Environment and Rural Development Committee, 21 Jun 2006
Meeting date: Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Official Report
176KB pdf
Sustainable Development
We move to item 3. My suggestion is that we cannot address the issue of sustainable development properly today as we are running about 45 minutes late. I know from the body language of colleagues that everyone has other events to attend, but I do not want to curtail our consideration of the policy that underpins sustainable development.
Minister, I do not know how short your opening statement might be—you have already given us some welcome pointers on what the Executive is beginning to do on training and high-level policy discussions—but we have an excellent paper from the Scottish Parliament information centre on some of the key policy areas that we want to follow up. Would it be possible simply to highlight those issues to you just now and give you the chance to respond to us in writing on all of those?
We certainly want to follow up the issue of sustainable development in our legacy paper for the next parliamentary session, but I am conscious that we cannot do the issue justice today. I am happy to let you make some opening remarks but, rather than have a proper committee discussion on the topics today, I am tempted simply to send you a set of questions. We can always come back to the issue and elaborate on it, but I suggest that we handle things that way today. Would that be acceptable?
I certainly share your view that going beyond 1.10 is unsustainable.
In that case, you have 45 seconds. I have never heard you make a speech in 45 seconds before.
I know, but I am prepared to change the habits of a lifetime.
There are two serious issues. If we are to ensure that the sustainable development programme is embedded, we need to ensure that we target certain key issues. I suspect that that is also the thinking in the committee's paper.
Although there has been a welcome focus on sustainability in the breadth of the committee's work and increasingly in responses from across the Executive and from other public bodies, I am under no illusion about the challenges of trying to embed principles of sustainable development right across the public sector and, more widely, throughout the private sector. The Executive, the committee, the whole Parliament and all the institutions must be actively engaged in that process. I welcome the committee's intention to list the areas in which we are implementing that principle, but I also want to engage with the committee to extend and broaden the range of people who are driving in the same direction across civic Scotland.
I suggest that we timetable a discussion with you after the summer recess. We are particularly interested in the implementation plan for the sustainable development strategy and we are keen on examining the work that you are doing on staff training on sustainable development. We are particularly keen to consider the whole issue of how sustainable development is addressed in policy memoranda for bills; we think that that is not being done consistently across the Executive and that the issue requires some attention.
We are interested in the work of the Cabinet sub-committee, which we might want to put on the agenda for a follow-up meeting with you. We are interested in how you select issues for discussion, in the whole process of reporting back to you, and in how the Cabinet sub-committee works to support different members of the Cabinet in embedding sustainable development in all their policies and programmes, with a particular view to the next spending review and to how that is being anticipated and developed.
We are also keen to consider how we might improve our parliamentary engagement with your sustainable development work. In our follow-up discussion, we would be interested in considering what international examples you think could be followed in Scotland and what positive lessons might be learned for the future, so that the Parliament can engage more effectively with the Executive. We want to put a series of broad policy questions to you, and if you are prepared to write back to us on all those issues, that will allow us to have an effective discussion when we return after the recess. If we timetable an early discussion, it will give us time over the summer to think about some of those issues.
That sounds like a constructive way of proceeding. I have no disagreement at all with your suggestions. The interplay between the Cabinet sub-committee, your committee and wider Government interests will allow us to get there eventually.
I will invite my colleagues to add any further questions that they may have for the minister to those that we have already listed. Questions should be e-mailed to me in the next couple of days, and we will ensure that they are sent to the minister so that we can get a response at some time during the summer. Then we can return to the issue and have a wider public discussion at a committee meeting after the recess.
I am happy to engage with you on that basis.
Thank you for attending the committee today. I hope that you will be happy to stay with us for a few seconds while we deal with item 4.