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.
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