Examination of Witnesses (Questions 117-119)
MR TREWIN
RESTORICK AND
MR SIMON
ROBERTS
1 NOVEMBER 2006
Q117 Mr Drew: I know Mr Roberts is on
his way, so do not feel as though you are quite on your own, Mr
Restorick. He will be with us shortly. I do not know how long
he is delayed, but I gather he is in transit, and Mr Sorrell,
who was going to give evidence in the second session, is not very
well, so we are a bit down today. You know the tenor of the evidence
that we are seeking today. Michael Jack is the Chairman. He gives
his apologies. He is batting for us in a different field. To begin,
I think what we would like is for you to say exactly what the
Global Action Plan is in terms of the organisation and then I
will go straight into some questions.
Mr Restorick: Thank you for the
invitation to talk here. My name is Trewin Restorick. I am the
Director of Global Action Plan. We are a charity. We were set
up in this country in 1993 and we are actually part of an international
organisation operating in 17 different countries. The aim of the
charity when it was set up was to encourage individuals to live
more sustainable lifestyles, so we concentrate specifically on
helping people to reduce the amount of rubbish they throw away,
to cut energy use, to use transport more wisely, to reduce water
consumption. The way we do that is that we run fairly specific
programmes with different audiences. We work an awful lot with
very large companies and local authorities, working with them
to help their employees create environmental change in the workplace,
that is companies such as Scottish Power, E.ON, Britannia Building
Society, fairly large well-known organisations. We work with predominantly
secondary schools, trying to involve students from all sectors
of the school in change within the school and in their local community
and we also work with households through a programme called eco-teams,
getting groups of households together and encouraging them to
promote environmental change as well. The charity is fairly small,
the turn-over this year will be about 1.5 million, and we employee
45 people in the United Kingdom.
Q118 Mr Drew: That is very useful.
Can we move on to look at the difference that you think you are
making and the ways in which things could be ratcheted up. What
are the big changes that you see happening and what are the big
changes that need to happen in this area?
Mr Restorick: I think what we
have discovered through the programmes we have run is that there
are certainly businesses and schools which are communities where
both the business corporately and the school as an entity want
to see change happen, and where those organisations give space
and time to people to create the changes within the organisation,
people are able to make environmental savings, typically anywhere
between 10 to 15% of reduction of energy use and carbon emissions,
and the changes they are making are incredibly simple changes,
they are normal behaviour changes, those that we hear promoted
by government on many occasions—turning things off rather
than on stand-by, not leaving computer screens on, turning lights
off, those simple behaviour changes—but we also see that
businesses and schools also make structural changes. For example,
when people measure how much energy a school is using, they suddenly
realise that at night they are lighting up the entire school to
run the after-school clubs because the teachers traditionally
hold the after-school clubs in the classroom they are based in,
whereas if they thought of it from an energy perspective, they
would actually move all those into one building so they only have
to heat and light one building. People are prepared and able to
make changes fairly easily when they actually look at the thing
from an energy and carbon perspective.
Q119 Mr Drew: Should there be a national
strategy, and, if there is going to be a national strategy, who
should evolve that and should that evolution include NGOs like
your own NGO as part of the decision-making process, or is that
something that you would be wary about getting involved with?
Mr Restorick: Personally, I think
government is very willing to invest very large sums of money,
it seems to us, in television awareness campaigns. The Energy
Saving Trust and Carbon Trust, you see very large spends of money
on programmes to promote awareness change. When you actually ask
those agencies how has that actually changed behaviour, you get
very a poor, if any, response at all. There seems to be a willingness
to spend money to encourage people to become more aware, but that
does not necessarily change behaviour, so we think that there
is definitely scope to promote actual behaviour change. The question
of who to do that comes down to a question of who do people trust.
We are very aware that government and people are worried about
the whole nanny state, the intrusion of government into people's
lifestyles. When we work with businesses and households they seem
quite open to listening to an environmental charity because they
know we are coming with an agenda which is about environmental
improvement and they seem much more receptive to the message than
perhaps they would if it was a "thou shalt" campaign
running down from government. We feel that NGOs have a crucial
role to play in environmental change, provided that they are backed
up by structural and policy leads by government.
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