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WEDNESDAY 12 FEBRUARY 2003 __________ Members present: Mr John Horam, in the Chair __________ Memorandum submitted by Sustainable Development Commission Examination of Witnesses MR JONATHON PORRITT, Chairman, Sustainable Development Commission, PROFESSOR TIMOTHY O'RIORDAN, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, Associate Director of the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment, and Member of the Sustainable Development Commission, and MR SCOTT GHAGAN, Secretary, Sustainable Development Commission, examined Chairman
(Mr Porritt) I was hoping you were not going to mention that last encounter, Chairman! (Mr Porritt) No, not really, Chairman. W e tried to show in that the way in which the Commission, predominantly back here in the UK, was seeking to reflect the Johannesburg agenda to a more domestic audience and trying to persuade the UK media to take on that particular part of it. I am assuming that we will deal with some of the issues regarding both the run up to some of the stuff going on in the Summit itself and afterwards. (Mr Porritt) Yes. My colleague Tim O'Riordan was actually in Johannesburg, unlike myself - Tim was one of our two formal representatives on the UK delegation; Maria Adebowale was also on the delegation - so I shall certainly defer to Tim regarding anything that was actually going on in Johannesburg itself. Chairman: Thank you very much indeed Joan, the Vice-Chairman of the Committee, was also at the Summit, unlike myself, so I will ask Joan to lead off on this. Joan Walley (Professor O'Riordan) Since I was there, may I speak to begin with. First of all, we kept a watching brief on all the discussions and particularly the way in which the British delegation was moving the case for sustainable development in the various arguments and particularly again associated with the plan of action. But also we were acting as intermediaries between large numbers of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the various official delegations. In my personal case I was very interested in the role of science in sustainability and the relationship between science and the so-called type 2 partnerships, the business/government/civil society partnerships which, in my view, need to be underpinned by very strong and reliable environmental science in order for them to work. So we were doing a lot of things in the form of monitoring, connecting, keeping people informed and keeping a watching brief on how the British delegation was working. (Professor O'Riordan) As you know, the British delegation was very much driven by trying to get the plan of implementation into a form that would be acceptable to the British Government's view. This was a constantly difficult thing to do because of the huge cross-currents of different points of view in international negotiations of this kind and because the plan of implementation was covering a massive array of material which could not be easily bottled into a week's negotiations. But, in terms of your question, I think the British delegation was so much involved with getting the agenda established that it may not have always taken into account the possible implications of trying to achieve what it was seeking in the plan of implementation back in the domestic scene - and that, I think, is part of our evidence to you this morning. (Professor O'Riordan) My own interpretation was that it was primarily trying to get a plan of implementation that would stick, that would meet the expectations of the Government and of many non-governmental organisations. That was its primary focus during the weeks it was there - and, indeed, ministers were summarily engaged in this matter because it was a difficult plan to put together in the last four or five days - but there are implications for what was agreed and what people were discussing which I think the Commission itself is now working on - and Jonathon Porritt will say more about that - to draw the agenda back out into the national scene. That, I think, is part of our discussions today. I am happy to elaborate on that but, to be precise in my answer to you, I think we were primarily concerned with getting that plan of implementation into some kind of reasonable shape rather than all the issues that might affect the British agenda following this. (Professor O'Riordan) If I can distinguish between the UK delegation, led by two ministers, Mrs Beckett, in particular, and also Mr Meacher, but other ministers were involved, I think there was a heavy degree of commitment by the UK delegation to getting the achievement of this Johannesburg Summit to work. They worked tirelessly as a delegation and the officials worked tirelessly as a delegation, with an exceedingly good integration of services and management. I was very struck by their capacity to keep working away well into the night, with virtually no food and no sleep, in order to try to achieve British delegation objectives. Sometimes they succeeded - sustainable consumption reduction was a notable achievement by the delegation - and in other areas, they suffered - like in the area of energy - and I think it is one of these things that happens in these big, international negotiations. But the heads of state in general - the Prime Minister to some extent less so - gave a very strong sense of being utterly disconnected from the whole Johannesburg process. I think one of the things that was rather unsatisfactory was that here we were talking about the well-being of the planet, about the whole idea of earthly survival - and it really is as significant as that, there is no question in my mind that is what the issues are - and the well-being of populations who are deeply impoverished and socially mismanaged, and yet here were ministers who almost appeared to begrudge giving a day of their time to talking about this when they are grappling for months of their time on issues which arguably are going to damage and worsen the state of well-being of the planet and its peoples upon it. I do feel there is a very strong sense of disconnect between the heads of government and their ideology for what they believe in and the way they approach that summit. From the point of view of the non-governmental people and the civil society generally, apparent lack of enthusiasm and commitment by heads of government right across the board is disheartening. It gives the impression that it is not a matter that they care about having a high profile on their agenda. We at this Commission, and many other people with us, believe that this is actually the most fundamental issue of the planet. Many of the questions that Government ministers are talking about now, not least preparations for war, are, in my view, very much bound up with a much more survivable and democratic and just society in a living planet, and these matters are therefore deeply connected to the other questions that ministers and heads of states are concerned about these days. (Mr Porritt) No. (Mr Porritt) It was very much part of our communication strategy. We felt that it was important that the Commission spoke out independently just immediately prior to the opening of the Summit, to remind people that although the UK would quite rightly be perceived as one of the leaders on sustainable issues out in Johannesburg, that was a relative judgment they would be making, it was not an absolute judgment, because leadership in this area is, as we know, a relative thing. It is quite clear from the discussions we have regularly on the Commission that what any government is doing falls woefully short of what is now required to drive the transition to a sustainable world. We wanted to make those two points. We wanted to commend the UK for the things that it is doing but to remind people that the likely outcome from the Summit was still going to be very inadequate in terms of the gap between what needs to be done and what is being done. As regards the media as a whole, I can assure you that we shared your frustration absolutely. The media coverage in the run-up to the Summit was disgraceful really and I feel indicated an intent to do a pre-determined piece of Government knocking that had nothing to do with the quality of the debate, the inputs that were being made by the UK Government and so on. They all fell into this utterly pathetic, childish belief that the quality of the contribution from any delegation could be measured by the size of that delegation and then proceeded to have a wonderful time going after really microscopically unimportant issues of that kind. Unfortunately, the Government offered them a wonderful, juicy titbit in terms of whether No 10 was or was not going to permit Michael Meacher to be part of the UK delegation. I cannot imagine a more stupid way of giving the media precisely the kind of irrelevant little story they love to play with so they do not have to confront real issues, and I think that was a piece of appalling press management by the Government. We made that position very clear at the time. Once you get off on a bad footing like that, all sorts of things go awry, and by the time we actually got to the start of the Summit the media orientation was very ill-disposed towards the kind of quality and depth that was needed. One has to say, however, that when we got going on the coverage it was okay during the Summit itself. We have not done a precise word count but it is certainly our estimation that the concept of sustainable development was used more in the 10 days of the Summit than in the preceding 10 months, and probably even longer than that, so there was a real awareness of sustainable development building up which I think was important. I feel the cynicism that we felt would literally overwhelm the media coverage tended to fade away as more serious reportage came back from Johannesburg itself. (Mr Porritt) I think this is a very interesting issue and I am sure you will all be deliberating about this. I am extremely sceptical, to be absolutely honest, that there is anything called a post-Johannesburg agenda. Whereas, in my estimation, Rio and the Earth Summit will continue to have resonance in international debates for the definable future, as far as I can tell, because it brought into being real hard-edged, new international instruments, new treaties, very important broad-brush things like Agenda 21 - however much people might like to knock the outcomes from Rio, they were substantive and they set in train international policy processes, that, as we can see with climate change and others, have been highly significant ------ Chairman (Mr Porritt) Indeed, specific commitments. (Mr Porritt) Yes, and a constant review process, so that the committees, the parties to all these international treaties, are on a meeting schedule which means they simply have to try to move things forward time after time. (Mr Porritt) Yes. I believe, Chairman, you have been sent some interesting research which was done by David Collins(?). I do not know if that has been put before you as yet, but he has done a little analysis. It is fascinating. There were 531 commitments made in Johannesburg - and he has done his analysis looking at the DEFRA version of what a good target is, so they are using the DEFRA smart target: "Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely". If you do the DEFRA analysis of what a smart target is, out of the 531, only 17 lead to any demonstrable, real process of change. Of those 17, 10 had already been said and done - so the millennium development targets and so on - and seven were new. So we are coming down from 531 to seven. Of those seven, five were commitments to publish a document, and two out of 531 were real commitments: one was the commitment to eliminate destructive fishing practices by 2012 and the other was the commitment to halve the number of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015. When you look at 531 sort of "bits of process" coming out of Johannesburg and then you think about a follow-up strategy geared to the reality of those 531 outcomes, one really does have to question whether you could talk about a post-Johannesburg implementation strategy if we are being serious about it. There are lots of things to be done still but the fact that Johannesburg was there is not what makes them important. That is not what makes them able to be implemented now. Mr Ainsworth (Mr Porritt) That is certainly the conclusion we came to as the Commission. Obviously, multiple brave faces were put on this in the immediate post-Summit reflection, but there was a palpable sense of disappointment about the loss of some of the targets, particularly the renewable energy target but others as well. As I understand it - and, again, I would have to defer to Tim here - the feeling from those present in Johannesburg, the commentators, the journalists and NGOs, independent experts, was that the UK Government was working hard to get tougher targets embedded into the plan of implementation and was certainly on the side of the angels in terms of many of the processes that might have resulted in something more substantive than we have ended up with. Is that fair? (Professor O'Riordan) I think the comment you made from David Coffey(?) really needs a bit more elaboration. The Johannesburg Summit was never designed to be something akin to the Rio Summit and this was its great failing. It was never set up in preparatory activity to lead to major conventions, to plans of action, to important declarations of principle, to significant follow through. So it was doomed in some ----- Chairman (Professor O'Riordan) They were a combination of being inept and confused and far too mismanaged by a combination of the United Nations machinery and a lot of messing about tactics by significant governments. (Professor O'Riordan) The preparatory conference procedures, of which there were four, were mainly plagued by indecision and muddle and the inability to get any kind of clearly defined agenda up for the Johannesburg meeting, which is why Johannesburg was such a difficult process, because there was virtually nothing on paper at the beginning of it and there was a remarkable achievement at the end. It is easy to make the remarks which Mr Coffey made - and I have to say I share them all - but there were even worse, much worse at the beginning of the Johannesburg process. So the South African Government in its very clever way and a lot of delegations did manage to get something out of this particular hat called, roughly, a rabbit when it would hardly have been possible at all bearing in mind the extraordinarily mucky arrangements leading up to it. You have to bear in mind that this was not the equivalent of the Rio Summit, which is a tremendous disappointment for a lot of people, that a world event 10 years on did not manage to get the same kind of agenda established that would really lock people into long-term commitments around areas which are so fundamentally important. (Mr Porritt) I guess, Chairman, you will be familiar with the need for politicians to turn less than successful events and happenings into something that looks vaguely passable. My feeling is that she perhaps overstated that, because by any standards it was difficult to describe the outcomes as truly remarkable. I think what she was properly saying was that it was not right for critics, particularly some of the NGOs, to dump on the entire process because, if nothing else, it did hold the line on some of the Rio processes and there was a real fear in the preparatory process that actually some of the Rio commitments were going to be diluted and weakened, not even sustained, so I suppose that in that regard she was seeking to say that there are positive outcomes here on which we can build. I felt that she was perhaps indicating this notion that we have to work now through these coalitions of the willing. The UN processes are inherently unsatisfactory in some regards. When you do have to get consensus views down to the last semi-colon, it makes it incredibly difficult for countries that are determined to move forward more purposefully to achieve what they need from international gatherings of that kind. I think her optimism lay more in the expressions of intent from these "coalitions of the willing" to advance certain agendas faster than seemed to emerge from Johannesburg itself. I think there was legitimate optimism in that, but it has to be admitted that that is fall-back optimism because the process itself did not generate much to be optimistic about. Ian Lucas (Mr Porritt) Well, there is undoubtedly a danger. I think we are in a difficult position here. I do not think we do anybody any favours by talking up outcomes which are not there and I think if the Commission cannot be seen to give a rendering of what constitutes reality as we see it, as a group of independent experts looking on on this, if we are not able to do that without falling back on some kind of need to put positive spin on things, then I suspect the credibility of the Commission will be very severely undermined. (Mr Porritt) I was an NGO activist then, of course! (Mr Porritt) We have got to get real about this. (Professor O'Riordan) May I come back to you on that in terms of what might be the British agenda in what is going forward. Let me give you four, I think, fundamental themes which lay behind the British approach and the whole Johannesburg notion. I am an environmental scientist, so you will have to forgive me for being a little bit more scientific than possibly is generally the case. The first one is the idea of providing eco-system based services for everything we do as underpinning the whole notion of our economy. If you are running your systems so that you run soil, water, bio-diversity, fish and forests down, there is no economy in the future; there is simply destitution. It is absolutely fundamental, therefore, that we think in this country about designing our fundamental agriculture, our water systems, our coastal management, our whole area of natural resources, in the context of eco-system based services. So we put values on these things which are long-lasting and reinforce not only their own survival but the well-being of people attached to it. To be fair, this Government is now beginning to tackle this. Under the Water Framework Directive there are moves by the Environment Agency and by local authorities to start to put this concept under the "water" heading. Although we do not have time for this this afternoon, I think the beginnings of this are beginning to happen and we need to say more as a Commission and you need to say more as a Committee to encourage this kind of thing to go forward, so we value water as something which we sewer rather than as something we just 'commodify'. That is beginning to happen and more of that is desperately important. The Commission is working in this area. It is exactly the same with soil, where committees have studied this, particularly the Royal Commission of Environmental Pollution, and we are just beginning to start to look at soil as a resource for long-term survivability and so on. In the area of natural resources, these things are coming through but they are not coherent, they are not consistent, they are not driven by an underlying principle. The second one is the idea of social well-being, what is sometimes referred to as social capital. This Government is very committed to the idea of inclusion, of rights, of responsibilities, of incorporating people into partnerships and local government and regional government and, above all, evolved administrations, so here is an agenda which is actually moving forward and is very exciting. But it does not lock into sustainability; it simply takes us down a track called social betterment. Social betterment without the environment, without an economic livelihood which makes sense, especially for the underprivileged, will not give us sustainability. We are saying as a Commission that we need to start to bring these ideas together. There are lots of initiatives in Government, mainly centred around the Cabinet Office and the policy think-tanks, but no one, apart from, dare I say it, our own Commission, is really trying to bring this into some coherent totality, and you as a Committee, I know, are very keen on this and will take it forward. So my plea to you is that the Government actually is doing a surprising number of things but it is not clear that they all add up to what the Americans call " a row of beans". If they were designed in that way, we could make much better progress. It is not as bad as it appears, but we need that grid of coordination and direction. (Mr Porritt) Those are two very different things. I think that is a really helpful distinction, because selling Johannesburg hard as a really heavy-weight contribution to on-going international processes would, I think, genuinely be difficult. I am sure that Margaret Beckett will do as good a job as anyone could this afternoon to persuade you of that, but for us that is genuinely difficult. Trying to persuade people of the growing importance, significance of sustainable development and the need to put all of our policies on a more sustainable footing is actually getting easier. It is not getting harder. I do think, when we come on to this, Chairman, in terms of the post-Johannesburg agenda and the climate for taking some of these issues forward, I would like to reflect quite positively on the subtle, indirect influence that I think Johannesburg might be having now on the UK scene. But that is a very different thing from trying to sell Johannesburg, which I think leaves us with a real quandary. (Mr Porritt) Indeed. (Mr Porritt) No, I know what you mean. (Mr Porritt) Exactly. (Mr Porritt) I think there are a lot of issues behind that. From our reading, we would say that there has been a change in the ownership in Government of the sustainable development agenda and that that now makes it easier to begin to promote the cross-governmental aspects of sustainable development - the non-DEFRA bits, as it were - which, to be honest, was proving extremely difficult last year. I think that is one change. The second point ---- (Mr Porritt) A change in the readiness of other government departments to see themselves as protagonists in the sustainable development agenda, to accept that they have a very significant part to play in making their work, their impact more sustainable - and there is more detail there that we can come on to. As to the levels of public acceptance, this is a difficult one to deal with, as you know. Apart from these rather strange events that suddenly break out in our midst, like the fuel tax protest, there is no evidence of embedded public hostility to doing things on a more sustainable basis; indeed, there is survey evidence, polling evidence, going back many, many years now, of significant public sympathy for policy directions, new programmes, new ideas, that enable things to happen on a more sustainable basis. There is a huge difference between the expression of theoretical sympathy and the interpretation of that into lifestyle decisions, real changes in how people conduct their business, manage their own workplace and their home, change their lifestyle. The problem, I think, for government has always been to convert latent sympathy into hard-edged behaviour change and that is still where a lot of the challenge lies. My feeling - and whether it is post-Johannesburg or not is, I think, irrelevant - is that, in terms of the challenge to take this forward, that is the area where huge amount of very skilful political design and intervention is going to be required. (Mr Porritt) Yes. (Mr Porritt) I think it is fair to say that the reaction has been mixed. We are still working our way through a series of meetings with ministers in the different departments to which we wrote. Some have proved harder to pin down and encourage this more proactive engagement than others. That is, I guess, the nature of the beast. We are disappointed that it is, with some key departments, still genuinely very difficult for them, I think, to accept their part in the sustainable development strategy for the UK. Ian Lucas: Are you going to tell us who they are? Chairman (Mr Porritt) Well ...... Ian Lucas (Mr Porritt) Indeed. We have had real difficulties persuading the Department for Transport that the sustainable development agenda and the strategy for the UK is one which they need to address strategically. We do not get a feeling that is happening at the moment. We have made little impact on the Department for Education and Science as yet. We have not really established a successful meeting with them. I have had other meetings which have been more productive but still have not led to the kind of position that we were pressing for. I guess, at the very least - and I do not know whether you would accept this as a successful indicator - for us one of the simplest indicators we can come up with is: Has that department developed a sustainable development strategy for itself? Is it prepared to filter its own governmental role through a sustainable development, an overarching development strategy, and come up with its own approach in this area? By our analysis at the moment, the following departments have these sustainable development strategies: DEFRA itself; the DTI, which is currently reviewing its strategy with a view to promulgating a new strategy; the Department of Work and Pensions; the Ministry of Defence; and, of course, the Treasury has a lot of documentation that does not constitute a sustainable development strategy as such but certainly would be seen as a significant contribution to many of the debates, particularly around eco-taxes and so on. Under consideration is a strategy in DCMS and the Department of Health, and there are currently strategies being developed in the Department for Transport (we are led to believe but we have not seen it) and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. Is that a convincing picture of cross-governmental post-Johannesburg ownership? Hmm. (Mr Porritt) Yes. Definitely. We are optimists, basically. We are not here just to go round with long faces and wish we were wearing sackcloth and ashes every day of our life; we look to incremental change and my feeling now is that there are doors that are more open to a genuine engagement in this than was the case in summer last year. We genuinely feel that. Chairman (Mr Porritt) Chairman, I have to hold fire on that one. I am afraid this is very remiss of me, but I was away all last week and I have not actually read this communities' plan as yet, and I feel a bit constrained about firing off a commentary on that at the moment. The Commissioners who are most actively involved in that whole area of regeneration and housing have come back to me with some instant comments, which are not overwhelmingly bright, as in: " Whuf! this is one of the best things that has ever happened for sustainable development in the UK," but they are clearly indicating that there are substantial passages in that plan that will lead to a more sustainable set of decision-making processes and so on. But I am very nervous at the moment, not having read it as yet, and we have not come to a Commission view on that. I have forgotten what the timing for this particular inquiry is but we will be getting a collective view of the Commission together on that and I will very happily send that to you as soon as that is ready. (Professor O'Riordan) Chairman, very briefly, it is the intention of the Commission to put something like an obligation on sustainable development into the work of government and devolved administrations in reaching local government. The concept of an obligation is a rather open one but it means that you have to go through a formal process of sustainable appraisal when you are doing policy initiatives of this kind. I think we would probably say along the lines that this housing initiative, this community initiative by Mr Prescott, has many aspects which are highly commendable but, if you really run it through something more formal called a sustainable appraisal, there will be other things that could still be done and should be done to strengthen its sustainability credentials. That is the kind of thing that we will be looking for in this period after Johannesburg, a much more formal rooting of policies and ideas cross-government in the form of a sustainability appraisal with certain targets built in. Joan Walley (Mr Porritt) I certainly have not seen that. Again, you are ahead of me. I have not had any wind of that as a possibility, I must say. (Mr Porritt) That is an interesting idea. I think the Department for Education has struggled slightly with the concept of sustainable development. Let us be honest about this, it is not a concept that comes naturally to many people in the Department for Education. As I understand it, the key area where I believe they are confident that sustainable development will be properly represented is in the citizenship strand of the curriculum, and there are already many schools who are interpreting the citizenship area of the curriculum very positively with a view to sustainable inputs. I think that has to be welcomed. If you interpret citizenship in that very dynamic way, those are new opportunities to get sustainable development into the curriculum. I am still not really sure that is something that the Department for Education would quite know how to promote at the moment because I do not think it has a handle really on what education for sustainable development in the UK might really mean. Chairman (Professor O'Riordan) Jonathon already made the remark that the Department of Transport has some difficulty in identifying its sustainability obligations. Certainly, in the Commission context, this is a very important area. Indeed, in the aviation sector as well, where the business community are beginning to take a serious interest in the idea of carbon neutral air travel, I do think there is huge opportunity for us to push harder. I do not know if Jonathan is going to say more, but I cannot imagine the Commission is going to sit down quietly and not respond to this particular initiative from the Secretary of State. (Mr Porritt) I am genuinely very disturbed by this, for two reasons really - and I have just read the summary report. The dismissal of the Royal Commission's report as a "gallop round the course" and a "thin report" in which they have not done as much work as they might have, as if to disparage the quality of the intellectual and science inputs into the Royal Commission report, is an extremely dangerous line for the Department for Transport to be taking. Simply to have cast that stuff aside as not being adequate, given that it is an infinitely wiser reflection on some of the impacts of aviation than anything that has even begun to be discussed in the Department for Transport, let alone to emerge from it, is extremely unclever. I also do not quite understand this, inasmuch as there is a Treasury consultation going on about the use of eco instruments in this area, and I am not sure how wise it is for one Government department to pre-empt consultative processes going on elsewhere. This seems to be a pre-emptive strike from the Secretary of State saying, "We take no account of what emerges now, tax instruments are out." I am really concerned about the defensiveness that is now surrounding the ability of the Department to engage properly in these issues. I think this is very detrimental to the Government sustainable development as a whole. This has a huge impact, as you know, Chairman, on the Climate Change Programme. We have already seen significant weakening in terms of the policies regarding traffic growth, which have a big impact on that aspect of the programme which hoped to gain reductions in carbon dioxide emissions from a reduction in traffic growth. There are all sorts of issues about the Climate Change Programme which are negatively impacted by the failure of the Department for Transport to play its strategic part in that programme. This is worrying, because you have one development going off like this when the rest of Government is trying to pull policies in line with an active climate-related strategy. We will see it obviously a lot more in the Energy White Paper at the end of this month but I genuinely think this Government is intent now on determining a low carbon trajectory for a successful economy in this country and it is going to be problematic if one part of Government simply says, "That's your job and nothing to do with us." (Mr Porritt) Indeed. (Mr Porritt) Absolutely. (Mr Porritt) It is what we have called for. We have brought out today our own audit of the Climate Change Programme. I am not sure how much it would be proper to go into the details of that here today but obviously we will be sending that to you, and it does reveal disturbingly that although the Kyoto targets are safe - we genuinely do think that the UK will achieve its Kyoto targets, greenhouse gas emissions targets by 2010, which will make it, therefore, one of the very few EU countries to do that, which is wholly commendable - the domestic CO2 target, which is for the 20 per cent reduction in the same time frame, is looking extremely vulnerable. Michael Meacher will be responding to our audit later this afternoon. One of the reasons why that domestic CO2 target is looking vulnerable - only one of the reasons - is because the transport aspect of it is now clearly in jeopardy. DEFRA, in its own review of the Climate Change Programme, will need to look at again - and has already indicated it will - and possibly amend, the projected reductions coming from the transport element as a direct consequences of those changes in policy. So this stuff has to be stitched together. It is not possible for the UK to achieve its climate change goals without the Department for Transport being fully on board in that process. It is just not possible. And we have not even mentioned international aviation, of course, which, as you know is not included in either of those two targets, either the Kyoto target or the domestic CO2 target. David Wright (Mr Porritt) I am aware of the fact that the Secretary of State Margaret Beckett is keen to use the, let us call it, "residual momentum" coming from Johannesburg to bring forward new ideas, new convening mechanisms across government; to interpret that DEFRA role of promoting sustainable development across government not just through DEFRA; to interpret that role more dynamically than I think DEFRA has been able to do up until now, for a variety of different reasons; and certainly, with her colleagues, to reassert the importance of this as a cross-governmental process. What those initiatives are I am not in a position at the moment to say because I do not actually know. I have heard lots of stuff about what is going on in DEFRA and what is not going on in DEFRA but I cannot actually give you an authoritative commentary on that - and I think she is going to be talking to you about that this afternoon, as I understand it. My feeling is there is a genuine intent to do this, to increase the stakeholder engagement with different bits of civil society in particular, to look at ways in which the current sustainable development strategy needs to be reviewed, because the review process for the strategy starts, I think, in May/June sometime this year. That is a very important opportunity, as we all know, to see exactly how well that strategy has served us up until now: Are the 15 headline indicators doing the right kind of job? So there are lots of bits of process already available and then I believe there are going to be new bits of process coming forward from DEFRA to promulgate a more engaged follow-up strategy, and we welcome that, very much welcome that, because I do not honestly think the processes were adequate before and I think we did need a little bit of extra institutional push and leadership push from the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer to make some of these issues really work harder inside Government. (Mr Porritt) We have had meetings with DFID abut it. Both myself and Scott have had meetings with officials at DFID. Oh, gosh. There is just a sense of regret really amongst a lot of sustainable development activists that Clare Short herself personally enjoys the cut and thrust of beating up on environmentalists as being narrowminded western elitists who care nothing about development. I think the feeling of regret there is very widely shared because it does not do credit to the work that DFID is doing in this area. DFID's work in this area is really seriously good. I mean, if we compare a lot of what DFID is doing in comparison to equivalent departments in other governments and look at the quality of some of the intellectual analysis - some very interesting work on how investments in the environment can help alleviate poverty - that is one of the most important documents to have emerged from DFID over the last two years. It is a cracker of a document. If you actually think of investments in natural capital and the kind of stuff Tim was talking about, this is one of the most effective ways of alleviating poverty that you can find out of any alternative range of investment strategies in developing countries. It just seems bizarre, to be doing rather good work in this respect and to have quite a lot - I would say most - of the intellectual underpinning of how to drive a more sustainable route to international development, it just seems a bit of gratuitous politicking then to go round, as I say, beating up on people who are actually in the business of delivering that on the ground in many of those countries. (Mr Porritt) I would have to ask Tim that. (Professor O'Riordan) The whole notion of the way the British Government delegation worked was to be closely connected to the non-governmental allies and to the business community. It is worth commenting that the major development non-governmental bodies like Tear Fund, Oxfam and Save the Children have really started to adopt this sustainability mantle. They are looking at the physical and the social and the environmental and improved methods of delivery in a way that is quite remarkable compared with, say, five or so years ago. And maybe ministers have not necessarily picked up that their main NGO allies are actually in this world now, working in this area and promoting it in an extraordinary way. The other thing about Johannesburg is that they have this famous delivery mechanism called the type 2 partnerships, which, again, you might want to spend a few minutes on, which have yet to be tested but if they are going to work at all will need (a) a really clear arrangement of notification and monitoring scrutiny, otherwise they could be anything, and (b) actually to be laid out in relation to sustainability principles which you can define and show are actually working. I think departments, when they actually deliver, are going to do so increasingly through these kind of partnerships and not just simply administrative departments, whichever way we are talking about it - and that, by the way, includes this country and not just overseas. I think we need to spend a bit more time on how these partnerships might best be monitored/managed and actually deliver what they are trying to deliver in the context of sustainable development. But that is an area where there is great potential from the non-governmental side but we have still to see real movement from both business and government to make that work. (Mr Porritt) It is one of the bits, the new partnership machinery, which I think is very important. I am reminded that DFID has made a public statement of their follow-up strategy to Johannesburg. I am not sure if they have shared that with you as yet - I presume that will be part of your raw material, as it were - and that is to be encouraged. I should also mention that we ought to be a tiny bit careful about assuming that just because something is not billed as a sustainable development strategy, stuff is not going on about sustainable development. When I think about the Foreign and Commonwealth Officer, for instance - which has a really clear understanding of the role it plays around the world to help promote sustainable development - it is not billed as such but there is a lot going on in the FCO to help develop awareness in these different areas. And I think you would have to say the same about DFID: they may not always front it as such, but there is a serious commitment to find ways in which what they are doing is compatible with sustainable development. Chairman (Mr Porritt) I could not possibly comment, Chairman. Mr Ainsworth (Mr Porritt) Yes. (Mr Porritt) Indeed. I have no complaints about that at all. I think the Commission was set up by the Prime Minister to act as the advisors to Government. We have good access to No 10 in terms of contributions that we can make on a range of different things under consideration inside No 10. There is clear interest from the Prime Minister himself. I have written about this publicly, but the speech that he gave in Mozambique on his way out to Johannesburg is a really very important benchmark statement of sustainable development from an international perspective. We commented, perhaps slightly cheekily, in that press release on the fact that it would be great to get a UK equivalent of the Mozambique speech, because it is a cracker of a speech, and I, unlike some, believe that these speeches actually are all part and parcel of the ways in which society gets to grips with great big challenges of this kind. They are difficult challenges to deal with. That Mozambique speech was really good. The contributions from Johannesburg themselves were fine but, we all know, when you have your 10 minutes as a head of government, to be delivered in that kind of hot-house environment, you are never going to do a great deal through contributions like that. I am convinced that there is real interest on the part of the Prime Minister and that that influences the way in which his staff in No 10 deal with the Commission, enable us to get access to different parts of government. I am not, if you like, worried on that score; the test will be, of course, how much political infighting No 10 will be prepared to do to bring some of these processes in line. (Mr Porritt) Yes. (Mr Porritt) No. (Mr Porritt) We could have an important role to play. (Mr Porritt) We would dearly love to have an important role to play but public-facing remit is extremely limited at the moment, not only because of resource constraints but principally because of resource constraints. The best we have been able to do so far is to work with the director of communications inside DEFRA to help encourage a communications strategy for sustainable development. I think this is a really important moment for DEFRA. When it came together of course it did not have a sustainable development communications strategy, it had a press management strategy for the environment. That is a very different thing. These are two totally different beasts. They are both important, clearly, but DEFRA needs both. The communications strategy for sustainable development has not yet emerged, has not yet seen the light of day, and for us that is going to be a very important test of any follow-up strategy, because, if DEFRA is serious about making this stuff stick with the general public as well as stick across government, it has to get out there and really start working with the general public to enable them to understand why this is so important, why change is going to be required in certain areas, why the Government is approaching it from a particular perspective and so on. That will not happen by waving one's arms around and saying, "Why don't the general public understand this better?" It means a very engaged, carefully focused strategic commitment to raise awareness throughout society. For us, this is on our list or real priorities, to work with DEFRA, to see if we can be helpful to them on developing a communications strategy for sustainable development. It is not easy. We are not going in there saying, "This is a doddle: all you need is 10 million quid. Bring in a PR agency and roll out a few adverts with a couple of celebs." It does not work like that. It is genuinely difficult stuff. (Mr Porritt) It is interesting. There are two points there. One, we have not formally given advice to this effect yet but in discussions with Lucian Hudson we said that the department should think very seriously about using non-governmental communications experts to take these messages to the public. That is for two reasons. One, with great deference, I think they are often better at it, and two, they have more credibility and trust, and communication is all about trust. With the best will in the world it is hard for a government department to persuade anybody that it is saying something for completely objective and dispassionate reasons. It is generally very difficult in this sceptical age. I think there is a strong case to be made which we all need to make more robustly than we have done up until now for looking at ways of communication strategies, not resting with government agencies or arm's length bodies but thinking more creatively about how to do this through other bodies, and including NGOs who are very good at communicating with the general public. The second area: is it because we are not trusted? I honestly do not think that is the case. It is a difficult one to gauge because obviously we can be a thorn in the side. We were deemed to be a bit of a thorn in the side in the run-up to the summit. It has to be said that one or two members of the government got pretty tetchy about that and ranted and raved at us about was this how we wanted to interpret our remit as a critical friend to government. Well - critical. It seems a perfectly reasonable interpretation of the word "critical". We felt that this was a timely moment for the Commission to remind people of the things the government is doing well and the things it is not doing so well. I do not feel that that has led to a sense of distrust. I genuinely think that in terms of the Secretary of State, whom you will have a chance to ask about this, in DEFRA, in DTI and in other government departments we have trust-based relationships that give us access to confidential processes and enable us to fulfil our role as an inside adviser without being perceived to be an irritant NGO, if I can put it like that, but I am not pretending it is not a difficult balancing act because we have to do both. We have to do the inside bit and we have to do this butt-kicking bit from time to time. I am sorry; that is not a very elegant way of putting it. Chairman (Mr Porritt) Yes, it is. (Mr Porritt) We have had two meetings with the Communications Director and the people that he has asked to take this forward, so he includes us in as much as we are being involved in the process. Whether it involves a role for us in any longer term we have not had discussions about. (Mr Porritt) Yes, it is extremely difficult. Mr Ainsworth (Mr Porritt) I have no evidence. We have mooted it. It came up in a meeting and it was not instantly dismissed as completely insane, but I have no evidence that it is being taken seriously and we have not done a serious contribution to that effect yet, which we would like to do. Ian Lucas (Mr Porritt) It is very interesting, your wording of that question, though. Would we welcome a role in promoting DEFRA policy? (Mr Porritt) Probably not. Would we welcome a role in promoting sustainable development? Probably yes, but we have never discussed it in all honesty. As you may recall, it was not in our remit to begin with. I think we welcome it but, boy, would we be determined to secure some proper for funding for it, because the idea that we could do it off the back of our budget at the moment is clearly something that is not possible. Chairman (Mr Porritt) We were encouraged by the speed with which the department moved to bring forward a strategy on sustainable production and consumption. There have been ongoing discussions since the publication by the PIU of a report on resource productivity about the sustainable production end of things, but what we are really nervous about, because the time frame seems very short to bring forward this strategy, ----- (Mr Porritt) No, for the production of the new DEFRA strategy. Did they not give it a time frame by summer, if I remember rightly? (Mr Porritt) It does not seem very long, which obviously slightly rings alarm bells in our heads that we are going to get a re-hash job rather than what is required. (Mr Porritt) Absolutely fundamental. There are two aspects to this challenge. One is on the sustainable production end of it which is in itself challenging but government has already made some preparatory steps in getting their heads around this. DTI, for instance, is very actively contemplating what indicators would be required for the economy nationally more effectively to drive a sustainable production sufficiency strategy. (Mr Porritt) This is DTI. That can be done. I am told that there are still ongoing difficulties about interpreting what resource productivity really means between Treasury and DTI and that this has led to some delay in following up with a proper response to the PIU report because there still has not been a proper response to that PIU report, as I am sure you are aware, Chairman. However, our assessment would be that that is a manageable challenge but a much more complicated area is sustainable consumption. To do something thoughtful and really productive at this stage on sustainable consumption - I am not sure how that can be done in what are in effect a few weeks, because it is a very difficult area of policy. It does go to the heart of lifestyles, coming back to that whole issue about behaviour, about ways of recommending a change in society. If that bit does not get at least as much attention as the rather easier techy bit of resource efficiency, then we will not end up with an integrated sustainable production and consumption report. We will end up with a sustainable production report with a sustainable consumption add-on. (Mr Porritt) Yes, it may be one of those. Gregory Barker (Mr Porritt) A question that I would love to prise away at a bit is this whole question of whether she feels that the institutional mechanisms available to her are sufficient to drive across government sustainable development strategy. I think it would be interesting to find out a bit about her latest thoughts on the green ministers because obviously there is a mechanism where, under that bit of the Cabinet Committee structure, green ministers meet regularly to explore different aspects of departmental behaviour but it is essentially a housekeeping role, as you know, and there is limited scope for more strategic inputs at that level. Our reading of that is that the work of that committee will be enhanced by the new paper on sustainable procurement which is imminent. We have been involved in that Sustainable Procurement Working Group and have been able to advise on that, and we see that as an extremely significant aspect of improving the government's own performance in this area. The green ministers can do so much but is that really sufficient? What new mechanisms are going to be required to move this stuff forward? That is where I am still ----- Chairman (Professor O'Riordan) This is where we come back to this notion of an obligation, some kind of much more coherent framework through which ministers' policies and actions have to go. This notion of an obligation is already in place to some extent in Wales under the Government of Wales Act, and is beginning to be seen more clearly in Scotland where, again, with the devolved administrations, there is a greater sense of buy-in to cohesion and to the integration of the social, environmental and economic aspects. In the English context it is much more difficult to achieve and one of the most important points to stress is how this can be delivered better in England when we now have some really rather exciting leadership, certainly in Wales, and I think increasingly in Scotland. Secondly, there is the broad audit function of how you run the whole national economy, the idea of a spending review where that should be looking at sustainability in some clearly defined way, the way in which the Audit Commission carries out its business (and officially the Audit Committee here) and, when local authorities in particular are auditing, whether they are audited in such a way as to reinforce sustainability with clear signals of good performance if they meet these things rather than the kind of muddled way things work in current times. That is a second area where I would think a lever needs to be placed. A broader question which I notice the French are taking on board is the whole idea of governing for sustainability, a whole new notion of how do we design government for sustainable development? The French in my understanding are going to take this to the G8 meeting at the end of this year, which does take me on to your third or fourth point about the EU and where the EU might be going in terms of obligation, a set of indicators and a more enriched appraisal mechanism. What we are saying is that forms of government need to be clear that when anyone is thinking about something or delivering something there are three basic requirements: they have met this understanding of the natural system; they are creating a better society; people are well off, they are more secure, they have a greater sense of their own identity within communities, and, thirdly, they have livelihoods which are likely to be retained as a result of this and not something which drops away after ten years. These processes have to be not only consistent and very much ongoing but also they have to be constantly adapted to changing circumstances. That is what I would like to see coming out of the European Union as a framework but also that we need to play our part in, and eventually the G8 too, because it is part of the whole process of running the global economy. What we are saying in the Commission is that we need to think about governance now in a much richer context of providing these levers and allowing people in a whole host of different ways to get on with it, and that is where the partnerships are. You do not want something which is nanny-state nit-picking down to the level of Motherwell or Brighton. It is much more to be flexible at that point, but the point of getting the framework right so that there is a lot of opportunity and variety and great choice in this country to explode into sustainability is what we think is really an important opportunity that we should grasp beyond this phase of the post-Johannesburg agenda. Joan Walley (Professor O'Riordan) If they do not do that it comes back to what the Chairman is saying. Mr Darling can say what he says. If there was a framework of the kind we are talking about he could not say what he said because he would not have met the sustainability obligation. We care about what happens to aviation fuel when it is seven per cent of the CO2 emissions in this nation. It is something on which we would then say, "Unless you have actually gone through this exercise you cannot pronounce", and if they then pronounce, having gone through the exercise, and they are clearly not taking it into account, you guys in this Committee would be after them like a pack of hounds. I think it is important that there is a mechanism which gives you that forensic scrutiny so that people do not even think of doing that. (Mr Porritt) I think the EU dimension will be helpful in this regard. Quite clearly the Commissioner is now intent on bringing forward the Commission's trading scheme. Early indications are that this is going to get significant support from the UK and other member governments. To me this will provide a context in which a lot of the climate change related international agenda can begin to be thought through. We see this as a wholly positive sign. I know some people have reservations about emissions trading but for us it is a mechanism that enables business to engage often on their own terms in ways that they do not find easy when you are talking about a climate change levy, and to a certain extent that will make it harder for people to pretend that this is not something in which we are all going to be very involved in the short term. Aviation will have to get involved in that international EU emissions trading scheme. The absurd thing is that the airlines know that. They are already working out exactly what this is going to mean for them and how they are going to handle this stuff. The idea that a Secretary of State waves his hands and says that all this cost internalisation for aviation is ridiculous will sound to them so unworldly because they know they have got to start thinking about cost internalisation processes. Let us not get into the technicality of emissions trading versus levies and taxes etc, but they know that aviation is going to be swept up in a cost internalisation process in the next three or four years. I think the EU in that regard gives a very genuine support to the kind of leadership positions adopted by the UK Government here. David Wright (Mr Porritt) I will start, but Tim was present at a lot of those debates in Johannesburg. There was no meeting of minds on that issue between the UK delegation and the NGOs that were pressing for some kind of statutory or mandated minima for social responsibility around the world. It is an axiom in the UK government that that which can be done voluntarily is always going to be preferable to that which has to be done mandatorily. There is an assumption that most of these corporate social responsibility issues can be driven by voluntary processes of one kind or another, and there is an absolute clear definitive preference for a voluntary approach to company law in our own country, to social responsibility internationally, and so on. They have made that very clear. The NGOs are deeply sceptical about that for all sorts of reasons. It allows for free rider problems. It does not really create a benchmark which drives performance across the whole world, and they are persuaded that there has to be a well-regulated set of minimum standards for social and ethical behaviour around the world. That is not a view shared by government. The difficulty for us in the UK is that we are home to a lot of companies that are in the forefront of this corporate social responsibility agenda. We sometimes forget that and it is very easy to be critical of any of these large multinational companies, but some of the companies here in the UK are miles ahead in terms of their thinking and practice of many other companies in the rest of the world, whether it is other European companies or America, let alone south east Asia where much of the debate about social responsibility is seen as an academic irrelevance. We get a bit deluded because if we look at some of our really good performers in the UK and we say, "Oh, that is good. We could do that across the world", whereas this is a quite small cohort of really progressive leading companies who have got hold of this stuff, can make it work, it does not damage any of their commercial or competitive issues, it is perfectly compatible with all that stuff, but that is not reflective of the business community globally; very far from it. What the NGOs are saying is, "Look, that is fine, that upper tier of the cohort of leadership companies. That is okay, but what about the vast mass of business impacts around the world on people's lives and the environment which is still going largely unmanaged and certainly not managed voluntarily? (Professor O'Riordan) It did, but there was a distinction between responsibility which was a voluntary arrangement and accountability, which is a much more formal governmental NGO arrangement. There was a terrific debate about that over ten days and the debate shifted towards the accountability model with a lot of difficulty, but nevertheless with progression and with a common degree of achievement, and the business community, which was very widely present in a number of meetings, particularly towards the end, did show themselves to be seriously committed to the idea of improving governance overall. They wanted democratically accountable governments to work with them; otherwise they were not sure that they could get all of this achieved. At the same time there are a lot of stories about businesses that do not do terribly well when they work with government at all levels and certainly not in many parts of the world, so there is an uneasy set of relationships between businesses which really want to do well with government and with people and show that they are doing so, which is what Jonathan touched on, this vanguard, this relatively small group, and far too many businesses which are not quite there on that and do not want the idea of rigid scrutiny. If you are pressing the Secretary of State on this area, corporate responsibility needs to be underpinned by a strong governmental framework which is seen to be transparent, which is seen to be delivering in relation to targets which are agreed to and set. That is not the case right now and did not come across in Johannesburg to the degree that was expected. Chairman: Thank you, all three of you, very much indeed for the session this morning. It has given us a lot of food for thought which we will be displaying in front of Mrs Beckett, I hope, this afternoon. |