By Gavin St Pier
THIS week is one of the few occasions when I’ve been fortunate enough to pen this column from the island in which it is printed, rather than the smaller island to the north-west where I am normally located.
I have been brought south by two events. One is the annual Crown Dependencies Network of parliamentarians from Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, about which I might write more in a future column. The second was an event hosted by the Jersey Audit Office, with the improbably appealing title ‘‘Embedding Long Term Sustainability into Decision Making’’. If time had permitted, I was tempted to try and squeeze in a ‘‘Sustainable Business Conference’’, also being held in Jersey this week at the L’Horizon.
‘‘Sustainability’’ is one of those phrases, like ‘‘affordable housing’’, that seems to be everywhere, and means different things to different people in different contexts. There are whole businesses, consultancies and careers built off the back of it. In a world of climate change conversation and net-zero strategies, plans and targets, many will associate ‘‘sustainability’’ with what David Cameron, when Prime Minister, infamously and regrettably described as ‘‘green crap’’.
‘‘Sustainable’’ has become a prefix for a whole range of topics. Quite apart from the environment and business, in politics we are faced with the challenges of developing ‘‘sustainable’’ systems of economic growth, finance, taxation, pensions, housing and healthcare, to name a few.
Given ‘‘sustainable’’ has become a prefix for so many topics, perhaps the best place to start is at the beginning. In 1987, the United Nations released a report, Our Common Future, commonly called the Brundtland Report, named after its principal author, the Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. Her definition was in the context of development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
That definition neatly encapsulates an aspiration of intergenerational equity in making good decisions that balance the interests of the present and future generations. Whilst it may be possible for the Chinese Communist Party to make political choices that extend ten, 20, 30 or more years out, a challenge, of course, in democratic political systems at least, is the electoral cycle turns over much shorter timeframes. It is for this reason that civil servants and those, such as the JAO, responsible for scrutinising government, are so attracted to the idea of somehow being able to get politicians to think and act in the long, not short, term. Policy makers themselves are conceptually attracted to this too, not only because they know it is a better way to make policy, but also because it gives them the best chance of leaving a political legacy if their decisions are embedded in the long term.
There are a number of mechanisms used to try to provide guard rails to help guide policy makers towards long-term policy making. The creation of a framework of ‘‘fiscal rules’’ is one technique, albeit the temptation – as Chancellor Rachel Reeves is finding ahead of her first Budget in two weeks – to tweak this when they become a tad inconvenient can become irresistible. An alternative, to try to prevent tinkering when rules become too constraining, is to impose a legislative requirement. For example, the UK’s 2008 Climate Change Act seeks to impose legally enforceable carbon reduction targets. The effectiveness of this route will depend on the extent to which the legislation contains legal sticks with which to beat someone. In other words, if the thing which ought to be done is not done, who can sue whom, or who could end up being punished for failing to do that which they should have done? However, taking legal action against any government is extremely time-consuming and ruinously costly. A response to that particular challenge is to try to create bodies that will keep governments honest to their legal commitments. The Climate Change Act created the independent Climate Change Committee to provide ‘‘advice’’ to the government. However, although the Climate Change Committee has become much respected, advice is just that, and the committee has found that its wise guidance is not always followed.
Wales took an innovative approach in 2015 with its Well-being of Future Generations Act. This imposes a legal requirement on public bodies to improve the social, cultural, environmental and economic well-being for current and future generations. The act also then created a role for a Future Generations Commissioner for Wales, as the guardian and overseer-in-chief for this legal requirement. For those who profess their admiration for small government, offices such as the commissioner’s are characterised as a fleas-on-fleas approach which leads to little more than a hopelessly bloated public sector. The point of such a route is not growth in government for its own sake, but rather to help change the culture of government decision making.
Jersey has an example of this legislative approach to intergenerational equity in government decision making, in its 2019 Public Finance Law. Among other things, this imposes a requirement when preparing the Government Plan, to “take into account the sustainable well-being (including the economic, social, environmental and cultural well-being) of the inhabitants of Jersey over successive generations”. ‘Take into account’’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. While it should drive policy that reflects the long-term needs of future generations, it could just as easily result in them being ignored, albeit consciously having taken them into account.
Imposing a legal requirement on decision makers to think about the future self-evidently ought to be unnecessary. But the very fact that is often used is proof that governments themselves know how hard it is to make good long-term plans. The JAO and others are to be commended for the work they do to shine a light on this challenge. But much of the responsibility lies with the electorate. Politicians cannot make any decisions if they do not get elected. If the voters keep telling them to focus more on today’s problems than tomorrow’s, then that is what they will do. In particular, so long as younger generations think that politics does not impact or interest them, leaving the already numerically larger older generations to vote in disproportionately greater numbers, then they really should not be surprised that their future needs play second fiddle to the present.
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Gavin St Pier is a Guernsey politician. He previously served as the president of the island’s Policy and Resources Committee
