Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
SIR IAN
ANDREWS, MS
HELEN GHOSH
AND MR
NIGEL SMITH
29 APRIL 2008
Q60 Jo Swinson: Is there going to
be a review this year of the SOGE framework? Will there be a possibility
to look at widening the departments which are involved in this?
We heard from the previous witnesses that it is only central government
departments that are involved and the Parliamentary Estate is
not included. Is that going to be considered, and is there going
to be this review?
Mr Smith: There is no plan to
review it as far as I am aware. My official view would be to say
let us actually get achievement of the targets we have got. Let
me give you one statistic in terms of the property estate, which
most of these targets actually relate to. There are 14,000 different
holdings in Government.[9]
This is a massive property estate, it is 4.2 million square metres.[10]
This is a very, very big part of Government. I do not think it
is a small agenda at all.
Sir Ian Andrews: Could I just
pick up the point on the targets? I absolutely agree with that.
I think it is very easy to refine targets continually and you
then take people's eye off the ball of what they are trying to
deliver here. When we did the original review within the then
Sustainable Operations Board back in 2006 there was a real recognition
that there was a proliferation of input derived targets, which
was not actually the way in which we were going to rise to the
challenge of leading by example and achieving a step change in
performance. What we sought to do in setting the first half dozen
or so SOGE targets was to focus on those areas that really mattered,
of which the most important was carbon. It was not to shed all
of the things we were doing before but to say these are the really
important things we need to focus on. My sense would be that we
should keep that focus because we are just starting to see traction
and we can really make progress against those objectives.
Q61 Jo Swinson: You have talked about
the Delivery Plans which are going to set out in detail how the
different departments are going to meet their sustainability targets.
They are due by this coming summer. Is it OGC that is leading
on this?
Mr Smith: Yes.
Q62 Jo Swinson: Are you confident
that deadlines will be met, you have got the resources and the
capacity?
Mr Smith: Absolutely confident,
yes. We made a commitment and we will do it.
Q63 Martin Horwood: I am going to
focus on carbon emissions so you know this is going to be rather
painful, do you not?
Mr Smith: Yes.
Q64 Martin Horwood: Let us start
with a "quick win". We gave the Sustainable Development
Commission a little bit of a hard time for the way they presented
some of the data and the easy ride they seem to have given you
in some respects, but they made the fairly reasonable point that
they were given rubbish data by Government in some respects, the
most spectacular one of which is the inclusion of QinetiQ in the
baseline data. That is clearly misleading. Why are you still doing
it?
Mr Smith: We are not. If you have
a look at the Government response to SDC, ahead of that response
basically my department, with help from Defra and also from Ian's
department, actually spent over two months looking at the baseline
data. There is no question about it, the baseline data was not
good enough. We spent two months going and looking at the major
areas of problem in the data, which are mostly within the carbon
area but there are other areas as well. We went out to all of
the departments and asked for revalidation. We looked at baselines
and whether they were robust and whether the collection method
was robust. Certainly in respect of QinetiQ, what comes out in
the report actually in the footnote is that QinetiQ was still
included in the baseline but they did show what it would be like
if the baseline was re-done. We have subsequently re-done the
baselines. Over the next two or three months we will get agreement
from SDC to re-baseline those numbers. There were other issues.
The MoJ was a similar issue, the courts' estate was included but
actually was not part of the baseline so that made the figures
worse. When you looked at the MoJ, with a proper baseline they
actually went from red to amber under the SDC evaluation. There
are things that went both ways, but generally speaking the accuracy
was just not good enough.
Q65 Martin Horwood: If you take out
MoD, the overall carbon emissions from Government buildings have
been up by 22%. Wherever you look at the hard data in this report
there are disgraceful performances. I will just pick out a couple
of examples. On page 71, the emissions of carbon dioxide from
road based transport for administrative operations: the Home Office
is up 80%, the Foreign Office is up 78% and the Department of
Constitutional Affairs is up 257%. If you look on page 57 at energy
efficiency on the government estate, two departments were excellent,
two were good, two were making some progress and 15 were making
no or poor progress and that includes the ones that are going
backwards who are in a sense doing even worse than that. This
overall picture is absolutely pathetic, is it not? Why is it so
poor when it is so important that the Government gives a lead
on this?
Mr Smith: If you just take energy
efficiency as an issue, I think we have to be careful about energy
efficiency and I am not suggesting we change the target, but there
are two sides of energy efficiency. Part of my responsibility,
in order to get better use of the government estate, is to drive
down the number of buildings and holdings and increase the density
of people in buildings because overall we think that against the
benchmark of private industry we are using space 25% less efficiently
than private industry. As part of High Performing Property, which
was published back in 2006, which is the major plan that my department
has, we basically set ourselves a target of saving £1.5 billion
on operating costs from the government estate over the next nine
years.[11]
How we are going to do that is by using the lease breaks and getting
over 500 lease breaks coming up over the next nine years[12]
and coordinating the use of those buildings amongst Government,
so basically we increase the density. We have just brought out
a standard, which was announced in the Budget, for density for
new builds and major refurbishments of ten square metres a person
and for all other refurbishments it is between ten and 12. If
you look at where we are, we are currently across Government sitting
at an average of 16 to 17. That is a long answer to a simple question.
If you bring that 16 down to 12 that will automatically lead to
a problem in terms of efficiency.
Q66 Martin Horwood: That is not necessarily
true. If you had well designed and well insulated buildings and
you had more people in them the energy efficiency would go very
high. You have not entirely answered the question, to be fair,
because you have talked about one of the things you are doing
well, which is laudable, but you have not really explained why
the overall performance is so appalling.
Ms Ghosh: Can I just give a living
example? One of the key features is the amount of energy you use
supporting IT, which is significant and we are doing something
about it through the Green IT programme. In my case we have moved
out—for both environmental and also economic reasons—of
two main buildings in London and all of my staff are now focussed
in two buildings along Millbank. Where there was previously an
empty space with nobody sitting at a desk tapping away at an IT
system now there is another person doing it. My energy efficiency
has gone down per square metre because I have two people in the
space where previously there was one and there is all the energy
associated in particular with IT. As we are all doing, you can
take action on the energy efficiency of the building overall,
but now we need to focus on things like Green IT to get better
energy efficiency figures. On my wider estate our energy use has
gone up in our science labs but that is partly because over the
past couple of years we have been beset by a number of animal
disease outbreaks and people are working 24 hours a day. What
we are doing is benchmarking, trying to find ways of reducing
energy. There are some strange things going on within the estate
that mean that energy use will sometimes go up and efficiency
will go up.
Q67 Martin Horwood: There does not
seem to be overall ambition and vision here. I have a medium sized
enterprise in my constituency employing a couple of hundred people
and they are trying to reduce their carbon footprint by 75% within
a matter of three years. Does that not make you feel a bit sick?
Ms Ghosh: It makes me feel completely
delighted. As a representative of Defra, I am absolutely delighted
if SMEs like that are—
Q68 Martin Horwood: Yours is going
up.
Ms Ghosh: My CO2 for my office
estate is going down. My energy efficiency is not good because
of the point about my square metreage. Our overall target for
Government on CO2 is very ambitious.
Q69 Martin Horwood: QinetiQ apart,
the MoD seems to be doing rather better than the rest of government
departments. Even without QinetiQ, it still improves the overall
government performance. What is making the MoD perform better
than the civil departments?
Sir Ian Andrews: I think it is
because it is different. If you look across the civil estate,
that is dominated by largely office accommodation. If you look
across the defence estate, it has a huge operational capability,
domestic accommodation, operation accommodation, airfields and
so on. One of the destabilising factors in the data was that the
SDC initially focussed on the civil estate, of which we have about
28 MoD buildings within that area, but the MoD as a whole is some
60 plus%[13]
of total emissions across government, a big polluter. We have
done a lot of things which are examples of best practice which
we are very proud of. There are a number of other things that
we need to do much better. I can go into some of those examples
if you like. I think there is a clear determination that as a
major polluter we have to play our part. The defence board has
taken on this issue in the last year or so and said this is a
serious operational issue for the department because if we cannot
reduce the levels of waste generated by our ships we cannot contribute
to the mitigation of climate change and there is an operational
effect on our ability to operate. There is a focus there which
is helping us to move forward, but it is a different environment,
it is a different estate from the wider civil estate. In terms
of the mechanisms that we have put in place through the OGC lead
in terms of property benchmarking, looking at best practice, sharing
best practice, developing solutions in particular areas and seeing
how they can read across to others, those are examples of how
we can move forward. In terms of why is it you just cannot put
it right overnight, as you said, if you have a building which
is designed to excellent standards it is possible to achieve low
carbon emissions. You have to have that design, you have to have
it in place and you have to think through sustainability from
the very beginning. We are doing a lot of new build and construction
on the defence estate, we have the opportunity to do that. The
target to go for standards of excellence was one which was put
in place only two or three years ago. We are now seeing across
the whole of the government estate those standards being achieved.
They were not achieved in the period covered by the Sustainable
Development Commission Report. As those buildings are built—there
is an excellent Defra example, we have got a number of examples,
there are other examples across Government—so those standards
of excellence will start to be delivered and we will be able to
make the sort of commitments and match the sort of achievements
that you are talking about in your constituency.
Q70 Martin Horwood: The significance
of QinetiQ is quite large. Do you know whether QinetiQ's annual
carbon emissions have gone down or up since it was privatised?
Sir Ian Andrews: That must be
a question for QinetiQ.
Q71 Martin Horwood: I am asking you.
Sir Ian Andrews: The answer is
I do not know.
Q72 Joan Walley: I want to come back
to the comment that Mr Smith made in response to Mr Horwood's
question when I think the Committee heard the welcome news that
the inclusion of the baseline as far as QinetiQ's emissions are
concerned was no longer being taken into account in respect of
the baseline figures. In the Government's response to our inquiry
the evidence in paragraph 8 says that the sixth SDIG report shows
that overall carbon emissions from the government's estate have
fallen by 4% against the baseline year. Even though you are saying
it is no longer applicable it has been taken out of the baseline
figure and the Government is still clinging on to the fact that
it is not being taken out to all intents and purposes. There seems
to be an inconsistency and a contradiction there. Can you clarify
it?
Mr Smith: The confusion comes
in that we happen to have two different four per cents here. The
SDC report gave credit for the QinetiQ baseline being in the baseline
but not in the actuals. We spent over two months looking at the
base data. We had other things which went the other way, for instance
the courts estate in MoJ. When you do the major changes, you take
QinetiQ out, you put the courts estate back in, you come to the
same number across government, that there has been between a 3
and 4% reduction in carbon. That is not where we need to be in
terms of achieving our commitments we have made to get to 12.5%
by 2010-11.
Q73 Martin Horwood: That is not at
all what I interpreted your answer as saying. I thought you meant
that in future you were re-baselining to exclude QinetiQ. SDC
are quite clear, if we exclude QinetiQ from MoD's baseline data
the emissions reductions made by MoD are lower than reported and
as a result carbon emissions from offices across the government
estate have reduced by only 0.7%. Are you saying that is wrong?
Mr Smith: No. In terms of the
SDC report, on the data they received that is correct. Since we
got the draft report we have gone through a number of problems
with baseline data, eg the Courts Service, and we have worked
those back in and we have tried to understand what the true picture
is. Over the next two or three months we will be getting those
signed off by the SDC as acceptable new baselines. What I am saying
is there is a pro forma reduction of 4%. When you take QinetiQ
out and you put the courts estate in you get to around a 4% reduction.
That will be incorporated in the next SDC report.
Martin Horwood: That is not the published
data that was referred to by Ms Walley earlier.
Q74 Joan Walley: I would be most
grateful if the Committee could have a written explanation relating
to the answer to Mr Horwood and also to paragraph 8 of the government
memorandum to our evidence so that there can be no misunderstandings
and we can clarify that.
Mr Smith: Yes, of course.[14]
Q75 Dr Turner: Helen, you have already
mentioned the problem of energy consumption with IT, which is
increasing. Can you tell us a bit more about how the Green Government
IT programme will tackle the rise in emissions resulting from
increased use, and how big a difference is it likely to make to
energy use and resultant emissions?
Ms Ghosh: I suspect Nigel is more
of an expert on this than I am. John Suffolk, who is the overall
Chief Information Officer for Government, is going to be publishing
some proposals this summer. I guess alongside it is our action
plan, is it?
Mr Smith: We have not agreed that
but it is in the summer.
Ms Ghosh: What we have been doing,
lead in operational terms by my CIO Chris Chant, is to look at
the various kinds of carbon impacts of the IT we use. Some of
the issues are around use, do people turn them on and off, do
we have over-complicated screen savers, do we have automatic standby
turn off kinds of facilities in our IT and some of it is in the
whole production chain. Most of the carbon impact of IT is in
fact in the production of the hardware and the disposal of the
hardware at the end. What John Suffolk is producing across government—and
it is an excellent example of the way collaboration and working
together can produce good sustainability outcomes—is to
produce guidance and no doubt common purchasing on both standards
and the use of IT. My own Department is already doing this through
our Renew IT Programme where we are all going to have laptops
which are produced in a very sustainable chain but which also
have some of those key up-to-date facilities to make sure they
are sustainable in use. Do you want to say more about the sort
of stuff John will be doing?
Mr Smith: The sort of things are
what Helen says, looking at behaviour as well as the supply of
equipment. One important issue which comes out of the early work
which has been done is, as Helen was saying, that some studies
indicate that 80% of the carbon footprint of IT equipment is actually
in its manufacture and not in its operation. Having said that,
if we have a look at the IT equipment in government, actually
a lot of the carbon footprint does not come from the power usage
of IT, it actually comes from the air conditioning to allow IT
to be used, for instance on servers, and one of the areas I know
John is concentrating on is looking at how we actually manage
our servers across government in terms of where the servers are,
have we got the right arrangement of our servers, because there
is a massive power consumption. Certainly those are the major
areas. The other area we are, I know, going to be looking at is
with the industry itself. We have got very good strategic relationship
management processes with the IT industry, we deal on a regular
basis with the top 12 suppliers of IT into government, and we
are looking at how they can help development of their hardware
to meet our requirement for lower energy-demand IT equipment.
So it is a very broad based approach.
Q76 Dr Turner: You have policies
for increasing the efficiency of new equipment but do you have
any policies for trying to control the demand for IT equipment?
Ms Ghosh: I think every Department
probably has its own policies, some of which are driven by finance
as well as sustainability. To give the example of Defra, we certainly
do, and one of the things we are doing through our Renew IT Programme
is to reduce the number of pieces of IT equipment which any individual
can have. I will feel this very much myself because at the moment
I have a fixed PC in the office, a laptop I use at home and a
Blackberry, and in the new world I will be able to have one item,
which is a laptop which I shall carry to and from on my bicycle
and plug in at the office or carry home and use at home, and therefore
we are restricting in Defra the number of items which individuals
can have and also making sure we are not over-providing within
our offices, more terminals and docks and so on, than are required
for our reduced number of staff. I imagine MoD is doing the same
sort of thing.
Sir Ian Andrews: Certainly we
are and indeed we have a major IT programme, the defence information
infrastructure project, which is rationalising our 300-odd current
systems into one single architecture, and that will have a huge
impact in this area as well. Helen is absolutely right to mention,
and Nigel, the importance of focusing on demand. The industry
is looking at how they can supply it better but unless and until
we actually focus on demand then we are not going to make as much
progress as we can.
Q77 Jo Swinson: Obviously restricting
this to one piece of IT is one way of managing demand but it seems
to me what is more important is the amount of time you have a
particular piece of equipment, and it is in the manufacturers'
interests to make us continually want more although there does
not seem to be any reason for that. Do you have programmes in
place where instead of just buying a new PC system the memory
card just gets up-dated and the processor gets updated?
Ms Ghosh: Yes, we certainly do.
Q78 Jo Swinson: How can that be extended?
How can the Government act as a driver to help ordinary consumers
in that way as well?
Ms Ghosh: Before Nigel comes in
with the technical answer, can I tell a little story? We have
recently, because we are upgrading our IT, and overall it will
have a very positive sustainability impact, given some—and
I do not actually know the figures but a substantial amount—of
our hardware to the UK Borders Agency who have not got enough.
So we are re-using within government some IT, and I think that
is a good example of recycling which is going on in the IT world
of government.
Mr Smith: The CIO Council are
probably the people who should reply on this because it is not
at the heart of what I do, but certainly they have set themselves
standards for reduction in the cost of desktops across government,
and they are pretty aggressive targets I believe, and that does
look at demand as well as behaviours and usage; it looks at demand
as well as supply. On the other side of the agenda, because I
do not think we should forget we also have a value for money agenda
here, we have also set up category collaborative pilots across
government, one of which is ICT and we are looking at demand as
well as supply and setting the strategy for that. We are going
to have sustainability right at the heart of the requirement we
are setting up for those category boards. So, yes, we are building
it into the system of procurement as well as just the one-off
procurement.
Q79 Martin Horwood: I want to come
back on the Blackberry issue. You do seem to be missing the point
here slightly. Accepting all the things which have been said already,
when your energy usage per square metre is going up 32%, do you
really think that focusing on getting rid of Blackberries and
things like this is going to make a big difference?
Ms Ghosh: Can I just reiterate—
9 Note by Witness: There are in fact, over
9,000 different holdings in Government, not 14,000. Back
10
Note by Witness: The estate measures 14.2 million square metres,
not 4.2 million square metres. Back
11
Note by Witness: It is in fact hoped that the target saving
will be completed by 2013. Back
12
Note by Witness: The Office of Government Commerce hope to achieve
over 500 lease breaks within the next 8 years, not 9, as indicated
during the evidence session. Back
13
Note by Witness: The figure is in fact 70 plus per cent
of total emissions across government, not 60 plus per cent. Back
14
See Ev 33. Back
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