designed to help departments ensure that we have a shared understanding of what came out of Johannesburg and of who is carrying forward the follow-up action. They are definitely designed as working documents and the documents you have got is our attempt to share those working documents with you.

  57. So when will they be updated? Do they now go and sit on a dusty shelf in a room somewhere and everybody forgets about them? What is the structure that we have to see progress on some of the targets that we can see here, progress on some of the gaps that we can see here? What worries me is that we get documents like this that come forward when we ask for them but that is not good enough really, they need to be used within the structures of the Civil Service to actually achieve delivery. I am not interested really in terms of just getting a document that is going to go on a shelf after today's meeting, I am interested in seeing something that is going to give us practical change.
  (Mr Lowson) I think that is entirely reasonable and that is just the approach that we will be following. Let us take the "Sustainable Development Commitments Originated from WSSD Outcomes" note. We will be using this as the basis for checking the extent to which the departments concerned are making progress with each of those elements.

  58. How regularly will you check?
  (Mr Lowson) I go back to what I said before, that we regard delivery as a matter for the parts of government responsible for those particular areas, so we want to see this work embedded in their activity and the primary responsibility for delivering outcomes in these areas rests with those departments rather than with DEFRA. We will have an interest nevertheless in being able to demonstrate to ourselves and demonstrate to the world in general that we are making progress in delivering the outcomes of the Conference and the wide sustainable development agenda. How it will be done I do not know. I have not reached any conclusions, and I do not think my colleagues have, about how best to present the steps that we will be going through from now on. I go back to what I said about the Sustainable Development Strategy and also mention the Sustainable Development Report which we produce annually and which will be emerging in January, as I said earlier. We will be ensuring that the outcomes of Johannesburg are properly reflected in what we are reporting on in these annual reports. You have certainly got that as a basis for high level recording of the progress that we are making in delivering sustainable development outcomes. I have mentioned also the indicator process. What we are interested in is moving indicators in the right direction. We have got over 100 sustainable development indicators and we publish progress in relation to those indicators as the information relevant to them becomes available. There is already a process for monitoring and publicising our progress as a government in meeting sustainable development targets. I, and we in DEFRA, need to reflect on whether we need more to build on some of this other documentation that we have shown you today that will provide more of a picture as to how far we are actually bringing home the Johannesburg bacon.

  Mr Thomas

  59. I have to say that on this I am still unconvinced. We have established on Mrs Walley's question that the cabinet committee that met to discuss co-ordination before Johannesburg has not met since, and possibly was a committee that was only going to meet before anyway, the green ministers have not met since Johannesburg which is a bit of a concern in that we have got a pre-Budget statement next week. We also have from you a working document, and I accept that status, that nevertheless sets out in its list the departmental interests and, importantly, which department is co-ordinating those interests and they are in bold, so we have got DEFRA and FCO and whoever it might be, and also the co-ordination. The impression I am getting very strongly from your responses is that there is an awful lot of co-ordination going on at the Civil Service level but very little, if any, going on at a political level. There does not seem to be a meeting of political minds between the political heads of departments, the ministers, or the green ministers at least, to drive this forward. Are the cabinet ministers themselves aware that their departments are committed to these things just at that level or is it just remaining at the moment at the Civil Service level?

  (Mr Lowson) I do not think it is remaining just at the Civil Service level, although there is an enormous amount of work at that Civil Service level going on. Civil servants do what they are doing because ministers have told them to do it or they have invited ministers to tell them to do it and that certainly means that the key ministers are fully engaged in this process. Ministers do not just have to meet in committees to co-ordinate the activities of their departments, they can write to each other, and they have been doing that, they can discuss issues bilaterally, and they have been doing that, they can work through their civil servants, and they have most certainly been doing that. I think it would be quite wrong to give the impression that the fact that particular groups of ministers have not got together does not mean that ministers have not got a firm grip of the process.


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries index

© Parliamentary copyright 2003
Prepared 23 October 2003