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March 2008 Archives

March 3, 2008 - Wanted: a code for sustainable buildings

What a treat yesterday (28/3): a visit to the EcoBuild Exhibition at Earls Court. I think this is the fourth or fifth of these exhibitions – and it started out very small and very ‘niche’.

The 2008 Exhibition is big, bold and bullish. With dozens of mainstream industry giants mixing it with innovative start-ups, government departments, industry organisations and so on.

The cumulative impact is very impressive, a powerful statement to politicians and citizens alike that if we want to live in sustainable homes, work in sustainable offices, shop in sustainable retail outlets, work out in sustainable gyms, etc etc, then we really are capable of figuring out exactly how to do it.

We are just in the foothills of the innovation mountain that we now have to climb, but the prospect already looks pretty good.

And for those who are sceptical about this Government’s passion for target-setting, you would have been heartened to see the way in which the 2016 target for zero-carbon housing is now impacting on the entire sector. Lots of doubts from the industry, lots of confusion (what is the difference between zero carbon, low carbon, very low carbon and carbon neutral?), but a gathering focus on what now needs to happen.

All this provides yet another example of the way in which timely and decisive regulation drives innovation. So, what we need next is a Code for Sustainable Buildings (commercial, retail industrial) to match the Code for Sustainable Homes, with the same kind of stepped standards kicking in at different milestones along the way. And given that things have moved a lot since the 2016 target was adopted for houses, in terms of the new consensus about the science of climate change, let’s go for the same target date of 2016 for all buildings, and just squeeze the intervals between the different steps along the way.

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Posted on March 3, 2008 9:35 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

March 7, 2008 - Procurement in the public sector

I know that everybody finds procurement really tedious. Even serious SD enthusiasts can’t seem to stop their eyes glazing over just as soon as the “p” word makes an appearance in any conversation. But from the Sustainable Development Commission’s perspective, how we spend roughly £160 billion of tax payer’s money is absolutely fundamental – so stop reading now if your eyes are starting to glaze over!

I have just come hot-foot from Defra’s second Suppliers Conference, where I found myself entertainingly sandwiched between Helen Ghosh (Permanent Secretary of Defra) and Ian Andrews (Second Permanent Under Secretary at the MOD), in the company of a whole host of pretty serious private sector buyers to government. It so happens that these two departments are the two departments that are doing best on sustainable procurement, and both have a very good story to tell in terms of their own engagement with suppliers on sustainable procurement – which the SDC will be featuring in its imminent (and very eagerly anticipated!) Sustainable Development in Government (SDiG) report.

That can’t be said about all government departments, let alone all of Local Authorities or health bodies of government agencies. Two years ago, the UK Government committed itself to being a “leader on sustainable procurement in the EU” by 2009 – and, quite honestly, it’s going to be one hell of a stretch to get anywhere close to that leadership goal.

Indeed, getting most departments to start getting serious about sustainable procurement – to start implementing the governments own perfectly adequate Sustainable Procurement Action Plan – has been a bit of a nightmare. Data gathering in management systems have often been defective; there has been no proper leadership provided by most Permanent Secretaries; hard-pressed Procurement Officers are just left to get on with it, struggling against the grain of crude “lowest cost mindsets”.

Things that are already mandated by central government are not implemented (the Office of Government Commerce’s Quick Wins, for example), and Treasury have been utterly supine in enforcing the use of critical tools such as “Whole-Life Costing” for all major capital expenditure projects.

But the good news – the really good news – is that this is about to change. Gus O’Donnell (Cabinet Secretary), Ian Andrews and Nigel Smith (new Chief Executive at OGC) have spent the good part of the last couple of months interrogating the causes of this chronic underperformance, acknowledging that it’s no longer acceptable, and putting in place a host of changes across government that we believe will transform this whole area. At last!

Posted on March 7, 2008 4:29 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

March 20, 2008 - Holding government to account

You probably won’t believe it, but our collective hearts sink every time the Sustainable Development Commission has to publish its annual report on the Government’s progress against its own sustainability targets – quite simply because the significance of the Government’s own performance in this area is enormous. Enormous in terms of impact on the private sector, on local authorities, and indeed on private citizens, and if the Government’s performance is rubbish, then the knock-on effects are really bad for sustainable development in general.

And for the last five years, the Government’s performance has been rubbish. Last year, commenting on the 05/06 results, David Miliband (then the Defra Secretary of State) performed the best collective mea culpa on behalf of government as a whole that we’d ever seen. It sounded really impressive – “never again, got to put our hands up on this one” – and so on. Unfortunately, despite the eloquence, nothing changed from that point on.

So this year’s report isn’t much better – as you’ll see if you check out the SDC’s website. Some really good stuff (28% of electricity from renewables, easily meeting the target of !0% by 2008, some rubbish stuff (two-thirds of Departments not on track to reduce emissions of CO2 by 12.5% by 2010), and a lot of what I would describe as just marking time. I find all this so depressing that I now hate having to comment on it. In fact, this year, I opted out of all media work around our report.

But next year (my last as Chairman of the SDC, as I step down in July 2009) is going to be different. Happily, the powers that be in Number 10 and the Cabinet Office have suddenly woken up to the fact that this kind of systematic hypocrisy (lecturing everybody else but barely lifting a finger oneself) just doesn’t make any sense – and is quite seriously damaging for one’s reputation.

The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, has now charged all Permanent Secretaries with “getting it sorted”, and they have been told that performance on both sustainable operations and procurement will be included in their objectives (a recommendation that the SDC first made four years ago). At the same time, the Office of Government Commerce has moved with uncharacteristically speed and purpose to improve the quality of data management, agreed proper Delivery Plans, set up a centre of excellence for sustainable procurement, and bring some serious leadership to bear on this hitherto neglected area of government performance.

Hallelujah!

Posted on March 20, 2008 12:08 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

March 25, 2008 - Foreign Office Strategic Framework

For a very clever man, David Miliband does do some very stupid things.

Under his customary ‘forceful leadership’, the Foreign Office has just adopted a new Strategic Framework, replacing the 10 Strategic Objectives that preceded it. In the process, not only has sustainable development been eliminated from the Framework, but the Foreign Office’s SD team has been disbanded, resources axed, SD attachés in embassies around the world have been told to focus exclusively on climate change, and the visible presence of SD in the FCO has quite simply been eliminated.

Mr Miliband’s officials offer two rationalisations for this retrograde absurdity: first, that sustainable development is now “mainstreamed” across the whole of the FCO, and does not therefore need a ring-fenced resource. I’ve heard that lame excuse so many times, and I can assure you that it holds no more water for the FCO than it does anywhere else. Without a specific Departmental Strategic Objective, let alone a cross-departmental PSA, SD in the FCO has effectively been relegated to the ‘lip-service only’ league.

Secondly, they point to the fact that the new Framework does indeed include a high-level commitment to “promoting a low-carbon, high-growth global economy” – and that this covers off sustainable development.

Complete rubbish. Climate change is just one (albeit the most problematic) symptom of a fundamentally flawed model of economic progress – a consequence, incidentally, of the brainless advocacy of the kind of high growth that takes no account of the social and environmental externalities it causes. Does the Foreign Secretary honestly not understand that the world would still be falling to pieces even if climate change wasn’t now exacerbating every one of the existing crises? And what now happens to the excellent work the FCO once used to do on biodiversity, on sustainable forestry, on sustainable tourism, on the Millennium Development Goals – and so on.

It’s just so stupid. But unfortunately, Mr Miliband has a track record here. When he whirled to Defra as new Secretary of State a couple of years ago, he instantly got rid of sustainable development as the Department’s overarching mission, opting instead for the populist, but ultimately unusable notion of ‘One Planet Living’. (Which Defra instantly got rid of, by the way, as soon as Mr Miliband moved on.) This was not helpful, and as a direct consequence, Defra no longer has a PSA to “promote sustainable development across the whole of Government”, and bits of the ‘institutional architecture’ that Defra had laboriously built up (like the Sustainable Development Ministers) have just disappeared.

So it’s clear that there’s a bigger problem here. First Defra, then the FCO. Perish the thought, but my view of it is that Mr Miliband just doesn’t understand sustainable development, having dedicated only a fraction of that awesome cerebral capacity to really interrogating what it’s all about.

This is a particularly disturbing blind spot given that not one of the ‘big ideas’ that the Labour Party has wheeled in and promptly wheeled out again over the years has ever come close to sustainable development in terms of potential scale, relevance, impact and intellectual coherence.

But I’m much looking forward to the FCO’s next Sustainable Development Action Plan. At least it will be short.

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Posted by JP on March 25, 2008 2:00 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

March 28, 2008 - The Battle for London Mayor

I blame London’s taxi-drivers personally. How else can one possibly explain the lead over Ken Livingstone that Boris Johnson has apparently taken in the polls for the London Mayoral Election? On the rare occasions that I have to endure a ride with a garrulous cabbie, any conversation all but instantly comes round to the evil, scheming, cabbie-hating monster that is Ken Livingstone - according to them. I have never come across such a vein of venom and vituperation.

The prospect of Boris as Mayor of London is just so scary. Either he is a genuine, out-and-out buffoon, in which case London becomes a laughing stock alongside its Mayor, or he is a pseudo-buffoon, in which case his true ideological nastiness will soon be revealed. The prospect of Boris taking over London’s Climate Change Action Plan is even scarier. He may have learnt not to reveal his full contrarian bigotry on climate change, but he really doesn’t get it, and would rapidly scale back or completely get rid of the ambitious targets in the Action Plan. And that would be a massive set back. Internationally, London is widely recognised as one of a handful of cities showing real leadership on climate change.

And Ken Livingstone has driven that personally, in a very effective partnership with his deputy, Nicky Gavron. Just as he has driven a host of other environmental and sustainability priorities. The surreal sight of Boris on the TV castigating Ken for his “lack of environmental vision” was almost too much to cope with. So I just hope all the environmental NGOs can rally the troops in London in a pro-Ken campaign, even if they can’t come out and explicitly endorse him.

Lastly, right now, I can’t help comparing Ken’s approach on these issues with other luminaries in the Labour Party. He really does understand how to make the joins between a high quality physical environment, sustainable resource use and a commitment to social justice, whilst still driving forward plans for increased economic prosperity. Particularly through a different kind of energy economy. It’s sort of grown-up.

Unlike the jejune fantasising about a “nuclear renaissance” in the UK, creating “hundreds of thousands of jobs” which now emanates from BERR – the sort of over-hyped nonsense which has to be put on a par with claims made nearly 50 years ago that nuclear power would one day be “too cheap to meter”.

Wouldn’t it be great, just once, to hear a senior Labour Politician (other than Ken) enthusing in similar terms about the hundreds of thousands of real jobs that would be created were we ever to get serious about energy efficiency?

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Posted by JP on March 28, 2008 5:09 PM | | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (0)

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