Securing the future
Central government is the biggest constraint on the kind of innovation and leadership on which the future of the UK depends, argues Jonathon Porritt.
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.
But it was clear to me, and to others on the Commission’s board, that all sorts of shared value synergies were being overlooked by the failure to locate this modernisation process explicitly within the framework established in its own sustainable development strategy:
- Increased value for money (in both the short term and over the long term), with a far stronger focus on ‘invest to save’ strategies.
- Mutually reinforcing outcomes (in terms of economic benefits, environmental protection and social justice), rather than crude trade-offs.
- A deepening of the idea of increased choice for consumers, through an emphasis on personal responsibility and active citizenship.
- A fresh approach to local governance issues, avoiding the extremes of the ‘local vs central’ debate.
- Increased innovation and creativity in policy design and service delivery.
- Connecting the modernisation agenda to the government’s leadership on global action for sustainable development and climate change.
On the ‘choice’ agenda (point 3), for instance, the balance between social entitlements and personal responsibility that lies at the heart of sustainable development can provide a critical reality check in today’s debate. It is indeed vital that citizens are empowered to get involved in co-producing improved public services, both as members of shared communities and as individual users.
But the key to this choice conundrum is stakeholder accountability and shared responsibility – a reflexive two-way relationship between citizens and the agencies that affect them (directly or indirectly), which allows citizens to express their interests and to hold institutions to account. In return those agencies can expect increased personal responsibility and a readiness on the part of citizens to participate in creating solutions to today’s problems. This is just one example where a convergence between the public services modernisation agenda and sustainable development can improve both the thinking and delivery of key programmes.
Our advice, sadly, fell on somewhat stony ground. And it is still stony, despite some encouraging improvements in the deployment of the Education and Health capital programmes, in the commitment to use “invest to save” tools such as whole-life costing, in the new Code for Sustainable Homes (and especially in the splendidly ambitious target for all new homes to be zero carbon by 2016), and in the (eventual) emergence of a new Sustainable Procurement Action Plan that should (eventually) ensure that all central government expenditure is subject to some kind of proper SD-proofing.
But each of these gains has had to be wrung out of the central machine as if it was a special concession being made to hold at bay the various watchdogs of the government’s own Sustainable Development Strategy – including the Environmental Audit Committee, the National Audit Office and the Sustainable Development Commission. In my experience, it never comes naturally, as can more recently be seen both in the new Planning White Paper and in the Treasury’s new ‘Review of Sub-National Economic Development and Regeneration’, a document that is brutally dismissive of the government’s own climate change targets and policies, and of the principles espoused in ‘Securing the Future’.
Conclusions of the Stern Review
That kind of mismatch on climate change has to be the most mystifying deficit of all. It was, after all, the Treasury itself that commissioned Sir Nicholas Stern to write his magisterial Review, ‘The Economics of Climate Change’. In launching the Review, both Gordon Brown and Tony Blair appeared to entirely endorse one of Stern’s principal conclusions that: “Climate change is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen”, and, further, that: “Adaptation to climate change – that is, taking steps to build resilience and minimise costs – is essential.” He continued, “It is no longer possible to prevent the climate change that will take place over the next two to three decades, but it is still possible to protect our societies and economies from its impacts to some extent – for example, by providing better information, improved planning and more climate-resilient crops and infrastructure.
“But the world does not need to choose between averting climate change and promoting growth and development. Changes in energy technologies and in the structure of economies have created opportunities to decouple growth from greenhouse gas emissions.”
Writing this article in the soggy aftermath of the July floods in Gloucestershire, I can’t help but compare the Treasury’s subsequent efforts to consign the Stern Review to the filing cabinet marked NIMTO (Not in my Term of Office) with the leadership provided by the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, in first producing and then driving forward what is probably the world’s most ambitious Climate Change Action Plan. The mayor’s efforts in this area have been strongly endorsed by the C40 initiative, through which the Clinton Climate Initiative has brought together the mayors of 40 of the world’s most dynamic cities to share best practice in driving carbon out of their urban economies without damaging their citizens’ prosperity.
Public sector innovation
What’s more, there’s no shortage of commitment and innovation elsewhere within the UK’s public sector to start getting serious about climate change. The reputation of Woking, for instance, has been transformed from sleepy, Home Counties gentility to global pioneer; the so-called ‘Merton Rule’ (requiring 10% of any new commercial property to source 10% of its energy from renewables) has now been taken up by more than 100 local authorities elsewhere in the country; the Nottingham Declaration is being adopted by more and more local authorities as the benchmark against which they should now be measuring themselves. Many Regional Development Agencies are fired up about the challenge of driving forward the transition to a low-carbon economy (my own RDA in the south west has adopted as its goal the idea of “securing economic growth within environmental limits to bring prosperity to the region”), but are constantly baffled by the endless flow of mixed messages and conventionally growthist ‘tasking frameworks’ from central government.
I see this at close hand through Forum for the Future’s direct engagement with many of the real leaders in the public sector today. For instance, our partnership with the Welsh Assembly Government, with its statutory duty to integrate sustainable development into all of its work, led to the development of a formal Integration Tool (approved by the Cabinet and by the Assembly’s own Management Board) to test all the Assembly’s policies against a set of strategic development priorities.
Through the Welsh Local Government Association, the 22 local authorities in Wales are being urged to adopt the Welsh Sustainability Standard (co-created with the Forum) as a powerful means both of benchmarking and improving performance – with authorities like Powys, Carmarthenshire and Caerphilly making real progress.
This stuff isn’t easy. It takes serious application, based on the incredibly simple insight that the net value public services can generate on behalf of the people they serve can be significantly enhanced by working within an integrated sustainable development framework. The ‘public value’ case for sustainable development is therefore a simple one: sustainable development provides a clear and accessible framework for defining the common good, and the performance standards to be met by public services. It is entirely consistent with the emphasis on partnerships between public bodies and other stakeholders in the search for joined up solutions and shared value. It seeks to design problems out upstream rather than having to cope with them later downstream. That means putting the emphasis on preventive policy making, ensuring that policies are geared as much to avoiding negative, knock-on consequences as to achieving a specific goal or outcome.
Many of today’s sustainable development tools have a built-in ‘proofing’ mechanism to prevent social exclusion, negative impacts on health, environmental damage or other avoidable external effects. Happily, this is exactly the approach that the Audit Commission in England is now embedding at the heart of its new comprehensive area assessment process, stating that: “We believe that sound understanding of sustainable development is essential if we are to achieve our strategic objectives, including value for money. Economy and efficiency require public bodies to get the best from limited resources and allocate them without waste. Effective decisions take into account long term local and global impacts as well as costs against this year’s budget.”
Sometimes, in my gloomier moments, I reflect on the growing gap between what the data really tells us (in terms of collapsing ecosystems, accelerating climate change, worsening global injustice, a ‘casino economy’ more or less out of control, fundamentalism of every kind already in the ascendant and so on) and the way in which governments are responding. It’s so patently inadequate as to leave one aghast at the depth of denial in all of today’s political parties.
But then I manage cheer myself up by tracking the latest developments in the Department for Children, Schools and Families, which has really started to ‘mainstream’ sustainable development in both its schools and young people’s divisions; in HM Prison Service, which has been an improbable beacon of sustainable development best practice for years; in the growing number of organisations in the National Health Service that have signed up enthusiastically to the Department of Health’s Good Corporate Citizenship self-assessment model (developed for them by the Sustainable Development Commission); and in the Department of Work and Pensions where there is one of the best sustainable development teams anywhere in the public service.
Joined-up delivery required
But all of these champion initiatives are still working against the grain of what’s going on at the centre – in the Cabinet Office, in Treasury, in Number 10 itself. Sustainable development is not the central organising principle of this government; indeed, in comparison to what’s going on at the regional and local level, let alone what’s now happening in the business community and in the hearts and minds of citizens the length and breadth of this country, central government has become by far the biggest constraint on the kind of innovation, leadership and seriously joined-up delivery on which the future of the UK depends.
Could it be that that’s all about to change under new management in number 10? I sincerely hope so.
JONATHON PORRITT is founder director of Forum for the Future, chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission and guest editor of this issue of Ethos. Visit: www.forumforthefuture.org.uk / www.sdcommission.org.uk /
David Allaby, Editor of Public Servant, looks at the three examples of sustainability being taken forward in the public service arena
CASE STUDY: C40 CLIMATE INITIATIVE
C40 is a group of the world’s largest cities working together to combat climate change. Chaired by London Mayor Ken Livingstone and in partnership with the Clinton Climate Initiative, it has committed to creating procurement policies and alliances that will advance new energy efficient and low-carbon technologies and influence the market place.
In May, former US President Bill Clinton announced a $5bn programme to retrofit buildings in 15 cities around the world, including London, to reduce energy consumption. Livingstone expects other cities to follow, “while national governments still struggle to agree a way forward on global warming”. Honeywell, Johnson Controls, Siemens and Trane will conduct energy audits on the buildings and work with local contractors to create efficiencies without net cost to the owners.
It is estimated that the project will double the global market for energy retrofit in buildings and energy savings of between 20 and 50% are forecast. The partners aim to pool the buying power of cities to help lower the price of energy-saving products and hasten the development and uptake of technologies. They will also look to lower production and delivery costs, and help cities establish baseline measurement and to access expert technical support.
CASE STUDY: HM PRISONS
Media interest in the Prison Service is generally so heated around record numbers of inmates and security issues that its award-winning work with integrated management for sustainability is often overlooked.
With 128 prisons in England and Wales, it is the second largest of the government estates, and the service declares it no longer asks why it should pursue green targets but how.
Procurement has been the focus of the biggest change management process since the inception of the service. It buys in excess of £500m of goods and services a year, with a central corporate procurement unit and six regional units to co-ordinate the business. It benefits from cross government procurement, online ordering and improvement management information systems, leading to more stringent requirements for suppliers and sub-contractors. The service buys recycled equipment and goods, and recycles its own waste on an impressive scale.
New agreements have removed annual maintenance costs from prison budgets – a saving of more than £700,000 on kitchen refurbishments by incorporating five-year warranties into contracts. Prison transport is saving more than 40,000 escorted prisoner journeys a year by making use of video links to court proceedings.
CASE STUDY: WOKING
The C40 major cities’ initiative has called on best practice from around the world (see page 8). However, only one of those originates in the UK. Woking, 25 miles south west of London, population 90,000, has been showing the big boys how to do it since 1990.
It established an efficiency strategy to cut council energy consumption by 40% in 10 years. That was exceeded and its municipal energy bill savings now top £5.4m. A combination of sustainable and renewable energy installations along with efficiency measures has cut carbon emissions in the council’s own buildings by 82%.
Woking’s strength has been in creating local sources of energy so that transmission losses are reduced. In 1999, the council set up its own energy and environmental services company Thameswey and soon after Thameswey Energy Limited (TEL) followed as a public-private company to finance, build and operate combined heat and power stations, as well as to supply energy services by private wire and distributed heating networks to institutions, commercial and residential customers.
It can also create larger scale projects with larger efficiencies. The town centre energy station provides heat, power and cooling through private pipes for customers that include major hotel, leisure and event operators.
