09 February 2007
Whitehall foot-dragging over green issues in local government is a 'complete disgrace', the chair of the government's environmental watchdog has said.
Sir Jonathon Porritt told the CIPFA sustainability conference on February 6 there were 'big question marks' over the government's handling of sustainable procurement policy.
'At the moment they are being a bit wobbly about what they should and shouldn't tell local authorities to do around procurement,' said Porritt, who chairs the Sustainable Development Commission. 'In other words, they are using the decentralisation debate as a pathetic excuse not to mandate minimum standards of procurement at a local level.'
The same reluctance was evident between the Audit Commission and Department for Communities and Local Government, he said. Embedding environmental sustainability into the local government performance framework would concentrate minds locally, but 'argie-bargie' between the two organisations had prevented that.
'There's been sort of like a game of badminton where the Audit Commission says: “Oh no, we can't put it in the Comprehensive Performance Assessment because the DCLG hasn't instructed us to put it in,” while the DCLG says: “The commission largely determines its own priorities and we don't have any right to instruct them”. This goes on and it's a complete disgrace,' said Porritt.
Gareth Davies, the commission's interim managing director for local government and housing, told Public Finance that a new 'comprehensive area assessment' described in the Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill would 'need to increase the focus on action to deliver sustainable development and address climate change at a local level'.
The DCLG will soon start consultation on the new framework.
Yet performance assessment was only part of the solution, the conference heard, and Porritt urged the accountancy profession to engage with the work CIPFA was doing through the Prince of Wales' Accounting for Sustainability Group to take proper account of the environmental impact of activities in both the public and private sector.
'It shocks the life out of private partners when you show them what their profits would look like once you subtract from them the cost of depreciating or destroying the natural environment,' he said.
Ray Morgan, chief executive of Woking Borough Council, complained that many financial directors' accounting processes were 'asleep' to the climate change issue. Woking, a 'beacon' authority in sustainable development, also found that central government and the Treasury 'stop progress happening' by disallowing the extra cost of green service provision in procurement deals.
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