Joining the dots

Councils get guidance on ‘whole picture’ sustainability Who’s keeping track? In the typical local council, many different departments are involved one way or another with sustainable development - sometimes unwittingly. Policy co-ordination can seem an impossible job. Happily, 12 councils have been working on this problem, in partnership with Forum for the Future. And the fruit of their labours is the new Sustainability Standard. It’s designed to help keep the overall picture clear, “ensuring you’re considering the environment in the round rather than cherry picking”, as Sue Rayden of Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council puts it. It’s all very well, for instance, to fulfil social and cultural objectives by building a new community centre, but it’s even better if the development improves the environment and enhances health at the same time. The Standard isn’t a checklist to be ticked off and filed away in a drawer. It’s a process to work through, to get different departments acting in harmony, not undermining each other, and to maintain co-ordination on a routine basis too. The first step is to get buy-in from the top - ideally with an overarching commitment to sustainable development written into the corporate strategy. Stage two is ‘trickle down’, encouraging staff in all departments - from social services to transport to the IT office - to make the concept of sustainability meaningful in their own practical terms. Ideally, by stage five, councils would not only be measuring how well they’re doing things like reducing paper consumption and waste, or ensuring equality in the workplace, but also whether they’re ‘doing sustainability’ in the way they deliver their services and work with external partners. Simple, eh? In the real world, of course, the Standard won’t be followed quite so logically from step to step. When it’s rolled out to local authorities later this year, councils will jump on at different levels, many of them having already gone some way down the sustainable procurement route, for example, or in implementing ISO 14001. But it’s still a clever way of holding a mirror up to work in progress. As Kendal Davies from Carmarthenshire County Council enthuses, “the stepping stones fit in with where we ultimately want to be”. He’s hoping they’ll be proudly displaying the Sustainability Standard logo within the next five years. Indeed, there’s a real prospect of wide adoption of the Standard throughout Wales, where sustainability is not just a choice but a duty. And, with piloting about to begin, there’s even talk that the Standard could eventually be the sustainability self-help guide that sprawling public bodies like the NHS so desperately need. - Hannah Bullock

17 June 2005

Hannah Bullock