The Government's First Green Betrayal (Jonathon Porritt)

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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 | Permalink

Comments (9)

It's bad news, but a minor correction: the Scottish administration have done next to nothing on sustainable development, and indeed regard all development *by definition* as sustainable. They're a group of road builders, coal lovers, airport expanders and would-be flatline target-setters. Supporting the SDC for SNP Ministers is simply another way to bash London and make it look like they care, not a badge of their success.

Posted by James | July 23, 2010 1:31 PM

Why exactly should taxpayers be providing a multi-million pound budget for people like you to promote your radical views?

The primary work of the SDC was always attempts to influence policy, that is clear enough just from looking at the "about us" page. The idea its sideline in advising public sector bodies on emissions cuts saves serious money is nonsense premised on dodgy maths with no serious attempt made to establish additionality.

I've written more here:
http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/bettergovernment/2010/07/the-sustainable-development-commission-is-abolished.html

Posted by Matthew Sinclair | July 23, 2010 2:59 PM

remember agenda 21. in dumfries and galloway it has been absorbed into all departments of the Council and therefore buried. most do not know its origin or what it is. Such will be the fate of sdc objevctives

Posted by george pattison | July 23, 2010 9:32 PM

Perhaps they just realised that the sustainability agenda is economic and scientific nonsense? If political dogma contributed to any such realisation then where's the harm?

Posted by tomsmith | July 23, 2010 10:54 PM

Hear hear! I'm was blown away by the news that the SDC's funding was withdrawn. What on earth are they playing at? Perhaps they hope the UK Space Agency can solve the unsustainable approach to life in the UK by moving half the population off-planet in the near future? If so, I hope Caroline Spelman is one of the first to sign up to leave.

Has the "right to recall" been enshrined yet, or was that just a sound bite for the media?

Posted by Andrew Harmsworth | July 24, 2010 8:10 AM

The worrying thing is that this is just the start. The public have voted these cretins in and they haven't the faintest idea what they are capable of. Worse still, the latest opinion polls appear to give the Tories a democratic mandate for their insanity.

I have just booked one-way tickets to New Zealand. I'm not joking.

Posted by punkscience | July 27, 2010 12:36 AM

A few comments
1 it is a good opportunity for the Green Party to raise it's profile by attacking this, so step up to the plate Caroline Lucas.
2 We are in an age of Austerity as the Government is keen to remind us. This means a return to not a retreat from the Green Agenda when re use and recycle will save money rather than mass consumerism. So how does the Government propose to remain at the cutting edge of sustainable thinking if it is removing the principal thought provoker. The fact that sustainability may be part of the culture doesnt mean that it will stay there without constant innovation on Green issues.
3 I doubt whether the Government or the Civil Service has the resilience to maintain suatainable standards on the back of all the cost cutting that is alledgedly happening at the moment and in fact what will happen is that departmental behaviour will regress to short termism and incorrect resource allocation as a result of cutting budgets to the bone, and indeed probably to the marrow.

Conclusion.
Philosophically this is antithetical to the way the Governement wants us to behave.

The sustainability debate has to move on from lipservice to exploring the true resilience of the economy we are in and understanding what principles the government will keep which will test the resilience of the coalition.

Posted by Len Jones | July 27, 2010 3:46 PM

Bad news.

This is really putting the COAL back in coalition :-(

Will this make it a little easier or harder for Chris Huhne to switch from anti- to pro-nuclear?

Posted by sim0n | July 31, 2010 8:11 AM

I am a mature student in my honours year reading environmental studies with Open University. Having recent first-hand experience of the cavalier attitude of UK Manufacturers to environmental concerns it seems to me that Con-Lib government is pacifying businesses yearning for quick profits. Such cost cutting as axing SDC will assist corporate responsibility avoidance.

The country will be poorer long-term if businesses are not forced to discontinue their greenhouse gas production, as will the planet (socially and ecologically). Part of my final course included an 'on line' forum with Paul Brown, author and past environmental editor for the Guardian - In which your site and comments on axing of SDC had a mention. Paul suggests mass 'comments to the editor' letters in complaint. Any one else up for it?

Posted by Liz Burden | August 1, 2010 9:48 PM

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