Measure for measure

“Strategies are worthless if they are not turned into action.” Bold words. They’re the very first sentence of the final chapter of Securing the Future. The chapter’s called ‘Ensuring it happens’. Here’s how we’ll know.

No piece of work is complete without some sort of appraisal. This time it’s serious. The UK government has set itself a detailed list of 68 indicators to measure its progress towards sustainable development, covering the big issues from air pollution and waste, right down to the nitty-gritty of our lives, like how many portions of fruit and vegetable we eat a day and how kids get to school. Having committed itself to active international leadership on the ‘greatest threat’ of climate change, the government is really putting itself on the line when it comes to tracking our greenhouse gas emissions. As well as measuring the emissions of our own factories, cars, planes and the like, it’s proposed that we also track the impact – created elsewhere in the world – of producing and transporting what we import. This is no small matter; we’re talking about the majority of our food, manufactured goods and raw materials. As WWF pointed out last year, we’re responsible in this way for a further 30% on top of our ‘domestic’ emissions. The Strategy suggests pilot projects to measure overseas impacts in key sectors such as timber or mineral extraction within specific countries. After all, climate change itself surely rams home the point that what’s done far away can still be very much our problem. Inevitably, that good old (bad old) economists’ shorthand measure, GDP, has made it on to the indicator list. And, as you’d expect, a fair proportion of the other ‘hard’ measures are economic ones. But the 2005 Strategy also recognises more clearly than before that the way we feel ain’t all down to money, so there’s a deliberate effort to grapple with quantifying the more elusive stuff too. The indicators in the 1999 Strategy were open to a lot of interpretation if you were trying to get a handle on whether our general ‘wellbeing’ as a nation was on the up. You had to do the juggling yourself, weighing the trends on different factors that obviously play a part – levels of employment, community participation, education and health, for instance. Now there’s less reliance on ‘proxy measures’, and a more explicit focus on monitoring whether policy is really making a difference to the way people feel about their lives. The Government is to investigate the viability of creating a specific set of wellbeing indicators, which might include mental health, access to sport and culture, green space and – that lovely word – “neighbourliness”. Also on the list of “measures to be developed” are indicators for environmental and social justice, in line with policy objectives like bringing us “cleaner, safer, greener public spaces”, and narrowing the gap between the most deprived areas and the rest of the country in areas like health, housing standards, pollution levels and crime. As with wellbeing, these are marked out to be among the headline list of 20 UK framework indicators. In simple language, this means that they are not only part of the UK government’s strategy set out in Securing the Future, but are also being taken on board for the separate sets of indicators used by the devolved administrations in Wales and Scotland (and being developed for Northern Ireland). We’re also going to see the UK government dipping its toe in the water of ecological footprinting. The concept of a ‘one planet economy’ (living as if we only had the resources of one Earth, rather than three, as our current UK lifestyles would imply) already runs throughout the discussion of sustainable production and consumption in Securing the Future. There’s merit in the simplicity of having one figure, our ‘global footprint’, to dramatise how badly we are currently overstepping the mark. The Welsh Assembly Government already uses Wales’s footprint as a measure of its impacts. The UK government is now looking into whether this could provide an easily accessible ‘headline figure’ for the whole of the UK – whilst still offering a robust analysis of progress in different areas of sustainable development. There’s still a lot of work to be done on the data and the definition front, to make sure the sums are right and that all departments are heading in the same direction. But the milestones laid down in these revised indicators represent a pretty comprehensive stab at capturing the measurable essence of sustainable development. Handily, too, the indicators are listed alongside a summary of existing departmental public service agreements and other public statements that relate to delivering on each one. So, you see, they really do want us to hold them to it...

Beefing up the scrutiny Proper processes of accountability? Nobody gave them a second thought at the time of the 1999 Strategy. The same government department (DETR, as it was then) wrote it, had much of the responsibility for delivering it, and then produced the annual report saying how well it had been fulfilled. Not exactly best practice... This time it’s different. The Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) is to review exactly who is responsible for scrutinising which aspects of government performance – not just in Whitehall but in the three Devolved Administrations too. The remits of all those involved (the National Audit Office, the Environmental Audit Committee, the Audit Commission, the SDC, Defra itself, agencies like the Environment Agency, various Regulators and so on) have just grown up higgledy-piggledy over the years – and what we need now is a comprehensive Accountability Framework in which everybody has a better sense of their role in the total picture. The SDC’s own new ‘watchdog’ function will be developed as part of this – avoiding duplication, maximising synergy, but making sure that UK citizens really do get a proper account of how well or badly the UK Government, the Devolved Administrations and the entire public sector are delivering on sustainable development. Action Plans are now a requirement for all government departments, and they will clearly be a key element in the process. Until now, it has been too easy for individual departments to dump responsibility for sustainable development back onto Defra. But Securing the Future isn’t a Defra strategy – it’s the government’s Strategy. It engages the whole of the public sector, and not one single part of the totality of government can any longer claim to be exempt from ensuring its delivery.

23 June 2005