Broadening the focus of environmental monitoring, the PM is ‘mainstreaming’ sustainability into all management and policymaking. Suzannah Brecknell gets an explanation from Defra director-general Mike Anderson.
Cutting carbon emissions from the government estate by ten percent in one year is an ambitious aim – but when David Cameron said he wanted to run the greenest government ever, he had more fundamental changes in mind. While Labour adopted the targets-and-watchdog approach, creating the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) to audit departmental performance, Cameron intends to ‘mainstream’ sustainability: he wants every policy, service and project to be developed and executed with environmental, social and economic sustainability in mind. And the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has just published a document outlining how this will work in practice.
According to Mike Anderson (pictured above), Defra’s director-general of strategy, green economy, and corporate services, the new approach requires departments “to step up to the plate, to be deeply open about where we’re going.” They must, he says, accept that sustainability is not just “the responsibility of a pretty small arm’s length body”, but part of everybody’s role.
In recent years, government has monitored its eco-credentials through a series of targets around better estates management and sustainable procurement. The Centre of Expertise in Sustainable Procurement (CESP), at the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), reported progress against the targets, while the SDC provided ratings and challenged poor performers.
Defra has now published new ‘Greening Government’ targets, which aim to reduce business flights, water use and waste production. Departments must now present their plans for achieving these targets to the Cabinet Office, which will monitor and support progress. Meanwhile, the energy department is currently working on carbon reduction targets beyond May 2011; and we can expect these new carbon targets to be challenging, says Anderson. Their scope has already been broadened to include not just non-departmental public bodies, but also subcontractors within procurement supply chains. Perhaps the greatest ‘broadening’ of the government’s green agenda, though, is that departments can no longer confine sustainability to the way they manage buildings or the goods they buy. All policies and projects must now be designed with sustainability in mind.
This isn’t necessarily as complicated or technical as it sounds, says Anderson: sustainability is largely about common sense and long-term thinking. Take the Olympics, whose planners have focused carefully on the Games’ impact in years to come: “Everything they set about doing on that project was based around: ‘How do you do it in a sustainable way? What’s a sustainable social, environmental and economic legacy?’” Anderson contrasts this with the Millennium Dome, where it wasn’t always clear that the project’s legacy “had been fully thought through”. The Olympics should provide a valuable learning opportunity across government, he adds, because so many departments are involved in a programme that has explicitly set out to deliver the most sustainable Games ever.
To ensure that departments are indeed mainstreaming sustainability, Anderson explains, there will be “a whole series of checks”. Environment secretary Caroline Spelman will sit on a number of cabinet committees (including the economic affairs committee); departments will be expected to regularly publish statistics on their progress against greening government targets; and Defra will develop “real and measurable” indicators by which progress on sustainability can be judged. The department is currently developing indicators: they must, says Anderson, reflect progress in a range of areas (including economic development and social wellbeing); be applicable across government; and provide a holistic and comprehensive picture of progress.
On the scrutiny side, he explains, the Environmental Audit Committee has the “powers to go into any department on any policy area at any time, to ask them how they're faring”. And the Cabinet Office will also be watching: minister for government policy Oliver Letwin will include sustainability considerations in his quarterly meetings with secretaries of state, at which he discusses progress against business plans. Eventually, there may also be scrutiny from the Treasury: in 2011-12 it will pilot ‘Accounting for Sustainability’, a system of measuring both long- and short-term activity and impacts in its Green Book rules.
But will this system of distributed scrutiny be as effective as the soon-to-close SDC’s regime? “I think the scrutiny will ultimately be more powerful,” says Anderson. “When you have a body of 70 people, they can only look at specific projects in specific ways; it’s pretty impossible for them to keep account of every single policy going on in Whitehall.
“The SDC was quite good for focusing in on a particular subject,” he continues. “Was it really able to look across the whole of government in the way that we’re talking about, and provide challenge? My personal view is: no, it wasn't able to do that. You've got to have a much more sophisticated system.”
This “sophisticated system” will have to be nuanced and sensitive enough to factor in both the political and the scientific thinking behind policies – and to reward departments that first make sensible choices, then successfully persuade the public to get behind them. “You won't please everybody all the time on this,” says Anderson. “You are trying to govern for the long term, as the deputy prime minister would say.”
When asked which policies haven’t been as successful in sustainable development terms as the Olympics project, Anderson mentions the recent attempt to reform forest ownership – which Defra is now reviewing. In this case the policy was sustainable, he argues, but it failed to win public support.
Other complex debates will include, for example, decisions over developments such as wind farms and waste incinerators, where local concerns over health and disruption can balance out evidence that incineration is “one of the best ways of dealing with waste”, says Anderson. Sustainable development is often about finding a balance, he says – in this case, between local and national priorities – and Anderson suggests that national government sometimes needs to step in at a local level to impose decisions for the national good.
Nonetheless, Anderson argues that local objections should be seen as a natural part of the decision-making process rather than a problem to be defeated. If policymakers are encountering a lot of resistance, he says, they should reassess their own assumptions. It may be “that we're not putting out the right evidence; or we might not have the right solution”.
Even post-credit crunch, people are quick to organise beneath environmental banners. In a concrete example of activism that fits neatly with the government’s Big Society agenda, moves are afoot – led by communications firm Futerra – to develop a ‘people’s SDC’. Supported by volunteers, and with the possibility of start-up funds from environmental charities, it may help keep green government on track.
In the end, though, it may not be the scrutiny that decides the success of mainstreaming: after all, even with the SDC providing external challenge, progress against the previous green targets remained varied. Real change must surely depend on altering departmental priorities. And it may well be that the pressure exerted on ministers and permanent secretaries by Oliver Letwin, business plan reviews, and the Treasury’s new accounting measures will help drive sustainability up the agenda in ways that the SDC never could.