And another thing…

In the first of his regular columns for Green Futures, Jonathon Porritt sniffs change in the air.

This government does love its targets! Despite ritual protestations that it is now going easy on setting any new ones, most policy areas are still awash with them.

To be fair, they are moving in the right direction. Targets for local government, for instance, have been reduced from more than 1,000 to fewer than 300!

Policy making on climate change has always suffered from a particularly persistent version of ‘targetitis’ – to the extent that some cynics believe that target setting is the one area of climate action where the UK government now has an unrivalled international lead. In that regard, it’s crowning glory is of course the new Climate Change Act, which has targets built into it by the basinful – statutory targets, what’s more.

Nobody is quite sure what it means for government ministers to be bound by statutory targets – rather than ones in a manifesto or a formal strategy. Say they fail to meet the targets for the first five-year budget period (20080-2012): everyone will get very cross, and Greenpeace (being the crossest of all) will feel obliged to haul them into the courts. The judge will then listen to their excuses, confirm their heinous failings, probably get a bit cross too, and then… well, nobody quite knows what happens next.

But this is a bit churlish. The truth of it is that the UK government is the first to introduce such an Act, and the first to have agreed to a target of reducing greenhouse gases by at least 80% by 2050. What’s more, this whole approach has been endorsed by the main opposition parties, to a certain extent ‘proofing’ it against party political shenanigans in the future.

And we are already seeing the fruits of that. One thing the Act does is to set up the Committee on Climate Change, which delivered its first official Report on 1 December. This is a Committee with serious clout (though that will inevitably be diminished now that its first Chair, the redoubtable Adair Turner, has moved onto that bed-of-nails from hell, the Financial Standards Authority). And it’s a Committee that does targets like no other committee has done before.

It does targets for CO2 and non-CO2 gases. It does interim targets and final targets, short-term targets and long-term targets. It does emissions targets and offset targets. It does sectoral targets and technology targets. It does EU-wide and UK-specific targets. Its report is, in short, target heaven. The target-setting policy community will be bathed in the sheer glory of it all, and our clear lead in this territory will remain unrivalled for years to come.

What happens next is interesting. Ed Miliband (who has made an extremely impressive start as secretary of state in the new Department of Energy and Climate Change), will deliberate on the Committee’s recommendations, will determine what the statutory targets should be for the first three five-year budget periods (2008-2012, 2013-2017, 2018-2022), and will then seek parliament’s approval. And that’s when the real work starts.

It all comes down to the usual combination of money and political will. On money, there doesn’t seem to be much room for manoeuvre, now that the government has squandered more than £9 billion on a VAT giveaway in the forlorn hope of getting people out there shopping again. Anything less than £1 billion of absolutely new money will be seen as tokenism.

Which brings us on to political will. With Mandelson now a born-again enthusiast for manufacturing and some kind of “green industrial revolution” (as well as the Post Office!), with the brothers Miliband on a low-carbon crusade all over the world, with Balls and Johnson dead set on decarbonising education and health, respectively, and Blears and Beckett sort of up-for-it in the muddled world of Communities and Local Government, exactly who in the Cabinet is not onboard? Not the chancellor, surely? Not the prime minister, even more surely? Which is why I remain quite optimistic – despite, not because of, all those wretched targets.

Jonathon Porritt is founder director of Forum for the Future and chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission. His book ‘Capitalism as if the World Matters’ (Earthscan, 2007) is available from www.forumforthefuture.org. Read his blog at www.jonathonporritt.com

15 January 2009

Jonathon Porritt

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