I went to a presentation tonight by John Gummer, Conservative MP, chairman of their new “Quality of Life” policy group, and hamburger-lover.1 It was part of the Linacre Lecture series on environmental governance and specifically he spoke about joined-up government, which coincidentally I just finished writing a paper about (shameless plug, I know).
It was a good talk with no Powerpoint to get in the way of his message that most government instititions are not aligned in such a way as to make damaging the environment “very difficult”. In other words, the lazy or failsafe option is often more environmentally-damaging than a simple alternative. He pointed out that having czars or other forms of direct leadership can sometimes help overcome these barriers in the short term but in the long run, there needs to be institutional change.
This left me wondering about role for strong leadership in implementing joined-up government. Taking a simple example, I noted that there are a number of potentially conflicting goals within energy policy; for example, between free markets on the one hand and reducing carbon emissions on the other. I argued that at the moment government might be said to be joined-up in favour of the free markets angle without consideration for these other factors. Therefore if, as Mr. Gummer suggested, the driver of all policies must now be climate change, who will provide the leadership to redress the balance?
The answer was two part. Generally, he noted that recent concern about future security of supply, for example, meant that the other dimensions of energy policy were rising up the agenda quickly. However he suggested that government wants an easy answer: cue a great impression of a macho prime minister saying we have to be tough, swallow our medicine, and have nuclear power. Behind the light relief though was a recognition that the time horizons of political, business and individual decision making are often too short to favour climate change and other long-term concerns. There may not be an easy solution for this problem but he did suggest that a cross-party consensus on difficult policy issues (like climate change and energy policy) might at least remove some of the political risk involved in making these decisions.
During the rest of the question session, things came a little bit less structured and some of his earlier statements about the climate being an absolute priority were tempered with concerns about maintaining an enjoyable quality of life and a detour about the price of first-class train tickets. Overall, it was a really enjoyable talk and I’ll be very interested to see what the quality of life think tank comes up with.
1 The power of Google. I’d heard of this incident before but didn’t realize it was him until now…
