ANNEX C
Round Table Response to Consultation on the Sustainable Development CommissionIntroduction
1. The Round Table offers the following response to the discussion paper The Sustainable Development Commission: an invitation to contribute. It has been prepared in the light of a seminar held on 21 September for a wide range of interested parties, but is the response of the Round Table itself. After this introductory section, the response follows the headings of the paper.2. The Round Table welcomes the proposal to establish a Sustainable Development Commission, subsuming itself and the British Government Panel on Sustainable Development. The achievement of sustainable development in the UK will be an even bigger task than the recent White Paper suggests, requiring determined political leadership, some difficult policy decisions and commitment and action by all parts of society. The Commission could play a vital role in helping to develop the policies and the broad consensus which makes them acceptable in a democratic society, and in promoting them to key actors within government and more widely.
3. The change in advisory arrangements is not, however, without cost to the effectiveness which derives from continuity of thought and effort. The following comments are intended to secure maximum benefit from the change, incorporating the best features of current arrangements into the new ones, so as to create a body which will make a major contribution to the development of policy and practice in this area.
Status of the Commission
4. The Round Table believes that sustainable development is a vital national objective and that the new Commission should have an UK-wide remit and member-ship. We endorse what is said about the devolved administrations in paragraph 3. The Commission should be expected to address any issue relevant to sustainable development, not only that narrow range of issues which have been reserved to the UK Government or which are subject to international negotiation. This should be the starting point for discussion of the relationship between the Commission and the devolved administrations, the details of which remain to be settled. To help prepare the way for good relations with the new administrations, the Round Table Chairman and other members are visiting Cardiff, Edinburgh and Belfast over the next few months.
5. Rather than the Commission's being sponsored by DETR, as proposed (paragraph 4), the Round Table favours the model offered by the Government Panel which is formally sponsored by the Cabinet Office and supported in day to day terms by DETR. It is important to have direct access to the Prime Minister and other UK Ministers, reflecting the relevance of sustainable development to all UK Government policy, whilst retaining the advantages of having a 'friend in court' in the form of a single committed department. The Commission will also need access to Ministers or Secretaries of the devolved administrations, and good relations with relevant officials who support them. This should be reflected in every aspect of the Commission's establishment and work.
6. The Commission should not "report to DETR" (paragraph 4). Rather, it should publish its reports, which would be submitted to the Prime Minister via the Cabinet Office and which should be laid before Parliament, with parallel arrangements in the devolved administrations. The UK Government should commit itself to responding to Commission reports, as it does to those of the Round Table and the Panel, with a regular debate in the UK Parliament on sustainable development issues of which the Commission's reports would form part of the focus; again with appropriate parallel arrangements for the devolved administrations. The Commission will also need an appropriate working relationship with the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee.
7. To give reality to the notion of access to the Prime Minister, the Commission should meet him once a year to discuss its work and key policy issues. It should also meet the Deputy Prime Minister at least once a year. Other UK Ministers should be invited to attend meetings of the Commission, and the Chairman and other members should visit Ministers, to discuss issues relevant to them. Appropriate arrangements to meet Ministers and Secretaries of the devolved administrations will be needed.
Purpose and remit
8. The task of monitoring progress, on the basis of indicators and other evidence, and focusing public and political attention on areas where things are not moving in the right direction, is a vitally important one. It should be the core of the work of the Commission. The Commission should not have to rely solely on data supplied by the UK Government and the devolved administrations, but should have the right (and the capacity) to obtain additional information or analysis it may need to assess progress, in the light of its own judgement of the key issues for achieving sustainable development. (This is also relevant to what is said under working methods and reporting.)
9. The Commission should be seen as the custodian of sustainable development, seeking to deepen understanding of the concept and objectives. It should bring together the three main aspects of policy and encourage others to do so. It should provide strategic advice to governments. But it should not focus too closely on the work of governments but should look across society, both for its subject matter and its key audiences, contributing to a common understanding between different sectors and consensus on the action required. It should be expected to take account of developments internationally.
10. The overall purpose of the Commission "to promote sustainable development in the UK" (paragraph 5) should be interpreted as relating to key sectors such as government (at every level), industry, and NGOs. The Commission should not expect to become much involved in direct promotion of messages to the public at large, which would risk overlapping with bodies such as Going for Green and the Sustainable Development Education Panel and would not be helpful. Rather it should seek to complement and enhance the work of such other bodies by providing an intellectual underpinning for their work and by discussing with them the practical outworking of sustainable development policy and practice.
11. The Commission should be given a specific role to act as a focal point for devolved and regional round tables on sustainable development. This would build on the Round Table's recently growing links with such bodies. It could also be given the task of encouraging liaison and co-operation between advisory bodies on relevant specific topics at national level.
Working methods and reporting
12. An informal, dynamic relationship with Government (UK and devolved) will be important for the Commission. The Round Table has sought to develop such a relationship by involving relevant policy officials from a wide range of departments in its plenary meetings and especially in subgroups. The Commission would do well to adopt such an approach and to develop it further. It should be authoritative and independent but well informed by governments, including in its choice of topics for study.
13. The Commission should take an inclusive approach, networking widely and using subgroups to draw in a wider range of people and to promote the messages of its work to key audiences. In this respect also it would do well to adopt the practices of the Round Table and to develop them further.
14. The "annual assessment of sustainable development in the UK" which the Commission is to prepare (paragraph 9) should not be detailed and lengthy. Rather, the Commission should prepare a brief annual review of the overall position, drawing on the UK Government's annual report on sustainable development and the UK Green Ministers' report, plus reports from the devolved administrations, companies, NGOs and overseas organisations.
15. The Commission should focus most of its resources on specific topics of key importance, seeking to engage relevant policy makers and opinion formers in a variety of ways and commending its reports to key audiences. It should develop a process for effective advocacy to a wide range of stakeholders and must be resourced adequately for that task. It should encourage a process and climate of target-setting and reporting by many of the organisations on whose performance sustainable development depends.
16. It would be helpful for the Commission to prepare medium term objectives for its work, with a rolling work programme looking more than a year ahead but retaining the flexibility to allow new topics to be introduced in response to changing priorities. It could also usefully set criteria for its own success, to be agreed with the UK Government and the devolved administrations, including for instance measures of its influence on policy and practice in the UK.
Membership
17. The Round Table does not support the idea of appointing, from the outset, a Vice-Chairman of the Commission. This could lead to an unhelpful division of approaches within the body. Rather, a Chairman should be appointed who has as many of the required attributes as it is possible to find in one person and is of international repute. That person may, in due course and with the agreement of all, designate another member of the Commission as Vice-Chairman, but there should be no assumption that this will happen. The Chairman should expect to spend more time on the Commission's work than the 3 days per month suggested: somewhere in the range 5-10 days would be more appropriate, depending on the scale of the task as it becomes more precisely defined.
18. Not only the Chairman but also the other members should be eligible for payment for the work they undertake. Payment could be based on a per diem rate for a notional annual time commitment, perhaps one day per month.
19. As noted above (purpose and remit) the Commission should be given a specific role in respect of regional round tables and liaison between national advisory bodies. To assist with the latter, a limited number of national bodies should be represented ex officio on the Commission, to secure them a place in its discussions. Strong candidates would be: the Advisory Committee on Business and the Environment, Going for Green, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the Sustainable Development Education Panel and the Trade Unions and Sustainable Development Advisory Committee.
20. In addition, there should be provision for members to appointed ex officio to represent advisory bodies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, if and when such bodies are established and if that is agreed to be the best way of relating their activities to a UK-wide forum.
21. For the rest of the membership, about 12 would be a reasonable number. Taken together with the sectoral interests held by ex officio members in addition to their formal role, this should allow a sufficient spread of interests. A resulting total membership of up to 20, rather than the 12-15 proposed, would also make it easier to establish subgroups to carry out detailed studies, which has proved enormously valuable to the Round Table. Members should be chosen to represent all three aspects of sustainable development equally; individuals may represent only one aspect, but should have an appreciation of the whole.
Support for the Commission
22. As with the Round Table and Panel, members who command respect will almost certainly have many other commitments and will therefore be able to give only limited time to the work of the Commission. They will need to be supported by a strong and capable secretariat.
23. The Round Table believes there is a strong case for the secretariat of the Commission to be significantly larger than that of the Round Table and Panel combined, reflecting its remit in respect of monitoring and promoting sustainable development. To reflect this, and to give the Commission greater prominence in Whitehall and elsewhere, it should be headed by someone in a more senior post than the current Round Table and Panel Secretaries. This person could be given the title Executive Secretary and a wide brief to take forward the work of the Commission, in liaison with the Chairman, between meetings and to act as an ambassador for the Commission and its work.
24. The secretariat should include officials not only from DETR but also from other Whitehall departments and/or from the devolved administrations, so as to ensure a wide spread of perspectives and to encourage 'buy-in' to the Commission's work from those other bodies. It should also include people from industry, local government and NGOs, so as to strengthen links with these key constituencies and to help promotion of the results to them. The Round Table's experience in this area suggests that such secondments might best be on a part-time basis; they should be paid for out of the secretariat's budget. The need to manage such a disparate and changing team of colleagues, plus a substantial programme of consultancy and research effort, is a further argument for appointing the Secretary at a more senior level than at present.
Review of the Commission
25. The proposed life of the new Commission, five years, is about the same as the Round Table will have had. It is important that the review, including any proposals for change, should be undertaken and completed in good time before the end date - preferably during the fourth year of the Commission's life - so as to avoid uncertainty and disruption of the work programme.
Timetable for setting up the Commission
26. The Round Table urges the Government to proceed urgently with the process of appointing the Chairman and other members of the Commission. Ideally, the Chairman should have a role in appointing the Secretary, who in turn should help to appoint other staff and make other preparations. This sequence of events needs to be well advanced by the time of formal establishment if the Commission is to get off to an effective start.
Published 14 September 2000
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