Oral evidence: The Sustainable Development Goals in the UK, HC 596
Tuesday 15 November 2016
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 15 November 2016.
Members present: Mary Creagh (Chair); Peter Aldous; Geraint Davies; Glyn Davies; Caroline Lucas; Dr Matthew Offord.
Questions 1 - 60
Witnesses
Abigail Self, Head of Sustainable Development Goals, Office for National Statistics, Dr Graham Long, Senior Lecturer, Newcastle University, and Elizabeth Stuart, Head of Programme, Sustainable Development Goals, Overseas Development Institute.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Office for National Statistics
– Overseas Development Institute
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Abigail Self, Dr Graham Long and Elizabeth Stuart.
Q1 Chair: I would like to welcome our first panel to the beginning of our inquiry into the sustainable development goals. I would like to welcome, from left to right, Abigail Self, Head of Sustainable Development Goals at the Office for National Statistics, Elizabeth Stuart, Head of Programme for the Sustainable Development Goals at the Overseas Development Institute, and Dr Graham Long, Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University. Thank you very much for taking the trouble and making the trip to be with us this morning.
Perhaps I could begin by asking each of you about the applicability in the UK. Obviously some of these indicators and goals we already meet but, as we know, there are always a number of areas where we can improve. To what extent do you think the Government could identify which of the SDGs require urgent action and should therefore be prioritised? Which of these 17 goals do you think we are currently missing?
Graham, I know that you said we don't have indicators for 10 and 16, but is that necessarily a problem? Does the fact that we are missing indicators in those areas mean we are falling behind, or are we doing fine on those indicators and don’t need to worry too much? It is a bit of a chicken and egg question. Who would like to go first? Graham, we will hear from you first, seeing as I have picked you out, and then maybe we will move on to Elizabeth.
Dr Long: That is a big question. One priority is to make sure you get a good measurement framework set up, and the question of what it is a priority to measure might be separable from the question of what is the priority to do, and it looks like the former should precede the latter. I would not necessarily talk about priority goals so much as targets. I think you can identify targets that are clearly applicable to the UK and where current available data for the UK indicates a job to be done.
You can identify some where your level of ambition in the SDGs has been met, and you would think it might be a good idea to meet the level of ambition, although that could vary with national circumstances. There are cases where the level of ambition is largely met, but there is a question about marginalised and disadvantaged groups and groups that are especially affected.
Then there are other ones where the SDGs prompt very big questions. I am not sure that they have entirely nailed the answers to the definition of sustainability and those kinds of very big questions, or how you decouple economic growth from environmental degradation and those sorts of things. I think it prompts not necessarily immediate action, but an immediate discussion of what the right action should look like.
Elizabeth Stuart: If the premise of your question is: should the UK be attempting to take on the whole of the SDG agenda, the answer is definitely yes. It is a universal agenda, as you know, so it is applicable to all countries and the UK signed it as a domestic obligation as well as an international obligation through its development co-operation.
You can make the argument for most countries that are middle income and up, and certainly all OECD countries, that in lots of cases they will already be meeting targets. I would also remind you that—this might be a slightly unpopular message—Amina Mohammed, who was the special adviser to the UN Secretary-General while the SDGs were being negotiated, kept making the point that the SDGs are a floor rather than a ceiling, so just because we have met them does not mean that we should think, “Job done”.
There are clearly some areas—I am going to talk about policy delivery rather than the measurement issue—that obviously the UK needs to make progress on to be able to meet the SDGs. For me, the obvious areas would be: goal 10, on inequality; and goal 7, on renewables. The UK has been doing very well on renewables but, with the removal of the subsidy to the solar industry, I think that is an area of potential concern. On Goal 3, which is on nutrition, clearly there are issues around obesity. Goal 5, which is on gender equality, might be of less direct interest to this Committee, but I think it is still relevant if we are thinking about this holistically. Then clearly sustainable consumption and production—goal 12—are the areas that I think the UK would need to prioritise and make progress on.
Abigail Self: Broadly speaking, the SDG agenda is about leaving no one behind and meeting the needs of the most disadvantaged and the most vulnerable in society. There is a focus on inequalities, so each indicator needs to be disaggregated in eight ways; so by age, sex, ethnic group. This is very relevant to the UK, and certainly in the PM’s latest speech—as we have talked about—we are just about managing grouping in the race audit, which is all about inequalities.
Elizabeth has mentioned several goals. I would certainly support goal 10, which is to reduce inequalities. That is a whole goal dedicated to inequalities, but inequalities are also a thread running through the entire set. It is also worth remembering that this is very much work in progress, so it is very difficult without the data yet to talk about establishing a national set of indicators, which the ONS are currently working on. It is difficult to say what the Government should focus on apart from the general interest in inequalities.
Q2 Chair: You will obviously be the keeper of the statistics. What work have you done? You have this autumn consultation. Has that happened? What responses have you had?
Abigail Self: No. The autumn consultation will be launched on 29 November and will run—
Chair: So the winter consultation.
Abigail Self: Absolutely, yes. It will run for 12 weeks, but to get to this point we have spoken to Government Departments to try to assess how current single departmental plans align with the global indicators and also, where they don’t align, what suggestions there are for what national indicators we should have. We have also conducted a similar exercise with non-Government stakeholders. Pulling all that information together, we are proposing a draft set and putting that out for consultation.
Q3 Chair: Which Department are you accountable to? Is it the Cabinet Office?
Abigail Self: We work very closely with the Cabinet Office and DfID on this agenda. DfID is responsible for the implementation, with support from the Cabinet Office at the policy level, and the ONS is responsible for the data collection, development and reporting.
Q4 Chair: What about the issue of universality and leaving nobody behind? Obviously there may be goals where superficially we look like we are meeting them but actually, within certain parts of the country or certain age groups, there may be terrible hidden pockets where we are not meeting them. Could you expand a little bit on that?
Abigail Self: This will be borne out in the disaggregation of each indicator into these groups. This is where the biggest challenge is, because often there is no data. Those groups are very small and often there is insufficient data to monitor them, but what the SDG does come with is a real opportunity. It is supposed to be underpinned by a data revolution, which is about collecting data from sources that you would not have considered before. It is about joining sources together, official and non-official, in different ways that have never been done before. ONS has established a data science campus, which is set up to do just that.
Q5 Chair: Where is that?
Abigail Self: It is based in the ONS offices in Newport.
Q6 Chair: Tell us a little bit about the unofficial sources. What sort of challenges are there? Can you give us an example of who and what they are, and what challenges they present when they are perhaps triangulated with official data?
Abigail Self: I don’t have the details on specifics, but there is certainly an appetite among non-Government organisations to contribute to this agenda with data. The main challenge will be the quality, so we are looking into whether we can develop perhaps a toolkit that will help assess the quality of data from non-official sources. But this is very much a journey. The SDGs are a 15-year agenda and we are at the very beginning of this data development, so it is more about the opportunity that it provides.
Q7 Chair: Do any of the other witnesses wish to say anything on that data revolution?
Elizabeth Stuart: Just to add that it is a challenge in this country. This is a universal challenge for SDGs and it is even more of a challenge in developing countries with less advanced statistical systems. Clearly, I think there is a role for the UK to play, in terms of developing some of the methodologies here, and then capacity building in developing countries. The kitemarking system that Abigail was referring to, whereby you can take good-enough data that may not be perfect—let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. It is better to be able to measure something, as long as we are aware of the deficiencies and that there is transparency if data is missing X, Y and Z. It can still be used to give us a picture, which is better than knowing nothing. Something else that might be one of the solutions is over-sampling, but that obviously covers a cost as well.
Dr Long: This is not specifically on the data revolution, but we have to be a bit careful here. It is very common to think that the relevance for developed countries lies with gender equality and finishing the job, and sustainable consumption and production. Actually, if you look at the targets and the indicators across all of the goals, there are 60 or 70 places where either the target sets a very specific ambition that is UK relevant, or else it prompts something very valuable. It is not just obesity, for example, but under-nourishment in Britain. You are talking about hidden pockets. I think there are some not-so-hidden pockets. Certainly, the hidden pockets can be very hard to get to, but think there are some less hidden pockets; there clearly is a potential issue among the elderly, for example, of under-nourishment rather than obesity. There is a whole range of cases where the “leave no one behind” idea is very relevant.
Q8 Geraint Davies: Obviously there is a whole series of metrics. It has been useful to point out that there is an overarching inequality issue, but in terms of what success looks like, it would be possible for the Government and wider civic society to make some progress on low-hanging fruit that are not very important, and then miss the big one and say, “Look, we have done very well.” I was wondering how people felt about that. It seems to be very difficult to judge success and very easy to make out that you have been successful when in fact you haven’t been. I don't know whether Abigail wants to start.
Abigail Self: As I said earlier, we are at the very beginning of this. I certainly think there is capacity to identify the low-hanging fruit, and one of ONS’s first jobs will be to establish a baseline of the data that exists, both for the UK data for global indicators, and also what should our national indicators be and what data exists for that. We have not done that yet, but I think it is possible to do that, and I would hope that out of that comes a prioritisation process for where we should look next.
Elizabeth Stuart: To add to that if I may, it is a very relevant question and we know under the MDGs, although there were startling successes in some areas—poverty reduction and increasing the number of children in schools, for instance—they tended to be the still poor, the multi-dimensionally poor, but still the relatively better off who were making the progress. For instance, between 1988 and 2008, globally the bottom 5% of the income distribution made no progress at all on poverty reduction. That is very much the question. It is about disaggregating, stopping looking at averages and looking at the extremes and about then closing those gaps, and that being the story that we need to keep telling.
Dr Long: The SDGs offer some very clear standards in a few cases, but also over the medium term they offer the prospect of an increasingly firm set of standards by which you judge who is cherry-picking and who is prioritising legitimately, who is doing just enough and who is doing more than just enough. That is an agenda that needs some work. Potentially that is the SDG’s role in an accountability framework here. They seem to offer some kind of standards against which you look like you are on track to meet them, or you have to come up with a good explanation of why you are not meeting them or why you are not choosing to adopt a particular target, so I think in the short and medium term there is an accountability agenda in the SDGs as well.
Q9 Chair: I want to come back to Abigail. We understand that you may not be including the Overseas Territories in your reporting. What are the advantages and disadvantages of that approach, or have you not decided?
Abigail Self: It is more the case that our priority to begin with has just been mainland UK and the four constituent countries. It is not to say that the Overseas Territories will not be included; it is just that they are not our priority at the moment. But as this agenda moves forward we are more than happy to consider what comes in via that route.
Q10 Chair: As an organisation, are you working with other countries? Are you part of a European network or a global network looking at this?
Abigail Self: There are various different groups. Through Eurostat we are part of a group on SDGs. There is a group about sustainable development indicators. We also have links with a regional group that is represented on the Inter-agency and Expert Group. We are very much in touch with different countries and different countries’ working groups for different things. We are also developing an online tool and we are part of the UN expert group on data platforms.
Chair: Thank you. That is very helpful.
Q11 Peter Aldous: The Government said that aspects of the SDG agenda were already covered in the Conservative party’s manifesto last year. In other words, they are already doing them. I would welcome your views on that. Also, how will the new goals help the UK to improve its performance on sustainable development above and beyond what we are already doing? I would welcome your perspectives on those issues.
Abigail Self: It is fair to say that there are aspects that are represented in single departmental plans, purely because the sustainable development goals cover pretty much everything anyway. They cover things on hunger, on education, on employment, on environment, and they very much embody the three pillars associated with progress, which are about making not just economic progress, but social progress and environmental progress. Inevitably there will be aspects of that that are in those single departmental plans and, again, we have already talked about inequality, so they will be in there as well.
Q12 Peter Aldous: Is there perhaps too much of a silo mentality, not pulling together and properly integrating it into overall Government policy?
Abigail Self: That is a difficult question to answer. From the work that we have done so far, looking at the single departmental plans and work with Departments, and also the non-Government stakeholders, about three-quarters of the global indicators are relevant to the UK and are reflected in some way. But the key is very much “in some way”, so there will be some that are very clearly met and others that are partially met. Then it gets very complicated.
Q13 Peter Aldous: Do you have examples of ones that are only partially met or where we could be doing better?
Abigail Self: Off the top of my head, I don’t know. I have a list that I can run through. I don't know if the others would like to answer the question and I will come back, or do you have the answer, Graham?
Dr Long: Yes, I have a list that might be too long—it took 25 minutes. It is: relative multi-dimensional poverty, substandard housing, air pollution, sustainable agriculture, water stress, suicide, non-communicable disease mortality, energy efficiency, fossil fuel subsidies—
Q14 Peter Aldous: The list goes on.
Dr Long: Yes. There is plenty there. Some of this is covered already in the Conservative party manifesto and departmental plans. It is a very interesting exercise and something I hope to do in future is look at those against the SDGs. Policy mapping is a very important part of this as well. It would be very interesting to see whether the level of ambition is slightly different, which of those should be the right ones, which ones are thoroughly covered, which are not so thoroughly covered. There are some interesting questions to examine.
Elizabeth Stuart: Again, we keep coming back to this, but the “leave no one behind” agenda, which as Abigail has said is in goal 10, explicitly refers to some of the goal areas, but it is implicitly threaded throughout the goal areas. It is about the sort of group-based analysis: how are older people, younger people, ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities doing, and what about the disabled, and rural/urban split? That is explicitly a perspective that has not been picked up in the single departmental plan.
Q15 Peter Aldous: Moving on, I would welcome your views and guidance as to how Parliament, and indeed this Committee, might best use the SDG framework to scrutinise and hold the Government to account on their efforts on sustainable development.
Abigail Self: From the ONS point of view, it will be providing the data, so you will be able to see where the gaps are, and I would hope that the national indicators will be able to determine some priorities on how well we are doing in those areas. Possibly that is a question for DfID on the implementation on policy.
Elizabeth Stuart: A methodology that we are looking at in developing countries—I think it is relevant universally—is this idea of a stepping-stone approach. It is a 15-year agenda, but clearly if you leave everything to the last five years, it becomes much more difficult to achieve the goals, and it also means you are leaving it to future Administrations. We have done some projections in low-income countries in sub-Saharan African showing the cost of delay. It is a bit like paying into a pension. The longer you leave it, the more and more difficult it gets across lots of these different goal areas.
The idea of a stepping-stone target is not only that you could have interim targets every three to five years to match the length of an Administration, but also you could focus on closing the gaps. Explicitly it is not just about the headline progress. It is about whether you are making sure of this commitment to fast-track action among the people who have benefited least from any kind of progress, and whether progress is accelerated among those groups most quickly.
Q16 Peter Aldous: Right. When we have Government Ministers in front of us, we ought to be encouraging them to put down these stepping stones, and in perhaps a couple of years’ time call them back to see how they are getting on.
Elizabeth Stuart: Absolutely, yes.
Dr Long: You should also be looking at how the stepping stones map on to the ambition of the SDGs and where they exceed or where they fall underneath. The Committee structure in the UK Parliament is in some ways a model of how this is being done effectively, with a series of Committees looking at different aspects, some crosscutting, some individual, some issue by issue—I welcome the Women and Equalities Committee inquiry. There is scope for more of those if there is an appetite. They are a resource for scrutiny. They are not perfect as a resource for scrutiny—it is not always easy because there is a level of national implementation and a level of national response that you have to assess against this—but they are a model of scrutiny and also a model of deliberation on what the right targets would be to set, which are both important jobs for Parliament.
Q17 Peter Aldous: Abigail, I have a specific question for the ONS. You stopped publishing the sustainable development indicators. When you did that you said, “This publication has been stopped after user consultation revealed limited engagement”. I want a bit more background information on that decision. Were you very disappointed and, in view of the way things have gone, do you think perhaps you should have stood back, reviewed the way you were approaching it and put a revised model in place?
Abigail Self: We inherited the sustainable development indicators from DEFRA, which had the policy lead. It had been running for some time and there was some confusion, as the SDIs covered various different areas as well as the environment. National well-being came along, which the ONS also led on, again looking at progress in the UK across 10 domains—health, education, employment and so on. Looking at who was looking at the data we published, there was very limited take-up and, with the advent of the sustainable development goals, it was widely felt that the sustainable development goals agenda met what DEFRA’s policy was trying to do but took it to the next level. All the data for the SDIs was pulled together from existing sources and those sources still exist, so if somebody wanted to they could still get those indicators. Another reason was that we would stop spending effort in that area, but you could still access that data, and we would invest that effort in the sustainable development goals and try to make sense of these various different overlapping initiatives.
Q18 Peter Aldous: Finally, to what extent do you feel that the SDG framework can empower civil society and the general public generally to hold the Government to account on sustainable development issues? As we pursue those SD goals, it is not just Government; it is all of us together. How can we get that movement going; get it running?
Elizabeth Stuart: That is absolutely the case that it is about civil society, the private sector, academia—all different parts of society—and different Governments approach this in different ways. The Finnish Government, for instance, have developed a tool whereby everyone can track their contribution. They are openly invited to list their contributions to the SDG. This is an open access tool so everyone can see, at the level of the school or sub-national governments, political parties; everybody is invited to participate in it.
Q19 Peter Aldous: Do they participate?
Elizabeth Stuart: Yes. It is a newish tool but they are starting to make use of it. That is a very interesting way to talk about engagement. I am very pleased to hear that the ONS consultations are happening. Again, this is about getting people involved in a conversation and thinking through how we prioritise these nationally.
I was just speaking last week at Norad. The Norwegian Development Ministry has had a series of public consultations and discussions with civil society and the general public to get them to think about SDGs and what they mean nationally. In Germany they are turning Bonn into the city of sustainable development. They are trying to promote a feeling of national ownership of this as an issue, so there are various different ways that the SDGs can be used as a vehicle. We know that they are not binding and the theory of change is it is going to be accountability processes, both parliamentary ones and civil society informal accountability processes that are going to ensure that they are delivered. That is the theory of change for the SDGs.
Dr Long: I agree with all of that. Just to add to it, there are some stipulations in paragraph 74 of the goals document itself about the kinds of review structures that countries should have, and that there should be a national review mechanism that is open, inclusive and participatory. There may be things that slowly this Committee and Parliament might do to encourage a scrutiny process, especially this idea of leaving nobody behind and the participation of the poorest, the most vulnerable and the most marginalised. It is the kind of thing that Parliament can directly empower in some ways.
Thinking about the silo point again, I am not clear how big a problem it is. If people see issues that matter in their lives and they are SDG issues but they do not necessarily know which goal and target and indicator it is, it is a question about how deep the knowledge of the SDG framework has to go for the issues themselves to be important to people.
Abigail Self: Can I add to that? Elizabeth mentioned the consultation, which is essentially to engage the wider public and give them a chance to feed in and then the national indicators will have more legitimacy. I referred earlier to the work that we have done with the UK stakeholders of sustainable development, which are non-governmental organisations. There is a huge appetite there to feed into this agenda. Thirdly, I think the way that we disseminate the data and report on that data will also be key to engagement, and ONS is developing an online tool with that in mind.
Chair: We, the Committee, are having a youth engagement event in Birmingham next Thursday, so watch this space.
Q20 Caroline Lucas: That leads on very nicely to my concern, which is about how we communicate all of this, how we breathe life into it, how we make it engaging and realistic for people more broadly in society, not just some abstract set of figures, and whether or not there are things we could learn from the Agenda 21 process, flawed though it was. My overarching question then—you have touched on it—is whether you can say any more about the best ways to communicate this agenda, and UK progress towards it, to the wider public so that it becomes something that is alive, rather than a dead set of statistics that most people don’t know about.
Elizabeth Stuart: Again, looking at some models globally where this has started to work—and I know this was an area of concern: are there too many goals? Does that mean that you cannot communicate this as an agenda, whereas the NDGs famously could fit on a card that would fit in your pocket? I don't know many people who could recite the NDGs—even people working on them—so I am not sure that the number of goals is going to be the thing that stops us being able to communicate it.
In this country it has just not been part of the national dialogue; nobody has heard of them. They are some sort of unknown thing. Maybe when they were being negotiated people were aware of Beyoncé concerts but not really much beyond that. There are different techniques. I think it is very important to have Parliaments starting to talk about them. Maybe it is about a Department creating a TV ad around them. Maybe it is a poster advertising campaign.
There is also Project Everyone, which is a civil society small grouping of focused people. Richard Curtis, the film director who has been doing a lot to publicise and promote the SDGs, has a roster of celebrities who want to talk about the SDGs. They are interested in talking specifically about leaving no one behind. I am thinking about some of the classic NGO techniques for popularising and socialising something that could otherwise appear to be a dull, bureaucratic framework, and talking about how it is relevant to people’s lives. There are ways of doing it, but the first thing is to make them known. Nobody has heard of them yet. The Norwegians have a lovely TV ad that I think is very inspiring.
Q21 Caroline Lucas: That was my next question: is it helpful to look at what other countries are doing and try to bring that into the debate?
Elizabeth Stuart: Yes. Again, I think I am right in saying that lots of the intellectual property for the advertising campaigns and the films is all open-use, open-source and open-access, so I think lots of this has been done already and can be borrowed cheaply and easily.
Dr Long: All of that is true, but it is worth advertising some of the features behind the details of the goals themselves. “Leave no one behind” is a very potent idea. It is the closest that the goals have got to a slogan. It is important that that is front and centre. The idea that these goals are interconnected, that the issues are linked, is something we would not want anyone to miss. The idea that they are universal is also something that we would not want people to miss, because that is where the transformative power of the framework lies, quite apart from the details of the particular goals and targets.
Elizabeth Stuart: To add one thing to that. I think that, particularly where there is a focus now for obvious reasons on people who are feeling voiceless, people who are feeling marginalised and left out by progress, communicating that we don’t have all the solutions already but that there is an analytical and political framework for thinking about, legitimising and outing these issues, is a helpful way to frame those discussions.
Dr Long: There is something else off the back of that. Popular participation is a very strong thread running through the goals. You see it in lots of different target areas. It is one area where there could be a genuine change. That would fulfil the goals themselves and also promote the goals to have that broader participatory component across lots of different areas, so that people are more aware of that, at local level, city level, to Government and beyond.
Abigail Self: I wholeheartedly agree with the socialisation and promotion of the agenda more widely. I want to clarify ONS’s role. ONS is responsible for reporting annually the data for the global indicators to the UN, and we will make that publicly available. The same is true for the national indicators; we will make that data available. It is very much part of what we do to find out from users how they would like that information disseminated.
There are also various ways in which you can do that, so at a very minimum we will provide a tool where you can interrogate for each goal and for each indicator what data exists with some supporting charts and tables. Also, ONS has various different digital communication channels now, so breaking things down, providing commentary on areas of interest, and we continue the work we have done with the national well-being agenda, which has very much had the public and users at its heart, as to how they would like to receive that information.
Q22 Caroline Lucas: Elizabeth, do you want to say any more about the SDG scorecard—or have you covered that?—as a similar tool to promote and make the information more widely available?
Elizabeth Stuart: Yes, certainly. We have done—it was part of the written evidence that was submitted to you—a piece of global analytical work. It was an attempt to assess the scale of the challenge. It was across each of the 17 goal areas projecting data forward—it depends, but in most cases it was over the past 15 years—and assuming, ceteris paribus, which of course is a huge assumption, showing how near or how far the world is from being able to reach that goal by 2030 and are you on track or not. It showed that there are five goal areas where globally we are farthest away from reaching the goals, and they are the environmental ones other than biodiversity, cities and goal 10 on inequalities.
It would be a very interesting exercise to do the same thing for the UK. This was useful as a tool to start thinking about the SDGs and what needs to be done to start getting into the agenda having signed them. This becomes a really useful analytical exercise when you do it. We have done it regionally but to do it at a national level, and then again it is a very clear way of showing prioritisation: where are the biggest gaps?
Q23 Caroline Lucas: That feeds into my last question, which was whether there would be a benefit in adopting a set of headline indicators. Obviously there are downsides too, but from what you are saying it sounds to me as though you are saying that just as the global process will be looking at those areas where we are furthest away from meeting the goals, maybe it would be useful to do that at the UK level too.
Elizabeth Stuart: It is useful in the “canary in the headlamp” kind of way, in that you would not want that to be the totality of what is being monitored, but if you take an indicator per goal you can see whether you are off track or on track. Then you would have to be careful about the indicator that you have used. We have been rightly critiqued for the methodology. It has been driven by the data that has been available, but if we are looking at biodiversity, for instance—I alluded to this earlier—the idea that that is represented by halting deforestation or looking at sustainable consumption and production, you are looking at waste and that is a very partial picture. If you have the data to look at targets that are more broadly indicative of the spirit of the goal area as a whole, it is a useful exercise, again, as part of monitoring, but you would not want to just be looking at that.
Q24 Caroline Lucas: Would you both agree that having some headline indicators is the right way forward?
Abigail Self: From ONS’s point of view, we are not terribly supportive of headline indicators. We acknowledge that they are very useful as a means of communication but, for the reasons Elizabeth has talked about, they can be quite a dangerous way of looking at things because of the things that you miss. First of all, which headline indicator do you choose and why do you choose that one over another one? Also, if you choose an indicator that is some sort of aggregation of others, it may give you an average answer, but it will not tell you where to look for where to divert resources to make real progress. We acknowledge that they are a good communications tool, but they are not terribly helpful in helping you assess where your resources are best spent.
Dr Long: I agree. Getting a set of headline indicators is itself an exercise in policy formation. It says, “These are the things that are most important that we want to measure, and these are what we are going to boil these goals down to.” In a way, that pre-empts a debate. I would not want the headline indicators to pre-empt the debate about what the right bits are to focus on, and how to keep the big picture in mind at the same point in time as identifying the little bits that need doing. I think we can look elsewhere where they have, ever so slightly, even in some European countries, and I think that is just not ideal in terms of getting to grips with the agenda.
Abigail Self: The UN was very clear that all goals should be given equal priority and they were very cautious about countries cherry-picking. They put in place a four-year review by the UN Economic and Social Council, which is country-led and voluntary but nevertheless within the spirit of the SDGs, so each country will be reviewed every four years on the progress it is making against what we have committed to in the resolution.
Elizabeth Stuart: If you wanted to look at a certain area such as “leave no one behind”, it is not the totality of what you are looking at, but again if something is going wrong in some of these indicators alarm bells would need to start ringing that you are going off track. There is a methodology that has been developed for doing this globally.
Q25 Chair: What is the date for the review by the UN’s Economic and Social Council?
Abigail Self: There aren’t any dates set. Each country is to volunteer when it is ready. As I said, it is country-led and voluntary. They are anticipated every four years but no dates are set.
Chair: Thank you. That is helpful.
Q26 Geraint Davies: I want to ask a general question about the quality of the goals as indicators. As you will know, there are 17 goals, 169 targets and 231 indicators, and it has been said that these goals should be specific, manageable, attainable, relevant, time-bound and easy to communicate. I was wondering whether in the round you felt that they were. Clearly, there is a lot going on and there is an issue about wood and trees and, once you have the quality of the data, then it is a value judgment about what are important. Abigail and others have mentioned the problem of cherry-picking.
Could you answer the question about the quality of the factual framework to record it? There is also this issue about cherry-picking versus, as it were, sour grapes. What should we be looking for as a problem to highlight, as opposed to saying that everything is all right? Perhaps you could respond to those few comments.
Abigail Self: On the quality of the framework, it is widely recognised as a practical starting point. At the very start of the work to determine what the global goals and global indicators should be, ONS led the work across the GSS basically to ensure that the goals had measurability in mind. But as you would expect, with each country feeding in, there are political implications that have resulted in a large set of indicators. The UN has gone as far as possible to ensure that measurability has been taken into account, and therefore equality, but they are recognised as a practical starting point.
That is why I believe there are global indicators, but there is also flexibility for each country to determine its own national indicators that better reflect its own national priorities. This is where there are real opportunities to ensure the quality of that data, and all the data produced, certainly by the ONS, must meet the fundamental principles of the UN, which is all about timeliness and relevance. So it is a practical starting point; there is scope for national indicators and you would expect those to come with the right quality safeguards.
Could you repeat your second question?
Q27 Geraint Davies: The second question was: what do you think we should be looking for? Where are the weak points we should be focusing on in the UK—the sour grapes versus the cherry-picking?
Abigail Self: I would hope that this would come out through our work on identifying the national indicators and then working out to what extent there is data to meet that and then what that data tells us, so I am not able to answer that question yet.
Q28 Geraint Davies: No. What is your hunch?
Elizabeth Stuart: The goals are a political construct and they are certainly not a SMART set of goals. They are a political compromise, which is generally accepted, and when you get to the indicator level you have something that is of better quality. I would say it is a political start rather than perhaps a practical start, but I think that, as Abigail said, the job then is how to take that down into a national-level set of goals, targets and indicators, which are what was always the explicit purpose behind the SDGs.
On the issue on cherry-picking, sour grapes and low-hanging fruit—and all other fruit-based analogies—we don’t know yet. Graham had an indicative list of potential problem areas, but it is absolutely right that we cannot cherry-pick. Does that mean that countries cannot prioritise? No, it does not. The whole point of the SDGs is that they are supposed to be a supplement to your existing national development strategy if you are a developing country, so the existing policy framework that you have in place. They are supposed to be increasing the ambition. They are supposed to be creating much better linkages between all the different issue areas, and they are supposed to be making sure that there aren’t orphan issues that get left off the agenda. They were always designed to be starting from the point of where a country is and as a tool to ratchet up ambition, so I think it is right that a country will prioritise, but that does not mean that they can cherry-pick.
Countries will need to choose priority issues that are relevant to their national context, but then you need to make sure that you are not leaving behind the other issues that might be more politically difficult to address—for instance, more technically difficult to address—and that all the goal areas are met throughout the 15-year life course, because otherwise the SDGs will by definition not be met. That is why I think—back to your point—that, as an accountability framework, it is a checklist to make sure the Government are doing everything they said they would do.
Q29 Geraint Davies: There has been a comment, by Michael Gove and others, that we have too many experts, and now we have seen Donald Trump coming along, and all this sort of area is very interesting to us, of course, but is there also a fear—we need to get the quality right and the cherry-picking and all this sort of stuff—that there is a cultural problem as well, which is problematic for what we are trying to do as a Committee and you are trying to do with all this? If you don’t want to answer that, then don’t.
Dr Long: I would like to reflect on that. I think there is a question about the role of experts in all this. One counter argument is to get the people who are most affected involved. There are lots of good reasons to do that: the quality of the targets and the policies you get out of that; the fact that we have already said we are going to do it. There is a whole bunch of reasons to involve people other than just experts. In the end, the experts might say—well, if we are experts—that it is not about what we say, but about the reasons we can offer people for why what we say is correct, so we should offer people reasons that they can accept, or at least that they find reasonable, acceptable and relevant to them.
Can I just pick up on the cherry-picking?
Geraint Davies: The quality and the cherry-picking, yes.
Dr Long: The SDGs are specific and they are time-bound, but we have to bear in mind the kind of thing that they were meant to be. They are supposed to be a vision working towards 15 years in the future; what we want our world or our country to look like. They are inherently aspirational in that sense, and they set out to set goals as if every human life everywhere was of equal and fundamental value. That makes it kind of utopian in a certain respect, and it invites them to look very ambitious. I think they aren’t bad.
You would look for the Government responses to be more SMART in that kind of sense. I am not sure that the indicators are. The indicators have a particular problem, which is that because of what is available and because of people using what is already available, they do not always track the targets perfectly. Sometimes the targets are specific, but the indicators only pick up specific parts of the specific targets. The indicators are not foolproof and I think they need work, and there is a process for developing them over the next few years.
On cherry-picking, I take it as versus prioritisation and it is about the reasons for prioritising and there being good or bad reasons to prioritise. You might look to prioritise where the gaps are the biggest, but you might also look to see where particular groups are furthest behind in those overlapping, or nexuses of disadvantage that you want to tackle and you want to tackle first. You might look for some quick wins. You might look for particular targets or a means of implementing these that offer synergies or that tick a lot of boxes or advance a lot of targets at the same time.
You can also take parts of the national context as being very important. Colombia quite rightly made peace a priority, and that is not cherry-picking. So there is a whole range of things that matter for your national priorities. The content of manifestos and the democratic will of the people is also part of that process for how you decide what to prioritise.
Elizabeth Stuart: Unlike the NDGs, the SDGs were not developed in a smoke-filled room in New York; they were developed as part of a consultation process, so civil society and others have had the opportunity to a greater or lesser extent in different country contexts. But still they were jointly created, which is why they are not perfect; they are a jointly created creature, not just the product of experts.
Q30 Dr Matthew Offord: I want to ask Ms Self, in particular, about the state of data collection by the ONS. In some ways there may be a perception that the Government are responsible for everything and, as has already been mentioned, the 231 indicators, which is a large set of indicators and not all of them may be the responsibility of the Government.
Abigail Self: You are absolutely right: there will probably be an awful lot of data at the national level that is available to support the indicators, and most likely it is from official sources, but we will have to use non-official sources for disaggregation. This is where I referred to the Data Science Campus earlier, which has been set up in the ONS’s Newport office. Part of its role is to consider how to source data in ways that perhaps we have not done before, so thinking about what data you could scrape from the web, whether it is using satellite data to enable you to count certain things that perhaps expensive surveys could not collect. There isn’t a finite list, but basically the Science Campus is set up to allow us to explore where that data exists, how we can use it, and if it is good enough quality. That is very much part of our—
Q31 Dr Matthew Offord: I am quite interested in that, because I remember asking the right hon. Member for North Dorset a question about sustainability—I think it was in the Home Office—and the response that came back was, “Well, we don’t measure that because it is not in our responsibility.” That was in reference particularly to the Prison Service and I think that was referring to recycling. I feel that there have to be some imaginative ways to elicit some of the information that you are going to need.
Abigail Self: Absolutely. There will have to be those ways, but that is very much part of the data revolution, as it is called. It is very much seen as part of the key to the success of the SDGs—and that is globally—so I think there are opportunities to meet our needs nationally where we cannot currently do so, but also to build statistical capacity internationally.
Q32 Dr Matthew Offord: What about some of the NGOs? I imagine they would be quite keen to work with you.
Abigail Self: Absolutely. We are working in partnership with the UK SSD, which I mentioned earlier. This is essentially a stakeholder organisation with over 300 organisations. We have had several workshops with them. They are very keen to help. We have not got to the stage of articulating how, when and what data are available, but there is certainly the appetite there and we are very willing to use that.
Q33 Dr Matthew Offord: That is where I like the Finland example where they are able to upload their results. They can even get into kind of a bidding war with different NGOs. You also mentioned global and national indicators. In some ways I don’t understand why they are not just global indicators. I suppose it depends upon the areas that is in, particularly those competencies that do not respect national boundaries. Where in our priorities, and why, do you see the need for a distinction between the global and the national?
Abigail Self: The UN makes it clear that in signing up to UN resolution 70, where each country is committed to delivering on the SDGs, each country is required to report against every global indicator, but it recognises that in some cases those global indicators will not be applicable at the national level, which is why it gives each country flexibility to develop national indicators. But they are to complement the global ones; they are not a replacement.
To give you an example, I think in hunger there is a target about malnutrition. In a developing country, this is going to be more based on hunger, whereas in the UK it may be that obesity is more of an issue. That flexibility is there to identify what is more relevant to us to make progress on in the UK, and there will be other examples like that.
Q34 Dr Matthew Offord: I want to ask a supplementary of my own. With regard to the Overseas Territories, which we have not touched upon—this is a hobby horse of mine—I understand you do not collect data from them, do you?
Abigail Self: No.
Q35 Dr Matthew Offord: You may not know the answer to this, but how do they report? Because one of the criticisms that the Overseas Territories have of the UK Government is that we have to sign up to agreements, such as the SDGs, but resources do not come with them. Secondly, they do not have a mechanism for reporting if they are excluded from the UK, as in this case.
Abigail Self: Yes. As I said, our focus at the moment has been on the mainland UK, but I will certainly look into the Overseas Territories. It is not that there is a deliberate attempt to exclude them. We will have to consider how to represent them but we have not done that yet.
Dr Matthew Offord: It concerns me that in some areas of sustainability, particularly biodiversity, most of our biodiversity is contained in the Overseas Territories and we are not reporting on that.
Abigail Self: Yes.
Q36 Dr Matthew Offord: Finally, I want to ask you about data disaggregation and breaking data down into different areas of competencies and different categories. Perhaps you could say a little bit more about why that is particularly important.
Abigail Self: Why disaggregation is important?
Dr Matthew Offord: Yes.
Abigail Self: It is important to be able to reach those furthest behind, essentially. With disaggregation we are talking about focusing in on different age groups. For instance, is there an issue for a particular indicator for the elderly? I think one of the disaggregation groups is disability, so how are those groups disadvantaged? I would say it is pretty impossible to meet the “leave no one behind” agenda without looking specifically at those disadvantaged groups, because that is what the SDGs are set up to do.
Q37 Chair: Dr Long, did you want to come in on the data disaggregation, because some of your evidence specifically talks about it?
Dr Long: Yes. I mentioned some of it already. This is one of the areas where there is work to be done. In the areas where we meet the SDG ambition on aggregate, you might look at how particular groups don’t and why that is the case. That is always a question worth asking.
On top of what Abigail says, measuring is very important because if you don’t measure you don’t know who is there and what their problems are. It is going to be very difficult to do and I don’t envy ONS the task of trying to do that properly. You might have to go at it from both ends by both identifying specific marginalised groups and asking about aspects of their disadvantage, so start with them and then also work from the statistics to spot where the gaps are in the groups that are not doing as well.
We do quite a bit of disaggregation already; the equalities in human rights work disaggregates by disability, ethnicity and these kinds of things. Geography is also quite interesting within the UK. There is a devolution issue with Scotland and Wales, but just geographical differences are interesting. The rural/urban split, which was mentioned earlier, is also very interesting in certain contexts. We are also invited to disaggregate on the basis of migration status. That may not have been done quite as much, but it might be important to do.
Q38 Peter Aldous: We have touched quite a bit on data collection measurement, assessment and accountability, but I would like to ask about a specific issue on that. How important do you all think it is that we establish a baseline from which to measure the UK’s performance on SDGs over the next 15 years? Do you feel that is very important, Dr Long?
Dr Long: Yes, it is. Having it is part of this package of measurement that we need to inform policy direction. I don’t think we should necessarily wait for a baseline before we get going, but I think a baseline is important, if possible in the terms that are going to be globally applicable.
Elizabeth Stuart: I would agree, yes.
Q39 Peter Aldous: Abigail, just coming to you on that, as far as the ONS is concerned, how are you getting on in establishing a baseline, and are there any particular barriers that are preventing you doing this?
Abigail Self: In terms of how we are getting on, we are at the very early stages. A lot of our efforts so far have been invested in trying to come up with the national indicator set, which has required a lot of work; we are only a small team and there is a lot of work with other Government Departments and also non-Government stakeholders.
Q40 Peter Aldous: Do you think that perhaps Government have dealt you a hospital pass?
Abigail Self: I don’t think so, because we did receive money from the spending review to carry out this work. It is just that the scale of the task is enormous and it is very difficult to start certain aspects. There is a certain order to things, so before we need to spend time that may be wasted it is very important to work out what the national indicators are going to be; where are the overlaps with the global indicators. That will then give us a means of tracking what data is available. There are other areas. Professor Long has already worked in this area. So we would hope then at that point to draw together. We would not be starting from the beginning. We would draw together what information already exists, but we do not have a clear sight of that at the moment.
Q41 Peter Aldous: Any idea as to when we might see the baseline?
Abigail Self: We are required to report next autumn on what we have. How complete that will be is very difficult to say at the moment, but that is our target; to have an online tool where we would disseminate the data that we have currently found.
Q42 Peter Aldous: Obviously, we are very much indebted to the work the ONS is doing, but there are other means or other organisations that help with these assessments. For example, UNICEF and the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation are already utilising existing or developing new metrics and indicators to assess different countries’ progress against the SDGs. How important do you all feel these or other bodies are for monitoring progress, working alongside the ONS?
Elizabeth Stuart: I would say very important. The problem is an insufficiency of the specific data that we need; different groups will be prioritising different indicators, different targets and different goal areas, but the more we have the better this is. Clearly, there is an official monitoring process, but it is better to let 1,000 flowers bloom in terms of people gathering data, and particularly people who are trying to bring new data sources together, and people perhaps sharing data and making open access data that has previously been held privately.
For instance, the international NGO Oxfam is releasing all its monitoring and evaluation data. If you are interested in left-behind communities, it is often NGOs who will be working with these communities. Now, is it comparable data? No. Does it need to be cleaned? Yes, of course. But, again, it gets back to the question of good-enough data, and I think the more generators the better.
Q43 Peter Aldous: Are there any areas where NGOs and other organisations are not filling the gap where we will have gaps in the various measures?
Elizabeth Stuart: Again, the big gap is the disaggregated data. One could imagine an exercise that is aggregating all the data that you have on disaggregated groups. However, it is a methodologically very complex exercise because these things are not comparable.
Dr Long: Yes, I see some of the gaps. There are the big ones but some of the big ones, in my assessment—and it is only a personal assessment—is the indicator measuring something that looks very different from what we currently measure in the UK. In those cases there is a genuine question about whether we should go with the global metric, or go with the domestic metric and then somehow extrapolate from that a figure that looks plausible in the context of the global one.
Q44 Peter Aldous: Are there any specific examples of that?
Dr Long: Violence against women and girls is the first thing that springs to mind, where the global indicator asked for the proportion of women who have experienced violence. The first thing that we found when we looked was data around convictions and charging, which goes from the opposite direction but, because you cannot just take the number of people that have been charged and somehow extrapolate that into a measure of the proportion of women who were the victims—because they might, for example, be defendants—there is a whole range in which the data can have some subtle differences. For instance, in some cases the poverty line is 60%, and in other cases it is 50%, and do you have a 50% measure?
There are other big clear cases, and one that springs to mind is a potentially very potent target on inclusive growth, where the idea is that the bottom 40% should grow by more than a national average. We have a very hard time trying to find a figure for that. The World Bank collects some relevant data, as does the UK, but nothing that quite hits the spot and would allow us to assess whether that target is being met. Then you either work to fill that gap or you choose something that is a close neighbour to that but maybe not exactly that, and then we move forward, aware of that potential difference.
Elizabeth Stuart: The World Bank is now going to start monitoring that explicitly. I think a relevant area for the UK might be in-work poverty. It is not in the global indicator set, but it goes back to the question of what is nationally relevant.
Q45 Chair: That is very helpful. I wonder if we could go back to the amount of money that you got in the spending review, Abigail. Could you tell us how much you got?
Abigail Self: It is in the region of £8 million over the spending review period—
Chair: £8 million?
Abigail Self: £8 million.
Chair: Over the four years, so £2 million a year roughly?
Abigail Self: Roughly. But some of that the spending review also included for work on natural capital, which is valuing the environment. I can get you more details on the split.
Q46 Chair: Could you write to us on that? That would be very helpful.
Abigail Self: Sure.
Chair: I think we are probably unaware that there was a natural capital bid as well, so that is a useful by-product. You said you are required to report by next autumn. Required to report by whom: the United Nations or our own Government?
Abigail Self: ONS is responsible for reporting UK data against global goals annually, so it is the UN that we will be reporting to, but we commit to making that publicly available.
Q47 Chair: When you say autumn, will that be 29 November next year?
Abigail Self: I could not say what date it is yet.
Q48 Chair: You do not know?
Abigail Self: It is our target date to release what we have at that time.
Q49 Chair: Okay. We have talked about the discrepancy between these different types of data. What problems do you think that could cause if we do start to do this reverse engineering, if you see what I mean? Let us take the 50%/60% for poverty. We define poverty as what, 50%?
Dr Long: 60%, I thought. It is 60%, yes.
Q50 Chair: We define it at 60% of median. And what is the UN indicator? 50% of—?
Dr Long: There are a couple of different indicators on poverty here. For the one under goal 1, the UN takes relative poverty as defined by national definitions, so the national relativity is built into the definition. I think the ONS takes 60%, but elsewhere there is a question about what proportion of different, itemised groups are under the national poverty threshold. I think that is under goal 10 as part of the way they examine inequality, and there I think the threshold is 50%.
Q51 Chair: Are you saying that we do not collect that?
Dr Long: Until I have had a very long, in-depth discussion with ONS, I do not know. That is the kind of figure that you can readily work back from because we collect the 60% threshold, and you might think that off the back of that you are going to capture all that data and the 50% would be very easy to get, and so there is not a big problem of alignment there. There is another goal where I think we collect 16 to 28-year-old data, and the UN number asked for 15 to 28-year-old. I am not clear in those cases. There is some further work to be done. Is that the kind of gap that is very easy to close, because we have the data for 50%, or for 15-year-olds, also there ready to be used, but we just do not chose to set our threshold there, or is it that maybe we, for particular structural reasons, just do not collect exactly that data and so we do not have it to go back on?
Q52 Chair: Okay. That is very helpful. We mentioned the health data. Are there any areas where you, as a statistical authority, are working with other global Governments? Obviously we are a kind of global leader on health, because of the unique nature of the national health service. Are there any other areas where we have something to offer internationally? Or is that it? Is health the real outstanding star?
Abigail Self: I would have to come back to you on that, because this will entail different areas of the ONS, and I am not familiar with what areas. ONS is quite well regarded internationally on a variety of fronts, so I would like to think that there are several other areas, but I am not able to articulate those today. I can find out for you.
Q53 Chair: Okay. Thank you.
How do we compare with other countries in terms of our approach? You talked a little bit about the bottom-up stuff—the Norwegian TV advert, which I am sure we will all go away and Google and put into Google Translate, because our Norwegian is probably not that marvellous. But which are the stand-out countries that are really powering ahead on this? We have heard about Colombia and the peace stuff; we have heard a little bit about Finland and putting in your own things; and Germany, with its sustainable city. Are there any others that you think we have real lessons to learn from?
Elizabeth Stuart: Yes. The Netherlands has appointed a kind of co-ordinator—a kind of SDG tsar—which I think is an interesting model. A couple of countries will have a focal point for co-ordinating SDG-relevant activity.
If you are looking at developing countries, I think Nigeria has a very interesting model. It has a special adviser at the national level who is assigned to look at SDG co-ordination. It also essentially has SPADs on this as well at regional level. Again, they are having national dialogues to think about what is relevant, thinking about the indicator set, thinking about target set, and thinking about prioritisation.
Q54 Chair: Final question: are there any particular data sets where we currently collate and aggregate our data through the European Union and where leaving Eurostat would make our jobs harder, were we to leave Eurostat, which is by no means definite?
Abigail Self: Not to my knowledge. Sorry, can you repeat the question?
Q55 Chair: We are in a process of leaving the European Union, however long that takes, and potentially that could see us withdrawing from Eurostat. Obviously you, as a national statistical authority, report aggregate data into Eurostat. Are there any areas where Eurostat reports back to us and where not having full access to that data would be problematic, or where they conduct specific surveys that inform UK Government policy? I remember that Eurostat does various surveys at a European level that we would not do nationally. Are there any areas where we could end up missing out?
Abigail Self: I would have to check on it, but I would say not. A lot of the data that Eurostat collects and needs is also the data that needs to be produced for wider international reasons—whether it is for directives, so for the OECD, for example, or the UN. I do not think there would be a gap. I would have to check on the specifics. I do not think there would be gaps, and the SDGs are not tied to what data is available in Europe. They are very much country-led, so I do not think that would be an issue.
Q56 Chair: Okay. Can you also let us know what has happened to the Greening Government statistics that were co-ordinated by the Treasury? Do they still exist?
Abigail Self: I would have to check on that. I am not familiar with that.
Q57 Chair: Okay. We are looking at the various sustainable development indicators, which you have stopped collecting. There are also Greening Government indicators that could be useful in this. If you could write to us on that, that would be very helpful.
Abigail Self: Sure. There is environmental account data that still exists and that the ONS still produces. I am not familiar enough with what the Greening Government data includes in its entirety. Yes, I can come back to you on that.
Q58 Chair: Okay. That would be really helpful.
Finally, what do you think the real challenges are for collecting data from the hard-to-reach groups? You have talked a little bit about some of this bottom-up, feeding-up stuff, but isn’t the difficulty the hard-to-reach groups? Obviously, there are lots of disability organisations. There are not really huge numbers of groups representing the very frail elderly, for example, who by their nature have all sorts of challenges to overcome in order to have their voices heard, just like there are not very many groups looking at the challenges of the under-fives, for a variety of reasons. Where do you think we are going to have to be most creative in accessing those under-represented groups?
Abigail Self: That is a very good question. It is something I do not have the answer to yet, as we have not done that pass-through of what data does exist. But, going back to the SDG agenda, it is very much about finding that data, making that data open, and from my experience, certainly with non-Government agencies, there is a real willingness to do that. Specifically, we are not in a position to say that yet.
Q59 Chair: What about on discrimination, for example, where there is evidence of systematic discrimination in the jobs market, or where if you have a name-blind recruiting process, BME people do better than if their names, which may be indicative of their foreign origin, are in? How do you propose to engage businesses with collecting data around systematic discrimination, which we know exists, but is very hard to put a finger on?
Abigail Self: Again, it is difficult to say at this stage. Establishing the national indicator set and then reviewing the data available to support those will give us a flavour for where the gaps are, and then there will have to be a process of how we prioritise those gaps, which we will have to do in consultation with Government Departments. Until we have reached that stage, it is very difficult to then talk about specific engagement strategies. It will definitely be a challenge; it is one we foresee.
Q60 Chair: Graham, do you have any thoughts on that? Because you have mentioned some hard-to-reach—
Dr Long: It is a very good question, isn’t it? I have some general thoughts. The first is that this is one reason why “leave no one behind” is such an important idea, and it would be a shame to let it go, or to let it go on for too long without any fixed content. I think there is a time period in which you want to give some substance to the idea. It is because we need this broader debate about what constitutes disadvantage, how we find it, how we understand it, and how we involve those who are discriminated against in responding to it. I think the SDGs are helpful in pointing out those kinds of issues.
A very tempting response in a debate about the SDGs is to invoke partnership, because every time you go to an SDG event somebody says it is all about partnerships, but it really is all about partnerships, and there are things that the UK Government can do. There is an SDG target, for example, on sustainability reporting, or sustainability in human rights reporting by big companies. Depending on what you wanted to work in on that and how you want to work it, it is not the case that the Government are powerless in going about how to steer some of those partnerships.
More broadly, I think that you do a better job of this, everything else being equal, if your system of governance, accountability and monitoring is open, so that it is porous. That way, you do not start off with a set list of the people you are looking for and then you exclude other people and do not spot other people when they come out to make their point; also, where you have some kind of active investigative body or bodies involved in it whose job it is to chase down, and to have a go at, and just to maybe throw some funding and effort at trying to solve these kinds of conundrums. I think there are some governance answers about the kinds of structures you would have in place to do a better job of this, but it is a very tough question.
Elizabeth Stuart: Just to add to that, Graham is absolutely right that the disadvantaged groups have not been prescribed in the SDG. There are different lists of groups, which clearly are the groups that you want to be looking for, but it also talks about other relevant groups. For instance, in the UK that might be looking at trafficked children or unaccompanied minors coming here. I know there are significant data gaps for which the fix is not really a technical fix; it is a systems fix that is needed.
I think an interesting lesson that we might be able to learn from other countries is the use of community-based and community-generated data. Again, this is going back to the idea of asking people within a marginalised community to develop data on themselves; absent official forms of data. They develop data on themselves, which also, one would hope in the best case, would lead to a sense of empowerment for these communities, in that they feel that they are actively participating and contributing to policy change that is going to be beneficial to them.
Chair: Excellent. There is plenty of food for thought there. Thank you all very much indeed for coming to talk to us today. We appreciate your time. Thank you.