To date the Private Sector has created a much more convincing case for taking leadership roles on sustainable development than the public sector. I am able to make this bold statement because I have spent the last ten years working with both sectors, endlessly wrestling with the similarities and differences between the two. For example, at a gathering of corporates, any passing reference to “the business case for sustainable development” would be reasonably well understood by most present and very well understood by a growing number of corporate champions.  By contrast, were I to invite readers of Ethos to reflect on the public value case for sustainable development, there would be a lot of rumpled brows out there – and this response would precisely reflect the confusion/indifference that most people in the public sector feel on being accosted with such an alien concept. For me, this constitutes a real indictment on the government’s demonstrable inability to follow through on its own sustainable development strategy – entitled ‘Securing the Future’– across the public sector.

Let’s start with what the government itself tells us about the need for introducing more sustainable ways of creating and distributing wealth. ‘Securing the Future’ acknowledges that we are living well beyond the environmental limits on which all our life-support systems depend. It recognises that climate change is the most significant problem that humankind faces; that the UK has become a dangerously divided and inequitable society, particularly in some of our larger towns and cities; and that many symptoms of social malaise (drug and alcohol abuse, binge drinking, levels of mental ill-health, obesity and other health inequalities) are now both chronic and increasingly costly to society.

Such a diagnosis lends itself either to a symptom-by-symptom approach, or to a root and-branch appraisal of the system that is generating all those symptoms. As with every other government over the last 50 years, this one has predictably opted for the former approach, bringing forward a welter of piecemeal and partial policy interventions to close the various gaps, ignoring any suggestion that the system itself (and the paradigm of growth-driven progress on which it is built) needs anything other than incremental tweaking.

We shouldn’t be too surprised by that.  Root-and-branch reappraisals usually result from some deep social trauma (war, economic depression, catastrophic system collapse), external to the system itself, to create enough political space for the profound shifts required.  But what is much more surprising is that Labour has been so ineffective in its symptom-by-symptom approach, invariably failing to join things up, to pursue the synergies that can be enjoyed from a policy intervention in any one area helping to meet policy objectives in other areas.

This is a deep-seated problem. Back in 2004, the Sustainable Development Commission produced a short report for the then Prime Minister Tony Blair. Called ‘Sharing the Value:  a sustainable approach to the modernisation agenda’, it demonstrated the massive benefits to be enjoyed from SD-proofing the public services modernisation agenda.

Since 2000, the Commission has been hugely supportive of the government’s massive new investments in health and education, and has little doubt that these have generated substantial improvements for the vast majority of people in the UK.