Whitehall Watch

With a general election likely in 2008, says
Peter Madden, prime ministerial rivals Brown and Cameron will set out their stalls this year. What will they offer on sustainable development?

Gordon Brown has been busy amassing evidence. Last autumn saw the publication of three major ‘expert’ reports: Stern on climate change, Eddington on transport, and Barker on planning. Disappointingly, Brown’s pre-budget report saw only a timid response to the Stern report; the chancellor had created a political space and then refused to move into it.

There will be strong signals about his agenda in March or April in the outcomes of the Comprehensive Spending Review. This is meant to go back to first principles, and will set out where he intends to put his money - and his political weight - during the course of his prime ministership. His room for manoeuvre, however, will be limited by the state of the UK’s finances.

“Will Brown carry his Treasury prejudices next door to Number Ten?”

May-June can be pencilled in for the Blair-Brown transition, with Tony Blair expected to step down once he hits the ten-year mark. Will Brown carry his Treasury prejudices next door to Number Ten? His ongoing obsession with productivity would suggest that wider quality of life considerations won’t rank high in his priorities. One thing he looks set to inherit is an international focus on climate change. Like Blair, he realises that we need global solutions, but he may also share Blair’s unwillingness to back up calls for strong action overseas with strong action at home.

Brown will need to emphasise the break with the past, so expect some surprises. We might even see, for example, the Department of Trade and Industry abolished, to be replaced by a new Ministry for Energy and Climate Change.

How will David Cameron respond? In July the Conservative Quality of Life Commission will report. John Gummer and Zac Goldsmith have been busy. The Commission has been wide-ranging, ambitious and willing to listen to a spread of opinions. We can expect a fairly radical report. Climate change will, of course, take centre stage, but it will also tackle transport and food head-on.

“Entertaining as Cameron’s populist message is, we will need regulation and tough action to tackle climate change.”

Cameron’s task will then be to square this with what’s coming out of the other policy groups, such as John Redwood’s Economic Competitiveness Review on taxation, and with his wider political agenda. George Osborne appears as allergic to green taxes as Gordon Brown. And Cameron will find it hard to square his view of government as a facilitator with some of the bottom-line action necessary. “We need to understand,” he said recently, “that cultural change is worth any number of government initiatives. Who has done more to improve school food, Jamie Oliver, or the Department of Education? Put another way, we need more of Supernanny and less of the nanny state.” Entertaining as this populist message is, we will need regulation and tough government action if we are to tackle climate change.

With Brown espousing a Treasury view of the world, and Cameron moving to the centre, it is difficult to discern where the party political dividing lines will be. I suspect that 2007’s big sustainability fights will be on two issues.

The first is climate change. The government will be bringing a climate change bill to Parliament in the spring, so we can expect intense lobbying from Friends of the Earth and others around emissions reduction targets. There will also be an Energy White Paper, including decisions on nuclear power which will be hotly contested.

The second is land use. The current government has already made one failed attempt to unpick the land use planning system. Gordon Brown has signalled his intention to try again. The system does need reform. The mistake would be to do this on narrow productivity grounds. Land use planning is about how we organise our public spaces, deciding what to protect or change, and how we live together on a crowded island. There is more at stake than retail productivity per square inch or delivering large infrastructure projects. Green NGOs will forcibly remind both Brown and Cameron of this over the coming year.

Peter Madden is chief executive of Forum for the Future.

12 January 2007

Peter Madden