Examination of Witnesses (Questions 117
- 119)
TUESDAY 3 JULY 2007
PROFESSOR TOM
BURKE CBE
Q117 Chairman: Professor Burke, you
have been around the track inside government for quite a long
time. I remember working with you when the people here were not
old enough to remember there was a Conservative government and
you and I were both working in the old DoE. Since 1997, the evidence
we have is that the UK is well regarded internationally in the
pursuit of sustainable policy making, but I think also it would
be fair to say that the implementation of some of those policies,
some of the changes, has not been quite so successful. There is
fairly persistent evidence of the difficulty of getting all government
departments to integrate environmental priorities into their policies.
Is that fair? Is it true to say that despite talking of good going
on, the government has not really succeeded in getting the environment
and climate change at the heart of its whole policy-making process
across the board in all the parts?
Professor Burke: Yes, I do think
it would be fair to say that. It is more a political than an institutional
problem. Let me illustrate that with some numbers. If we are looking
at the environment as a whole, governments demonstrate their priorities,
predominantly by the amount of public expenditure they allocate
to something but then by the amount of legislative time that an
issue gets. If you look at the current level of public expenditure
on maintaining what you might call the social conditions for development—in
other words, health, education, social security—we spend
about £400 billion a year, and I think that is approximately
the number for 2006. We spend, quite properly, about £60
billion a year on internal and external security; in other words
on the Armed Forces and on the police. We spend just over £9
billion a year on the environment. I think those numbers speak
for themselves really. I am not making a party political point
but those numbers will have been pretty much the same, scaled
down, under a Conservative government as they are under a Labour
government, but I think they reflect pretty clearly the failure
to take the environment into the heart of government. If you look
at legislative time, I have lost count of how many criminal justice
bills we have had but you can count on one hand the number of
environmental bills we have had in the current government and
the same again would have been true in the previous government.
The evidence that we have failed to put the environment at the
heart of government is pretty conclusive.
Q118 Chairman: What you say is interesting.
You say it is not a failure and the problem is not institutional
but more political. The fact is that Tony Blair was one of the
heads of government who was the most consistent in this very strong
rhetoric about climate change issues. Despite that, even with
a Prime Minister like that, it does not seem to trickle down through
Whitehall.
Professor Burke: I think the previous
Prime Minister undoubtedly had a significant effect on the way
in which climate was treated as a global environmental issue.
Without his interventions in a number of ways, we would not be
paying the attention we currently are paying to the issue. I do
not know that anybody would suggest that the previous Prime Minister
was a master at the art of governance. I think that was clearly
commented on by Lord Butler in his report. The way in which the
machinery of government was often circumvented led to a failure
of political intent when translated into outcomes in that case.
My previous remarks were addressed to your first question, which
was about the environment as a whole. On climate change, I think
there were institutional failures but to some extent they were
a consequence of the ad hoc approach to governance taken
by the previous Prime Minister.
Q119 Chairman: We now have the draft
Climate Change Bill and so on. There is a bit of talk about the
role that independent bodies can play both in policy making and
monitoring whether this is effectively implemented. There is talk
about perhaps the civil service training being improved. Do you
have any strong feelings about that? We have some constitutional
considerations now taking place about the role of Parliament and
ministers and so on.
Professor Burke: I think it is
extremely difficult for government to pass off the responsibility
for essential political decisions to others. The analogies that
have been drawn between the proposed climate committee—and
we do not yet know what is actually going to be put in place—and
the Monetary Policy Committee are not very good. First of all,
the Monetary Policy Committee operates inside a clear policy framework
and a clear, specific and deliverable target set by the government
and the Monetary Policy Committee has the tools and capacity to
determine whether that target is reachable or is being reached
or not, and it is doing so in the context in which the particular,
precise, very specific focus is broadly understood by all of the
various stakeholders. I do not think we are anywhere near that
point on climate change. I do not think people understand the
urgency or the scale of the problem, the dynamics, the impacts
it is going to have on our lives if we fail to tackle the problem
and the impact it is going to have on our lives if we succeed
in tackling the problem. The idea that you can somehow pass off
political responsibility to an independent body of non-politicians
is illusory. It would be a very powerful idea to have a well-respected
advisory body that had some real authority, and that would then
depend, because of all the inevitable tensions between a government
and its advisers, on the rules which you wrote and the way in
which you selected the body, but if you created the right sort
of body, it could play a very useful role. If you were looking,
for instance, to monitor more effectively whether the government
is reaching the targets it set itself or not, you would do far
better, and maybe the opportunity will now arise given the new
Prime Minister's approach, to strengthen the Environmental Audit
Committee and actually give it some environmental auditors. I
think that would be particularly useful because the Environmental
Audit Committee has the cross-government role that is necessary
to address this problem. Having an Environmental Audit Committee
without any audit capacity seems to me rather a failure.
Chairman: I am sure we may want to pray
your evidence in aid on that point.
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