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July 23, 2010 - The Government's First Green Betrayal

As the former Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission from 2000-2009, I’m clearly going to be a bit biased about the Government’s decision yesterday to get rid of the Commission. So I’ve been working really hard to put myself in Ministers’ shoes in terms of the ‘rationale’ they’ve advanced for this reprehensible decision. They’ve put forward four justifications:

1. It will save money
The SDC costs the taxpayer around £4 million a year, around 50% of which come from Defra. The rest comes from the Devolved Administrations and other Whitehall Departments – all of which wanted to carry on working with the SDC. As George Monbiot has pointed out, the SDC’s advice on reducing costs through increased efficiency has already saved the Government many, many times that negligible amount, and would have gone on doing so year after year.

2. Sustainable development is now mainstreamed across government.
Defra Ministers are now claiming that sustainable development has been embedded in every department. In other words, no specialist capability at the centre is any longer required, simply because the Government ‘gets it’.

Like hell it does. To hear Caroline Spelman, Secretary of State in Defra make such a totally fatuous claim after a few weeks in power is irritating beyond belief. She clearly knows nothing of the constant slog required (of the SDC and many other organisations) to achieve the limited traction that is all that can be laid claim to today.

There’s a rich irony here. The SDC is a UK-wide body. Neither Wales nor Scotland was in favour of getting rid of the Commission, no doubt because both Countries have done an infinitely better job than Whitehall on ‘mainstreaming’ sustainable development.

3. It will avoid duplication
This is a bit trickier, simply because the SDC does a number of different things. It advises Ministers – and there are indeed lots of other people who do that. But rarely if ever from an integrated sustainable development perspective. It helps countless public sector bodies (from the Audit Commission to the Department of Education, from Local Authorities to Primary Care Trusts in the NHS) to make sense of sustainable development, and no other government body does any of that. And it scrutinises government performance on a completely independent basis across the whole sustainable development agenda – not just on climate change. And no other body does that.

4. Sustainable development is too important to delegate to an external body
It’s worth recording Caroline Spelman’s actual words here:

“Together with Chris Huhne, I am determined to take the lead role in driving the sustainable agenda across the whole of government, and I’m not willing to delegate this responsibility to an external body.”

Even after nine years working with dozens of Government Ministers, I’m astonished at such utterly brazen cynicism. The only thing Mrs Spelman has done so far as Secretary of State at Defra is publish a new strategy for the Department. This has not one serious reference to sustainable development in it. Such is the depth of her concern.

If Defra’s next step is to get rid of what’s left of it’s own internal Sustainable Development Unit, then it will have literally no capacity to ‘drive the sustainable agenda’ even within Defra, let alone ‘across the whole of government’. And how can you drive anything if you haven’t the first clue what it actually means? And it just got rid of the only part of the system capable of providing you with a basic primer for beginners?

So let’s not beat around the bush: their justification for getting rid of the SDC is transparently vacuous, if not downright dishonest. This is an ideological decision – in other words, a decision driven by dogma not by evidence-based, rational analysis.

And the only conceivable reason for allowing dogma to dominate in this way is that the Government doesn’t want anyone independently auditing its performance on sustainable development – let alone properly-resourced, indisputably expert body operating as ‘a critical friend’ on an inside track within government.

I don’t suppose the Prime Minister was even consulted about such a footling little matter. But it’s clear that his advisors hadn’t the first idea about the kind of signal this dogma-driven decision sends out, ensuring that his claim that this will be the ‘greenest government ever’ is in deepest jeopardy.

It’s too early to make any definitive judgement about how the Green agenda will fare under the Coalition. But it’s not encouraging. ‘Greenest ever’ has to mean something substantive. Simply smearing a sickly ideological slime over everything just won’t cut it.


Posted by Jonathon Porritt on July 23, 2010 11:20 AM | | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

July 28, 2010 - Nailing the Lib Dems

Thanks to everyone for those empathetic responses on the government pulling the plug on the SDC. Crass, unfounded, self-defeating, ideologically-motivated – that just about sums it up!

Which brings me to the role of the Lib Dems in this wretched business. And what one detects here is a combination of indifference and supine deference to their coalition partners. Not so much as a puppy-dog whimper of dissent.

For Lib Dem MPs and voters, this has sent out a very worrying signal. Whatever the Party’s internal rationale may have been for throwing in its lot with the Tories, the external perception is that the Lib Dems have four things they have to deliver on if they are going to come out of this the other end with any credibility: electoral reform; civil liberties enhanced; environment and sustainable development on the up; and the Lib Dems need to have exercised a restraining, moderating and civilising influence on their coalition partners.

Sticking to the environment / SD bit for now, Lib Dem performance to date has been poor to very poor. Not having a Liberal Democrat Minister inside Defra is proving particularly problematic. Claims that Defra will be enhancing its capability to promote sustainable development are, as yet, entirely unsubstantiated, and the likely outcome of further cuts in Defra is that SD capability will be even further hammered come the Comprehensive Spending Review this Autumn.

If the SDC was still there, that probably wouldn’t have mattered that much. Defra always struggled with its cross-government remit in this regard. But without the SDC, other Departments will just get on and do what they want to do without any SD oversight.

So this may well be the time to create the first test for Caroline Spelman in her self-declared role as ‘personal lead’ on promoting SD across government. Right now, she has a wonderful opportunity to prove her championing skills with the Department of Education.

I won’t bore you with the details, but for the last four or five years, the Department of Education has done an increasingly good job in ‘mainstreaming’ sustainable development, quietly and intelligently, across the whole educational system. Michael Gove, as the new Secretary of State, has now decided that he wants to get rid of the department’s Sustainable Schools Strategy – and will no longer be actively involved in promoting sustainable schools.

A small thing in itself – relative to the systematic slash and burn underway on every other front – but fairly disastrous in terms of engaging young people in building a low-carbon sustainable future.

Again, this is straight ideology. The cost associated with the department’s leadership in this has been minimal.

Plenty of scope, therefore, for Caroline Spelman to pick up the phone to persuade Michael Gove to withdraw those proposals, and start championing SD even more enthusiastically than his Labour predecessor.

If Mrs Spelman is too busy, then perhaps some of her greener Lib Dem colleagues could weigh in with Mr Gove.

As I said earlier, it’s too early to come to any definitive conclusion here. Maybe what we’re seeing is a series of one-off, heedless decisions – taken simply because they don’t know any better. Alternatively, it could be a pattern emerging along the lines of ‘slash the deficit, sod the environment’.

In which case, suggestions that we should be targeting Lib Dem MPs now, before the pattern is established, becomes all the more important.

And the parallel idea that we might set up some independent, web-enabled scrutiny function (under the compelling title of ‘ GreenestGovEverYeahRight.com!’) is beginning to sound more and more attractive.


Posted by Jonathon Porritt on July 28, 2010 3:38 PM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

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