Environment and Rural Development Committee, 15 Dec 2004

Meeting date: Wednesday, December 15, 2004

Official Report 219KB pdf

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Sustainable Development

I welcome the Minister for Environment and Rural Development and Executive officials. Members will recall that in September we published a report of commissioned research entitled "Is the Scottish Executive Structured and Positioned to Deliver Sustainable Development?" We sought a response from the Executive, on which we agreed that we would take evidence from the minister. We have now received the Executive's response together with an additional response from the Sustainable Development Commission, both of which have been circulated to members. I invite the minister to introduce his officials and to make a brief opening statement.

I am joined this morning by Sandy Cameron and Tom Davy, from the sustainable development directorate, as it is now somewhat grandiloquently described.

I do not want to take up much time with an opening statement as I think that now is the time for the committee to build on what was originally reported to it together with our response and the response from the Sustainable Development Commission. We welcome the committee's interest in this matter and found the initial report from your external consultants helpful in pointing us in some directions. In relation to some of the issues, we believe that the particular circumstances of the Scottish Executive did not require some of the action suggested, but I hope that our response gives a constructive view.

The issue relates partly to process but it is also about ensuring delivery, which is the essential element. We believe that, in broad terms—and subject to the refinements that are referred to in my letter—it is important to have a minister driving the issue on a day-to-day basis and relating daily with the sustainable development directorate. We regard it as hugely important that the First Minister should chair the Cabinet sub-committee on sustainable Scotland, as that gives that sub-committee both projection and a sense of importance, and that the sub-committee has three external members who can provide objective advice. Also important is the fact that we link with our own sustainable development forum, that we have two Scottish commissioners on the Sustainable Development Commission and, crucially, that we have a parliamentary committee that can scrutinise the process and hold everyone to account, which brings a degree of rigour to the process. Part and parcel of that is the fact that we are already engaged with the United Kingdom Government in terms of the next stage of the UK's overarching sustainable development strategy. Within that, we will be preparing a Scottish sustainable development strategy that ought to complement the actions that are being taken by the UK Government.

I will be happy to pursue some of the matters that were raised in the report and to expand on the response that I sent the committee.

We regard this process as on-going work both for the Scottish Executive and for the Parliament. We are therefore keen to take up your offer of focusing on issues on which members would like more information or which we think we could progress further.

I welcome the opportunity to talk to the minister about sustainable development. In some ways, however, it is symptomatic of the way in which sustainable development is treated by the Executive and Parliament that we are talking to the Minister for Environment and Rural Development rather than the First Minister. As you know, minister, sustainable development is about the economy and social justice as well as the environment.

In your response to the CAG report, you say that the sustainable development directorate's current location

"reflects the strong linkages between sustainable development and related policies in the environment field, such as on climate change."

How does the directorate work with other sections of the Executive on economic policy? What influence do you and your directorate have on mainstream economic policy—not just the green jobs strategy—in the Executive's programme?

I will deal with the general position before dealing with the specifics. I regard responsibility for sustainable development as being entirely cross cutting; I do not regard it as just an add-on to the environment. The sustainable development directorate, which was created over the past two years, was established specifically because we recognised that.

Our experience of developing governance over the past five-and-a-half years is that, whether it is a cross-cutting issue or an issue that affects only one department, the day-to-day relationship between a minister and the civil service is far and away the best way of ensuring that matters are progressed systematically. The First Minister has an enormous role to play, but a First Minister's role is very different from that of the ministers in his Cabinet to whom he has delegated the day-to-day responsibility of managing the process. I said in my opening remarks that I regard the fact that the First Minister chairs the Cabinet sub-committee as hugely important, as that stresses to the rest of the Executive the importance that we attach to sustainable development. The fact that other European leaders take similar positions in their countries is important in terms of the interface with the wider world. However, I have to say that my experience is that a specific minister is needed if that interface is to happen properly, and that the location of the directorate is important.

On our interface with other departments, that is what we do; it is our job. As I think the committee will be aware, each minister was required to produce a little statement of how they were going to bid in the financial round, the sustainable development impact of that work and the elements within each portfolio. I am currently engaged in a round of bilaterals. This is not the first time that we have done that, but this is a new round, and we are quite specifically going down the range of policies within each department, seeking to tease out areas in which a sustainable development impact is already acknowledged and areas in which we collectively believe that more attention ought to be paid to sustainable development issues. More important, we are asking whether departments have a number of economic outcomes and targets. In our bilateral discussion with the Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning only yesterday, for example, we asked how his targets would integrate with the sustainable development targets in the new plan.

I would be interested to know how many bilateral meetings you have had with other ministers, particularly in relation to the Executive's mainstream economic development policies, and what kind of practical engagement the sustainable development directorate has with officials in the Enterprise, Transport and Lifelong Learning Department to ensure that those policies reflect the sustainable development balance.

I will give as an example two documents that have recently been published by the economic division—the "Framework for Economic Development in Scotland" and "A Smart, Successful Scotland". There is no doubt that the final definition in those documents of economic development, which was collectively agreed and is completely different from the old-fashioned definition that was less susceptible to communicating even a trace of the sustainable development agenda, was influenced greatly by my officials and me in the discussions that we had with officials in the economic division at every stage in the production of those documents.

What specific policies are we talking about? It is fine to acknowledge sustainable development in a document but I would like to know about specific policies. As the CAG report noted, programmes that are delivered in other areas of the Executive might well undermine environmental programmes that you are trying to deliver.

Sandy Cameron might want to highlight a specific area of engagement.

We in the sustainable development directorate do not have different economic policies from our colleagues in the Enterprise, Transport and Lifelong Learning Department. We engaged in a dialogue on green jobs and other initiatives and we regard that as a useful step towards sustainable development.

I have thought of a specific example. One of the instruments that the Enterprise, Transport and Lifelong Learning Department uses to encourage businesses to develop, through the enterprise network, is regional selective assistance. We have had serious engagement with the department about the criteria for regional selective assistance and the fact that proposals for developments should contain elements that are wholly consistent with sustainable development, such as a company pursuing a particular energy policy. Such things are fed into the thinking process as a direct result of the sustainable development team being engaged with our economic development colleagues.

I would like to dwell on recommendations 3 and 4, which suggest that

"the Executive should ensure more integrated sustainability appraisal of its policies and legislation early in their development"

and their systematic monitoring and review. A practical example of your job in rural development is your forward strategy for agriculture. Will you talk us through that strategy? Has sustainability proofing been built into it? What monitoring is being done of the development of that strategy?

The issue is partly about striking the right balance between sustainability and pure agriculture. One of the thrusts of the strategy is to make agriculture more market focused: it is about trying to get better returns and therefore, in a purely economic sense, about making farms more sustainable. However, that was not good enough, because the same strategy document recognised that farmers are the stewards of 75 per cent of the land in Scotland and therefore, in seeking the sustainable management of that land, both the environmental imperative and the socioeconomic dependence of communities are important.

The forward strategy is made up of three integral parts: the interrelationship between the economic and socioeconomic dependence of rural communities in which agriculture occurs; the need to deal with the performance of the individual unit; and the need to optimise the stewardship that is exercised by individuals. On that basis, I submit that the strategy does not take a single view about how particular farmers should operate. It takes an overarching view about how we manage the countryside in a genuinely sustainable way and it uses those three factors as a starting point.

On monitoring and effect, in so far as the recommendations in the strategy document were designed to deliver the overarching strategy, the implementation group was engaged in monitoring the delivery of the agriculture strategy. The implementation group was broadly based and drew members from a wide range of interests, including environmentalists, community people, commercial people and farmers.

How can there be any practical audit of the strategy? A major thread in your approach to farming is the need for an overview, as you say, rather than just the monitoring of individual farms. How can Parliament get a handle on the effectiveness of the strategy? We will need regular information to enable us to audit the process.

I suppose that that can happen at several levels. However, I am not quite sure what happens to the outcome of the implementation group's work and I do not think that the officials who are present have that information.

Perhaps we could receive supplementary information—

I was merely suggesting that the agriculture strategy implementation group has responsibility for trying to ensure that the strategy is delivered across a broad spectrum of interests. I do not quite know how we aggregate the data; there is a danger of excessive bureaucracy and we must find a more imaginative way of proceeding than by imposing burdens on individual farmers and asking them to tick boxes on forms. It is not as if the strategy were not being monitored; it is being monitored, and the implementation group is charged with that responsibility. Perhaps I can inform the committee after the meeting about the information that is made available for that process.

The agriculture strategy is a clear example of a Scottish policy that has a very Scottish perspective. However, the Sustainable Development Commission said that much of the work on a sustainable development strategy

"will be developed as a result of the review of the UK Government".

In response to the committee's recommendation 3, on monitoring, the Executive says:

"we can mirror the indicators used by the other UK Administrations".

You said that you could give the committee more details about how the success of the Executive's agriculture strategy is being monitored, but surely we need a mechanism to monitor the strategy that has been developed to suit our circumstances, rather than one that mirrors the approach of other parts of the UK.

I said only that we can use such indicators. There is a common interest in having a common measurement, given that there is a European set of sustainable development indicators. There would be no great merit in reinventing the wheel for the sake of it. The intention behind the phrase that you quoted was to suggest that in relation to some of the broader, higher-level indicators it would be helpful from a European perspective—and indeed generally—to try to ensure that we are all heading in the right direction.

If what underlies your question is a concern that our current set of indicators needs to be revised to take account more particularly of Scottish policies, I agree with you. When I published my first set of indicators I made it very clear that they represented a preliminary view, because when I inherited the post of Minister for Environment and Rural Development and subsequently took responsibility for sustainable development we had already been talking about the matter for two years. People kept telling us that we could refine the indicators in this way or in that way, which was always an excuse for not publishing them and not setting ourselves targets, so I was determined to put the indicators in place and then build on them. As we revise the sustainable development policy, we must first get a handle on how we align our broad, strategic indicators with the revised suite of European indicators and then we must ascertain what other indicators would be sensible and more specifically directed to Scottish issues, as you rightly suggest. That will be part of the process. Mark Ruskell has also asked about indicators. I accept that having put the broad indicators in place we must consider revising the Scottish indicators.

I am not talking about reinventing the wheel, but the indicators should mesh with the UK and European indicators. Some knowledge of how that will roll out would be helpful.

Perhaps I could give a brief indication of the process. We understand from discussions that the UK is doing two things in parallel. We are engaged with the UK on the overarching sustainable development statement, in which we clearly have an interest in order to ensure cohesion throughout the United Kingdom and integration with Europe. We understand that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and others will then develop a strategy for publication. We expect the broad strategy to be published early next year.

Is that 2005?

Indeed. I am not happy about developing a strategy internally—that is not the style of the Executive or this Parliament. I am keen to take the broad overarching strategy and have some broad statements, on which we can consult Parliament and a wide range of stakeholders, and then to proceed quickly to develop a Scottish strategy. As part of that process, we will have to be clear about the Scottish indicators and the overarching indicators. That is the timescale for the process.

I look forward to seeing that.

I am disappointed to learn from the Sustainable Development Commission's letter of 25 November that you are putting together a strategy and action plan only because of what the UK Government is up to.

Richard Lochhead puts an interesting gloss on the matter, but that is not my understanding of the position. We integrate with the UK Sustainable Development Commission. I appreciate that your political position is that you would not do that, but we do. Therefore, we are trying to act in concert by having an overarching plan within the UK. We said when we published our first stab that we would revise it, which is what we are doing.

It was not I who said that you are putting together a strategy and action plan only because of what the UK Government is up to; it was the Sustainable Development Commission that said that.

I have two questions. One is in reference to your comment that you have bilateral meetings with other departments. You said that one of your objectives is to tease out policies that are not compatible with sustainable development. Does a list exist of all the policies, department by department, that are not compatible with sustainable development? Such a list would help the committee.

No—there is no such list. The problem is in trying not to burden the process through ministers exchanging volumes of paper. We are trying to talk more and write less in order to speed up the process. I am frustrated by how long it takes to move the issue forward. We are having bilaterals. We have the broad policy portfolio of each minister; however, we have not produced a document. We are trying to get the process to move more quickly. Everyone is frustrated by how slowly people get moving and by how slowly progress is shown in sustainable development.

I appreciate that it is a big task and a challenge, and that such a list would not be the easiest thing to put together, but it would be helpful in that it would show the committee that sustainable development is being taken seriously. Otherwise, all that we have is the word of various ministers that they are taking the matter seriously. It would help the committee to hold the Government in Scotland to account if we could see individual departmental policies and any audit that has taken place.

Secondly, even if Government departments have sustainable development policies, they are often implemented by quangos or non-governmental bodies. I am thinking of the announcement from the Minister for Communities of about a month ago on the multimillion pound investment in housing. What attempt is made to ensure that money is spent in a way that is compatible with sustainable development? For instance, tens of thousands of houses are to be built in the next few years, thanks to the Government's policy that was announced a few weeks ago, but will those houses be built from sustainable materials? To what extent do you pursue the impact of policies and of how the money is spent?

I will not pretend to the committee that every part of every policy in every place is carried out sustainably—if that were the case, we would not need this discussion. However, we are trying hard to achieve that. We want to make it clear in housing and cities announcements that we are imposing standards with the aim of meeting the sustainable development criteria. A group is considering improvements to the building standards. As members know, we have changed the building control regulations twice in the life of the Parliament in order to start to improve, through statutory enforcement, the way buildings are erected.

The issue relates to public procurement across the spectrum of Government and its non-departmental public bodies. I do not claim that we are 100 per cent there; we are not, but the issue is on the agenda and the situation must be monitored constantly. Public procurement could play a huge role in improving the situation.

I am trying to get an insight into how Government works in this respect. A few weeks ago, the Deputy Minister for Environment and Rural Development led a debate on forestry. A theme that came across as being important in the speeches of members from all parties was that one way forestry could be supported would be to encourage building more timber-frame buildings and sustainable buildings, especially for housing. Given that the Minister for Communities had previously announced huge investments in housing, I wonder whether the Deputy Minister for Environment and Rural Development left the chamber thinking that that was a good idea that has cross-party support. Perhaps he decided to investigate whether the Minister for Communities intends to attach conditions to the announced investment in housing. How does the system work? How do the issues tie together?

The generality of housing building is not all in our hands. The Executive discusses such matters with architects and specifiers of contracts, but meets with varied responses, particularly from the private sector. A number of architectural bodies and specifiers see the issue as important and are anxious to talk to us, but others are driven by a different agenda and do not see matters the same way. In relation to forestry development and specification, we have been encouraging an architectural project.

We are doing a lot on the issue. We are developing an internal group to bring together people from building control, architecture and planning as well as people from the Scottish Executive Environment and Rural Affairs Department. We are funding a major project at the Lighthouse in Glasgow. Sustainable designs exist, but we need to roll them out for greater use. Much work is going on; I can provide other examples for the committee.

I am still quite confused. I am aware that all those initiatives are happening. Were there any bilateral discussions involving your department and the Development Department in relation to the housing investment announcement?

Three were no such discussions on the day of the announcement. Announcements do not happen in a day; they are made on a day to MSPs, but preparation for announcements takes a long time. The process is regular. We have expanded greatly the sustainable development directorate to give us sufficient capacity. The directorate started off with three or four people, which was inadequate to tackle the sort of issues that Richard Lochhead raises. We now have in the directorate a solution capacity that enables us to engage with other departments on policy development that might ultimately lead to a policy announcement. Therefore, sustainable development is part of most of our policies. I am not suggesting that we have covered every quarter, but we certainly have better capacity to address the issue.

I read through your answers to our questions, the response to the CAG Consultants' report and the response from the Sustainable Development Commission and it seems to me that there is general acknowledgement that there has been a significant gearing up of staffing and resources for sustainable development. However, there is still a sense that there is an awful lot more to do. It is a question of how you expect the Cabinet sub-committee on sustainable Scotland to provide political leadership on sustainable development and how that will be picked up by the civil service through administrative action. The issue is training and development.

I will ask a question from a parliamentary perspective. What do you intend to do to train bill team leaders to address sustainable development issues? The CAG Consultant's report certainly made us think about how we do that in parliamentary scrutiny of bills. We lack the cross-cutting capacity to scrutinise Executive bills for sustainable development issues, so to what extent is the Executive geared up to provide in-house capacity for that? Perhaps there should be more independent scrutiny of the Executive's work along the lines of scrutiny of the National Assembly for Wales and the Welsh Assembly Government. Perhaps Audit Scotland needs to mirror such work so that, for this committee's scrutiny process and for the Government, there would be constant scrutiny to track the effectiveness of the huge amount of work that is going on and to provide focus and bite.

I appreciate that the discussion is about sustainable development; you could pursue that argument and apply it to a range of Executive activities. It could be suggested that we have completely independent scrutiny, rather than parliamentary scrutiny, for a raft of policies. However, I am not sure that doing that would necessarily produce better results. I think that we have learned a lot in the past five years about what we need to do. I am not claiming that we are anywhere near getting the sustainable development policy right, but we are getting somewhere in providing the necessary skill sets and resources.

I accept the point about independent scrutiny, but the real solution is for the Environment and Rural Development Committee to employ expertise—or to engage with it and have its support—that would allow the committee to hold us seriously to account. From your—or my—perspective, all parliamentary committees need that resource in order adequately and perhaps better to scrutinise policies in respect of sustainable development. I am not suggesting that this committee should do a batch of such scrutiny work. I sympathise with the committee's problem because there are complex issues and the committee must have access to adequate resources to deal with them.

I would be instinctively reluctant to have an external body scrutinising and passing on reports to a parliamentary committee. It seems to me that that would make the process overly bureaucratic. I am sympathetic to the notion that we need a high level of resource to scrutinise the Executive adequately, but I do not know whether adding another layer of bureaucracy is the right answer or whether the committee could get access to outside work for its purposes.

We will try in January to do sustainable development scrutiny for the climate change inquiry. We have kicked off that in the light of SEERAD's work. Our scrutiny will cut across different departments, although SEERAD is leading the strategy. However, I am thinking in terms of having a more focused monitoring and review process and I wonder to what extent the Executive does that. The procurement issue, for example, has been identified as an area in which we lead the way in Scotland. However, the Sustainable Development Commission has commented that we need to be more focused and explicit in monitoring the rate of progress and how that links into the modernisation agenda, which your department is not leading. There is recognition that good work is beginning to happen.

That brings me back to the question of who does the monitoring and what is the catalyst that will push things on to the next stage. Clearly, although a lot of good work is in progress, the question remains about how things are monitored and brought to the attention of everyone who is engaged in the agenda—the people who can help to raise standards and work through the difficult issues.

There are two things that I can mention in answer to the question, although the convener might consider them to be an inadequate response. Parliamentary scrutiny is extremely important, which is why I am sympathetic to the view that people should have access to that resource. The Cabinet sub-committee on sustainable Scotland plays two roles: one is to take forward the day-to-day agenda and the other is to try to form a view on whether we are addressing issues adequately. Although it is unusual to have external members on such a committee, their contribution is totally justifiable and extraordinarily valuable. We engage with the three external members of the sub-committee not only at our meetings, but by sending them draft papers and other material that is under development, and inviting their comments. That allows us to get an external view; we might otherwise become a bit myopic about our policy delivery and lose sight of elements of the sustainable development theme.

Given that we have that balance at the moment, the question remains of how to manage it. How many people do we need to progress things without ending up having a team auditing the auditors who are auditing the auditors and so on? I take the convener's point, but the question is about how to strike a balance between the number of people involved in monitoring a process that is already quite complex and the need not overly to burden it.

I was not suggesting more layers—or even four layers—of people. I suggest simply that the people who are doing the work should be able to see how their work adds to the whole and to track it. I leave that suggestion with the minister.

Although the convener has covered a number of the points that I was going to raise, I have one or two areas still to cover. I return to what Richard Lochhead said about the forestry debate, which I thought was quite a good issue to raise in the context of the housing announcement. In the plenary debate on forests, we heard that the forestry industry would be greatly helped as a result of the announcement. That said, I think that the issue was about not timber-framed but timber-clad houses. The issue of timber-clad houses is slightly different, given that we build timber-framed houses at the moment.

I attended a rural housing conference not long ago, at which it became apparent that the big problem was not the minister with responsibility for housing but the planners who do not give planning permission for timber-clad houses. Links to sustainable development need to be made through, for example, a new planning bill. I hope that the bill will include a provision that would lead planners to give more weight to sustainable development, the use of local materials and so on. That is just one example of a measure that could be applied in different parts of the country.

There is a big role for education and for enhancing people's knowledge and training not just in the Executive, but further down the chain. How, if at all, is that progressing?

I also want to ask the minister about procurement rules. What is the interface with Europe? How do the EU procurement regulations sit with our wish for sustainable procurement?

I will deal with the last part of the question first. Although it sits with sustainable procurement, procurement can cause a slight awkwardness in that the more one puts into a specification, the more difficult it is for people to meet that specification. We must also consider the budgetary consequences of elements that may be introduced into contracts.

The procurement rules are not necessarily the biggest impediment to sustainable procurement. The bigger constraint relates to the point that Maureen Macmillan made, which is the extent to which professionals in the building trade and industry, and planners and people in the architectural sphere are comfortable with the specification of materials. Those are the people who have genuinely to believe that materials are fit for purpose.

One of the issues about timber cladding is the lack of unity of belief that timber cladding is an appropriate material that is fit for purpose in certain climatic conditions. There is a difficulty in that and I cannot second-guess the architects' and other professions' views on that. Given that I have a son who is an architect, I have to be careful about doing so. If he were to hear me say anything of that sort, I might get a very bad time when I return home.

However, the issue is really about whether the Executive has taken a view on the use of such materials. The Forestry Commission has rightly said that it would be hugely helpful if we were to do so. At the same time, we must recognise that if planners and architects in certain areas do not believe that timber is the appropriate material for a job, they will not, on professional grounds, recommend the use of timber cladding.

As Rob Gibson or Richard Lochhead also mentioned, the broader thrust of the question is about education. I am in no doubt that, if we are to achieve a more general understanding of, concern about, belief in and buy-in to the sustainable development process, we must involve education in a major way. That debate is part of our discussions with the Minister for Education and Young People and others in further and higher education. We are engaging with them not only on management of their estates—which is a separate issue—but on how to achieve educational content that will lead to better understanding of sustainable development and therefore to greater receptiveness to it.

You have probably exhausted us after the debate on this issue and our discussion earlier this morning on the Water Services etc (Scotland) Bill. The committee will have to return to this and decide how we want to progress the matter thereafter. It would be useful if we had a sense of the work that is being done across Executive departments. It is easier to discuss sustainable development if we can discuss practical issues such as the links between housing, forestry and rural development, for example. The subject can become a bit airy-fairy if we look only at the overarching issue of sustainable development. It is nice if we can come up with some crunchy topics.

Although we do not produce a detailed analysis such as Richard Lochhead would like, I will see whether it will possible for us to produce something. I apologise in advance that it might have to be a summary, but we could give the committee an indication of connectivity between departments and policy elements. That might help the committee in developing its thinking.

That would be helpful in terms of best practice, as we are also looking at the issue in terms of climate change. A summary would give us a sense of how the Executive is doing things in practice. We recognise that the issue is subject to on-going work, both for the committee and the minister. However, I am still attracted to the idea of getting something that would provide more effective parliamentary scrutiny. We may need to return to the issue, so I will not seek your advice on that question, minister.

Absolutely not.

Thank you. We will let you depart.

Thank you.