Main

Government Archives

July 13, 2007 - Planning White Paper

Let battle be joined! Earlier this week, a coalition of some of the UK’s most influential environmental NGOs decided to go to war with Gordon Brown and his government on the new Planning White Paper.

This White Paper is all about accelerating planning decisions on major infrastructure projects – based on the theory (which, it has to be said, is mostly unsubstantiated) that current planning processes get bogged down in wholly unnecessary delay. So there will be a new, independent Commission to decide on key infrastructure issues – such as airports, power stations, waste disposal facilities, ports, roads, etc. And the work of the Commission will be guided by a sequence of new National Policy Statements in all of these different areas.

So here’s the issue: if these National Policy Statements have sustainable development absolutely at their heart; and if the new Commission has sustainable development as its overarching statutory remit; and if government meant what it said about consultation, community empowerment, localism and so on, then the Planning White Paper could be seen as a positive development for delivering more sustainable outcomes through the planning process.

However, the NGOs have come to the conclusion that all those big IFs just won’t be delivered on by government – hence the new coalition firing off a tactical warning barrage putting Gordon Brown “on notice” that this could become the first big test of his own application of the principles and practice of sustainable development.

The Sustainable Development Commission is currently advising government on all this, and we suspect that NGO-angst may be just a little premature. But the Government is not helping itself by letting it be known that the current Air Transport White Paper provides a useful “template” for all future National Policy Statements. Excuse me!! As the Commission made clear at the time, the Air Transport White Paper falls so far short of anything even vaguely resembling a proper sd-proofed process as to leave one gob-smacked at the nerve/bravado/ foolhardiness/insanity of anyone in government proposing that this is what the future holds in terms of embedding sustainable development at the heart of future National Policy Statements.

Posted on July 13, 2007 4:53 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

October 31, 2007 - The Green Belt

Who would have thought that staid old Natural England, one year into its new persona, would have come out with such a fantastic pot-stirring initiative to celebrate its first birthday – by calling for a fundamental review of the Green Belt. In its announcement there is more than a hint that Green Belts have had their day, and that we should come up with a radically different approach. Dovecot duly disturbed, with doves duly wheeling around in consternation, outraged at such unthinkable heresy.

Actually, I’m a bit envious. Somebody had to do it, and I would have quite liked the Sustainable Development Commission to get stuck in on the future of Green Belts – precisely because it is so important, so controversial, and so rich from a sustainable development perspective. Too bad.

But the fear that everyone has (and it’s a wholly legitimate fear) is that the only reason for reviewing the Green Belt at this moment in time is to make life easier for volume house builders who want to make life easier for Gordon Brown who wants to make life easier (theoretically) for all those people who can’t get their first foothold on the housing ladder – by building more than 3 million new homes.

And the Government’s current appetite for all those new homes is so rampant that these fears are more compelling now than ever before. Housing Minister Yvette Cooper is keen to dispel those fears (regardless of Green Belt issues), and powerfully hits the “sustainable and affordable” button on every available occasion – which is great. But there is more than a suspicion that Treasury might hear those same words but continue to treat them as little more than linguistic baubles.

To be fair, Natural England has tried to reflect those fears in the way that it would like the Review of the Green Belt to be carried out. The obvious thing to do (to ensure the kind of quality debate we need) is first to review the need for a review – in other words, just how broke is the current system before anyone sets out to fix it. How well has it achieved its objectives? How good a job is it doing in terms of nature conservation, recreation, amenity value, and simply preventing development. Without so much as a mention of new houses, this would really begin to highlight the nature of the debate that is needed.

But good for Natural England. A pot well stirred!

Posted on October 31, 2007 3:59 PM | | Comments (0) | 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.

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

April 15, 2008 - Review of Sub National Economic Development and Regeneration… Part II

There is a remote possibility that I am just a touch obsessed with this particular bit of Government process, in which case apologies to those who are not touched by any such obsession. But I feel I have duty to update.

Previous SNR instalments have portrayed this innocuous-sounding review of economic growth and development at the regional level as a bit of a horror story – along the following lines:

"This Treasury-inspired confection popped out in July last year, after minimal consultation with either Defra or CLG, heralding the most radical changes in the English regions since the Regional Development Agencies were brought into being in 1999.

There was no serious reference to sustainable development, and no reference to the imperative of securing a low-carbon economy. It had one principal purpose: to get the English Regions and local authorities to focus on accelerated economic growth, including increased housing numbers. Out go those sad old Regional Assemblies, now deemed unfit for that particular purpose, with their regional planning functions to be dumped on the RDAs, even though they themselves are demonstrably unfit for such a role, lacking as they do any kind of democratic accountability. To describe the Sub National Review (or SNR) as a dog’s dinner is an insult to the culinary expectations of any self-respecting canine. "

I can’t attribute developments since then solely to the Sustainable Development Commission’s ire on the SNR, but a consultation document that was due out before Christmas 2007 somehow got delayed until April 2nd (under the friendlier title ‘Prosperous Places’) largely as a consequence of some pretty serious inter-departmental argy-bargy. So congratulations are due to all those who have been working so hard over the last few weeks to civilise this wretched document – a pretty good job done.

There will now be the usual 12 weeks for people to feed back their reactions and ideas, which might just conceivably lead to a little bit more civilising along the way.

The Sustainable Development Commission will obviously be producing its own response – just as soon as possible, to help inform others keen to get stuck in here. Fortunately, we’ll have plenty of good things to say (the whole tone of ‘Prosperous Places’, is completely different from the original, with none of the arrogance and macho-growthism), and many of the proposals about a new integrated regional strategy are very sound. But none of the serious governance issues have as yet been properly addressed. Regional Development Agencies will still take over the regional planning functions, once the Regional Assemblies have been put down, even though their Boards will remain ‘business-led’.

And then there’s all the rest of the original SNR that isn’t being consulted on at the moment. How much of that is the Government just going to try and sneak through? What happens, for instance, to the aggressive commitments the original makes to sweep away all other high-level targets for the RDAs apart from a “single over-arching growth objective”, including delivering on housing numbers?

Maybe that too has been consigned to some deep Treasury dustbin – to be replaced (miracle of miracles!) by a commitment to the following definition of “sustainable economic growth” to be found in a footnote in ‘Prosperous Places’:

“Sustainable economic growth is economic growth that can be sustained and is within environmental limits but also enhancing the environment and social welfare, and avoids greater extremes in future economic cycles.”

Clearly not the work of a lover of the subtleties of the English language, but just great to be getting along with!

Posted by JP on April 15, 2008 3:52 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

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