Appendix 2: Sustainable Development Commission
response
The Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) welcomes
the Environmental Audit Committee's (EAC) report—Making
Government Operations More Sustainable: a progress report. Such
reviews are a vital part of holding government to account and
ensuring that the commitments towards sustainable development
are met.
Several recommendations and conclusions are made
in the EAC's report. Three of these pertain to the SDC; these
are:
19. Considering the significant nature of the
Government's response to this year's SDiG report, we agree that
the Sustainable Development Commission is playing a significant
role in stimulating Government to improve its performance. (Paragraph
57)
20. At the same time, we recommend that the SDC
reviews whether its presentation of performance in the annual
SDiG reports could be made more straightforward, including—where
necessary—being more critical. (Paragraph 58)
21. We recommend that the SDC looks again at its
practice of simply reporting the data as given to it by departments.
Currently, where it has reservations about the figures, it only
expresses these in separate commentary sections. For example,
the SDC's press release on the recent SDiG report stated that
"overall carbon emissions from offices have fallen by 4%
since 1999", despite the fact that this figure had been discredited
elsewhere in the report. (Paragraph 59)
The SDC also welcomes these comments and will consider
the EAC's recommendations in all future reporting and other work
programmes.
In particular, the SDC is pleased that the Committee
has commented on our role stimulating improvements. The SDC will
continue to push government for further and bigger improvements
through our watchdog function. At the same time, we also strive
to offer support and advice through our advisory and capability
building functions. Striking a balance between these roles in
our role as government's "critical friend" is essential
to our success.
We will therefore continue to support and advise
the new Centre of Expertise in Sustainable Procurement (CESP)
in the Office of Government Commerce (OGC). Over the past 6 months,
we have been working closely with CESP and the rest of government
to improve the process for reporting on operations and procurement.
For example, we are currently working toward handing back ownership
of the data to government for the next reporting. This was begun
this year by using the OGC's e-PIMS database as the platform for
data collection. It is important that responsibility for ensuring
the data is as accurate as possible rests with government.
As a part of this transition we will be developing
the understanding of roles with CESP and with Defra over the coming
months. Ultimately the aim for all organisations involved is to
improve the quality of data reporting and in turn further improve
performance.
The SDC will also work closely with the EAC to ensure
the Committee is fully up to date with the development around
this agenda and other initiatives. Specifically, we are currently
discussing reporting options for this year's Sustainable Development
in Government (SDiG) report internally. However, once we have
developed our thoughts we write to the Committee outlining our
intentions and seek feedback.
October 2008
| 
