Embedding Sustainable Development: An update

One of the Government’s earliest decisions in this Parliament was to abolish the Sustainable Development Commission. That decision had a direct impact on our work, as we set out in our January 2011 report on that change. Since then we have continued to monitor the Government’s efforts to bring sustainable development responsibilities back into Government departments. Now, two years on, our conclusions are that:

• Guidance for Government departments on policy appraisal and impact assessments has been improved to reflect the need to address sustainable development, and civil servants’ skills requirements are being strengthened on these disciplines. Defra now needs to use the results of an audit of impact assessments to develop the guidance further, and challenge departments where they are non-compliant.

• The Business Plan review process has a significant weakness in that it does not seek to address potential policy gaps, where new initiatives could tackle unsustainable development. The reviews examine the policies that are added to the Plans after being negotiated within Government, rather than policies that should be generated as a result of applying sustainable development thinking from the outset. For the policies that the process does review, the system remains opaque to external scrutiny, but presents an important opportunity for the Cabinet Office, with Defra support, to focus departments’ attention on the sustainability of their policies.

• A year into the operation of new Greening Government Commitment, good progress is being made overall, but the ambition of those targets now needs to be reassessed where they are already being readily hit.

• Sustainability reporting in Government is a significant and welcome development.

The first year results nevertheless show room for greater compliance. Defra and the Cabinet Office, as well as the Treasury, need to take ownership of sustainability reporting compliance. There is particularly poor compliance on procurement, as well as significant slippage in refreshing Government Buying Standards; in part the result of a continuing flux in governance arrangements and leadership in this area.

Defra and the Cabinet Office should raise with the Treasury (who set the Annual Reporting requirements) how poor performance should be addressed.

Complementing this report, we are producing another on our examination of the outcomes of the 2012 UN Sustainable Development Conference—the Rio+20 Earth Summit. The actions needed on both the global and domestic front to drive sustainable development complement one another and should be taken forward together.

In the main body of this report, conclusions are printed in bold and recommendations are printed in bold italics.