Main

Consumption Archives

January 30, 2008 - Future Leaders Survey 07/08

I was trying to think the other day what it felt like to be 18 – back in 1968. A spate of 40-year on retrospectives covering the Paris riots and other events at that time have stimulated all sorts of dubious attempts on my part to re-capture the mood and the moments of that time. It was certainly bracing, and, for me at least, my first serious brush with radical politics – though a couple of rather well-behaved protests was about as far as it got in my case.

There would appear to be no such ‘new dawn’ mirages shimmering in front of today’s 18-year olds. The idea that students might take to the streets in their thousands, let alone engage in running battles with riot police for days on end, must be a completely alien notion.

But it was still very reassuring to see some serious anger bubbling through in the responses of the 25,000 university applicants to the second Future Leaders Survey – coordinated jointly by Forum for the Future and UCAS, and sponsored by Friends Provident. Bombarded as they now are on all sides, by uncompromising rhetoric about the likelihood of climate-induced meltdown, the inadequacy of the political response must appear breath-taking as far as they’re concerned. Whilst the majority of them would appeared to have resisted a collapse into apocalyptic despair (84% think it likely or very likely that human civilisation will last another century), their residual optimism is based on the prospect of radical change commensurate with the scale of today’s converging crises. And of that there is little sign, and that’s the source of their anger against politicians.

Surprisingly, there is also growing awareness that the cornucopian bonanza enjoyed by their parents’ generation may in fact be coming to an end – with 86% supporting the idea that material consumption must be reduced, and more than 50% subscribing to the heretical premise that economic growth should no longer be the government’s top priority.

Mind you, that kind of high-level response needs to be tempered by some of the specific responses. Perhaps not surprisingly, only 16% expect to avoid taking a flight that they would have taken otherwise for environmental reasons (happily, that is at least up on a 10% response last year!), whilst 82% are mustard-keen to get out there and visit as many exotic places as possible “before they disappear”!

Mind you, such ambivalence seems perfectly reasonable – especially given the fact that my generation probably wouldn’t muster anywhere near a 16% response to the same question!

But will the anger grow? What needs to happen to convert these reasonable plugged-in, compassionate people into cobble-stone heaving insurgents? Forty years ago, in 1968, the end of the world (for human civilisation at least) wasn’t even on the agenda – the greed, injustice and war-mongering oppressiveness of capitalism was quite sufficient.

Add eco-meltdown to that list (the rest of which has hardly gone away after all!), and who knows when that will create some kind of tipping point in gathering anger amongst the young.

For more information visit www.futureleaderssurvey0708.org.uk

Posted on January 30, 2008 10:45 AM | | Comments (5) | 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)

May 30, 2008 - Fuel Tax Protests

PetrolPump_200.jpgThis all feels very much like one of those periodic crunch moments for the sustainability agenda. Fuel-tax protests. Rebellious backbenchers. The kind of febrile atmosphere we last saw in 2000. The Tory press on the war path. NGOs winding themselves up: “Stay green, Gordon, don’t be yellow”.

In 2000, the price of fuel was heading sharply upwards – not as sharply as today, but very uncomfortably. A motley consortium of some of the worst affected citizens (road haulage firms, farmers etc) took to their trucks and their tractors and blockaded key oil facilities in protest against the fuel tax escalator – a Conservative innovation which Labour was quite happily rolling on with. Within a few weeks, the Treasury caved in and agreed to decommission the escalator.

On the face of it, a minor blip. But a strong case has been made since then that it was this one setback that put paid to Treasury’s enthusiasm for the sustainability agenda. Ministers blamed both NGOs for not having come to their aid and the media for having hyped the whole thing into a massive crisis. The image of ‘Mondeo Man’, feral and unforgiving, was on display, virtually, the length and breadth of the Treasury’s corridors of impotence.

Roll forward eight years. It’s all stacking up again, with campaigns both to defer the projected increase in fuel taxes for the second time, and to reverse decisions announced in the budget on increases and vehicle excise duty. Ministers are ‘listening’; U-turns are widely anticipated.

And would that be so awful? Focussing for now on fuel taxes, just stand back for a moment. The essence of using fiscal instruments to change corporate and consumer behaviour relies on three things: transparency (so that people know what’s coming down the track at them); fiscal neutrality (so as not to piss everyone off by using green taxes primarily to increase revenues); and fairness (so that the less well-off in society are not further disadvantaged).

On those three counts, given the dramatic increases in the price of petrol and diesel over the last couple of years, everyone has been taken by surprise by the price hikes, apart from ‘Peak Oil’ campaigners (who have been telling us this was about to happen for years).

Moreover, the less well-off are being disproportionately hammered, and the hikes in fuel taxes are far from fiscally neutral and never have been.

So, economically, socially, ethically, what are the implications of all that?

Your thoughts really welcome. As the Government’s official advisers on such matters, what do you think the SDC’s advice should be?

Posted by JP on May 30, 2008 9:38 AM | | Comments (20) | TrackBacks (0)

Subscribe to this blog's feed
[What is this?]