Government departments? If I had a magic wand I'd...

Friday, February 26, 2010

Boundaries between government departments must be broken down to allow much greater crossover of ideas and resources, Will Day, chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission tells Alison Thomas. Radical action is needed to tackle global warming and achieve long-term benefits

Where is Harry Potter when you need him? As Will Day settles in as the new chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission, he says what he would most like is a magic wand. With one wave, he would sweep away the turf wars and fiefdoms that bedevil government, and promote recognition of the big cross-cutting issues spreading across and beyond government departments – along with the understanding that sustainability is about far more than carbon.

"Politicians have woken up to the threat the changing climate poses, but there has been a collective failure on the part of politicians and lots of other people to articulate what a better world would look like," says Day. "The default setting seems to be on carbon, so we can measure it and value it and have graphs and make reductions. But as well as needing to live within environmental limits, it is clear that we need to be aspiring to be a healthy, fair and just society. We could end up transitioning to a low-carbon economy, but if we do that without recognising the need for a better society we will have lost the battle."

And none of the issues to be tackled by the next government, of whatever party, are the territory of a single government department.

"If I had a magic wand I would be saying don't give any departments any budgets at all," Day says. "Identify what the outcomes are you want to achieve as a government, prioritise them in terms of how much money you need to apply to them, and then work out who does what best. So the Department for Transport will clearly want to help deliver the health outcome by designing transport that helps improve the quality of life, and promoting walking or cycling. Education will want to help deliver the health outcome by teaching kids about health and diet.

"So you start to look at things like the public service agreement targets and seek to finance these desirable outcomes in ways that don't end up with turf wars, which we encourage at the moment by the way we do government business.

"Now that's easy for me to say sitting here in the SDC, but surely it should be about results, about impact, not just about turf. I'm hoping we can work with any incoming government to help them get their heads around these challenges. The central organising principle should be around the long-term outcome that we want."

And part of the role of the SDC is to ensure that the principles of sustainability are widely recognised and adopted so that when policy-makers have to make tough decisions they can measure them against a sustain- ability yardstick.

"The pragmatic daily reality of political and policy life is that sometimes that is inconvenient. It's often cheaper to spend money on something that doesn't have a long-term sustainable future, but is politically expedient in the short term. And that's not just in politics. One sees it in the marketplace: short-term thinking and decision-making that is great for the quarterly results but not necessarily good for the long-term health of the company involved.

"So trying to communicate the long-term benefits is at the heart of what the SDC was established to do. I'm hoping that as civil servants and policy- makers wade through the various sets of reviews that will undoubtedly be required in the months ahead they are really asking hard questions about what they are choosing to do or not to do. Are we making decisions leading us to a healthier, more just society living within environmental limits, or are they simply saving us money in the next 12-15 months to get us over this particular hump?"

The SDC's independent status means it can frame the cross-cutting questions, but then work with the civil servants operating within departmental structures.

"The structure doesn't always serve us well, and people within the structure know that. That's why changes within politics are always interesting, even if it's just within parties, because it's an opportunity for incoming politicians to look at how we are structured and how it can work better.

"We need to find the tools, the metrics, the incentives and the regulations to make long-term change, and here the SDC is more important than ever. We are close enough to government to be trusted – we are not out to undermine them. But we have the independence to ask the hard questions that if an individual minister were to ask would frighten the horses."

The upheaval caused by the financial crisis, combined with a looming election, provides an opportunity for a fundamental debate about the kind of society we want, argues Day, who joined the SDC from a career in international sustainable development, including posts as chief executive of Care International and chairman of BBC Children In Need.

Carbon may be difficult to cut, but it can at least be measured. Issues such as equity, wellbeing and happiness are harder to quantify and "much trickier territory" for debate.

"Bhutan has a national happiness measure rather than GDP, the only country that has that. I don't see the UK ditching GDP, but it is widely recognised as a pretty inadequate measure of a successful society. It measures certain things, it distorts others and you can have a pretty unhappy country with good GDP.

"I want to build on the SDC' s work on redefining prosperity. How do we start to assess quality of life, wellbeing and happiness and get it into the hands of people like the Treasury and government economists – and not have hollow laughs ringing out in government corridors when anyone mentions happiness, because it is too soft and squishy. Actually it is a perfectly laudable, desirable outcome."

A debate is also needed on what a sustainable economy could look like. Day says politicians are prone to talk about sustainable growth without any true appreciation of sustainability. "They are talking about growth that goes on forever – infinite growth on a finite planet just doesn't work," he says. "And if you add the complexity of depleting natural resources to that already impossible sum it really does oblige us to rethink the basis upon which our society is run."

But that rethink should be full of positive messages, emphasising the potential win-wins, argues Day, who describes himself as a "glass half full sort of person".

Even in the aftermath of the Copenhagen summit, he is looking for the positives. Though it was "clearly disappointing", he adds: "I am sure that politicians and officials in the EU and the UN are working to turn it into something legally binding and universal – and it is absolutely urgent."

"Politicians do not want to be people whose sole job in the next 50 years is to tell other people not to do things. We need to paint a better world, articulate a better future that doesn't involve wilful consumption and everyone driving a Hummer," he says.

"There's the fear that we are inevitably heading towards some kind of ghastly future where we have to knit our own socks and pick the stones out of our teeth. Every time I look at the big global trends I depress myself to bits; most of the graphs are pointing in the wrong direction and seem to be getting worse. So it's very easy to slip into a doomsday version and one response to that is to say 'Oh my God, I'm on the Titanic so I might as well stay in first class and to hell with steerage'.

"We at the SDC don't buy that argument, our view is that we live in a fabulously privileged part of the planet and have an opportunity by example to be part of the solution – and to do so in a way that does employ people and does improve the quality of life and does narrow the growing social inequality gaps. I think this agenda is full of win-wins.

"You can forget the idea that a low-carbon future will be boring and dull, it can be as exciting, as aspirational, as we want, so let's make it happen."