International Development Committee
Oral evidence: UK progress on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), HC 1732
Tuesday 12 March 2019
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 12 March 2019.
Members present: Stephen Twigg (Chair); Richard Burden; Nigel Evans; Chris Law; Ivan Lewis; Mark Menzies; Lloyd Russell-Moyle; Virendra Sharma; Henry Smith.
Questions 1 - 63
Witnesses
I: Emily Auckland, Co-Chair, UK Stakeholders for Sustainable Development (UKSSD); Andrew Griffiths, Co-Chair, Bond SDGs Group.
Witnesses: Emily Auckland and Andrew Griffiths.
Q1 Chair: Good morning and welcome to today’s oral evidence session, looking at the UK’s progress on the global goals—the sustainable development goals—with a particular focus on the voluntary national review process. We have two panels of witnesses this morning. The second panel at 10.45 am is with champions from the DWP and BEIS. We are delighted to welcome Emily and Andrew, who are here to represent the civil society view.
We are seeking to cover six questions with you over the next 45 minutes, just to get a rough idea of time. Let me start by giving each of you an opportunity to briefly introduce yourself and the organisation you are here to represent, then to answer why the SDGs are important and what you see as the significance of this voluntary national review.
Emily Auckland: I am Emily Auckland. I am the network director and co-chair of the UK Stakeholders for Sustainable Development, also called UKSSD. We are a cross-sector network of organisations that work together to drive action on the SDGs in the UK. The sustainable development goals have been called the closest thing the world has to a strategy for the future. Together, they provide us with an ambitious plan for a future that is fairer, safer, healthier and in better balance with nature. They resonate with every aspect of life in the UK. They are relevant to individuals, to households, to communities, to business and to Government. The UK is not perfect.
In 2018, UKSSD released its report on how we are performing on the sustainable development goals. This was the first comprehensive assessment of the SDGs in the UK. The report, called Measuring up, shows that people and places are being left behind in this country. Of the 169 sustainable development goal targets, we assessed those that are most relevant to the domestic context and found that we are only performing well on 24% of them. For the remaining targets, our performance is either inadequate or poor. That looks at both indicators and at the policy context in the UK.
The SDGs can help us to join up policy making, to work collaboratively and to act in a coherent way to address these challenges that we identified in the SDGs. The voluntary national review provides the UK Government with an opportunity to raise awareness and engagement with the SDGs, and to drive action towards them. At the moment, we are at risk of losing that opportunity because of a lack of ministerial leadership.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed. There is a lot of what you said there that we are going to probe further in the rest of the questions.
Andrew Griffiths: I am Andrew Griffiths. I am the head of advocacy at Sightsavers. I am here representing the Bond SDGs Group. I am sure I do not need to introduce Bond. It is an organisation that represents 400 member organisations of international development. The Bond SDGs Group has just over 150 members. We work with the UK Government and with stakeholders such as UKSSD—we have a very close partnership with UKSSD—to ensure and push the SDGs and their implementation in the UK, particularly in the UK’s international obligations.
When it comes to the SDGs and their importance to the UK, I echo a lot of what Emily has said. They are obviously relevant. The SDGs are a universal agenda. They do not just apply to poorer countries. They apply to the UK as well and they reflect many of the challenges that the UK faces in the environmental, social and economic spheres. They also provide a framework for policy coherence, which is very important. That is probably one of the main reasons why the UK needs to do a VNR in terms of understanding policy coherence.
Emily has mentioned “leave no one behind” and the important of that as an agenda, and also partnerships as well. The agenda talks about the importance of partnerships to deliver sustainable development. It provides a framework for understanding how those partnerships would work. At the moment, as Emily said, we are at risk of losing the opportunities that those partnerships provide.
When it comes to the voluntary national review, I would say that this is a great opportunity to reflect. As an organisation, Sightsavers has worked in about 13 countries to support voluntary national reviews. They have always been a great chance for the beginnings of a strategy that will lead to implementation; they really kick-start the process in a lot of countries. The hope is that would happen in the UK as well.
The last thing I would just mention is in terms of global leadership. The UK played a big role in the agreement of the SDGs. They were real champions, particularly of “leaving no one behind”, as well as goal 16 and the inclusion of governance as a goal within the agenda, but at the moment they are not really playing a role internationally. That is a shame, and the world misses out when the UK is not playing that role.
Q2 Chair: Thank you both very much indeed for those responses. What I would like to do now is just go a little bit into more depth about the process itself. Can I ask each of you to comment on how well the Government have managed this process so far? In particular in terms of engagement with the stakeholders that you represent, has that engagement been timely? Has it been meaningful? If so, can you give examples? If not, can you give examples?
Andrew Griffiths: The first thing to ask about a voluntary national review is what it is reviewing. At the moment, the UK does not have an implementation plan for the SDGs, so the review is always going to be a challenge; it is always going to be partial. There is a lot that the UK is doing in terms of the implementation of the SDGs. Going back to the point about policy coherence, there is a challenge in terms of how joined up that is.
The other thing is that it is supposed to be a national review. It is not a Government review. It is a national review. That is intentional and that is within the language of the 2030 agenda. That does not mean that it should be a reflection of lots of different individual activities, but a review of the systems and how the UK as an entity is implementing that agenda, both in terms of domestic policy and international policy. Those facts mean that it was always going to be a challenge for the UK to do a really great voluntary national review. At the moment, we do not have the voluntary national review. It is still being drafted and it is still being worked on. There is still a process that is ongoing.
We really hope that the outcomes will be good. We are working really hard and are committed, as organisations that work together, to promote a good voluntary national review process. The key thing here is that there has not been the level of leadership that we would expect in order to deliver this. We have a really good and positive relationship with the DFID team that works on this. We are very thankful that there is a dedicated team working on this, but we do not see that backed up by the Prime Minister, by the Cabinet Office or by the Secretary of State. We would say that the challenge is around leadership.
Q3 Chair: What do you mean by the Secretary of State?
Andrew Griffiths: The Secretary of State for International Development, who has shown an interest but we do not see her here pushing it continuously.
Chair: That is really interesting.
Andrew Griffiths: We do not see the voluntary national review as being something that she is willing to step out on a limb to push with her Cabinet colleagues. The majority of this is a domestic agenda. There is only so much that she can have responsibility for. She needs to be pushing for the rest of it.
Q4 Chair: Let me ask you a supplementary on that and then bring in Emily. Looking at the domestic Departments or indeed all of the Government Departments, are there any that are doing better than others? Is there any way of differentiating between how far this SDG agenda has been picked up by the domestic Departments?
Andrew Griffiths: The first thing I would say is we have—what are they called?
Chair: The single departmental plans.
Andrew Griffiths: That is right. We have the single departmental plans, which outline something. They do not go into very much detail. They do not provide a particularly coherent overview of how the SDGs are being implemented. The other thing we have to go by is the stakeholder engagement that has come in terms of the drafting of the voluntary national review. Some Departments have engaged us. The Home Office, for example, held a roundtable on the goal that they are drafting.
Q5 Chair: That is 16, is it not? They lead on governance.
Andrew Griffiths: Yes. Some have not. You are speaking to DWP and BEIS. We know that DWP held a roundtable, but we did not hear about that until the week of it.
Q6 Chair: You are a disability organisations and DWP did not engage with you.
Andrew Griffiths: It is the same for the Bond SDGs Group and UKSSD. We are consortiums of however many members.
Emily Auckland: We have over 100 partners in UKSSD and a wider network of over 1,000 organisations.
Andrew Griffiths: We were not able to engage with that process and we have not heard anything from BEIS. We do not know how they are engaging stakeholders or whether they are engaging stakeholders in the drafting of their chapters. That gives you maybe a sample of some of the challenges that we face in terms of that engagement.
Q7 Chair: Emily, please do answer the original question, but I am keen to hear from you on any perspectives on different Departments and how they are doing.
Emily Auckland: I would reinforce everything that Andrew has said, particularly on the leadership issue. That has led to the issue of stakeholder engagement, particularly when you have a Department who are co-ordinating the VNR but who do not have a domestic network or a domestic mandate. For them to engage and ensure that the VNR is a national review is very challenging. I would also reinforce that point that we do have a positive relationship with the teams. They are trying, but they have looked to us to engage stakeholders.
There is an opportunity to do more both with the VNR at the moment and post VNR, in terms of stakeholder engagement, particularly about that implementation-plan question. The risk at the moment, with individual Departments being allocated responsibility for individual goals, is that we lose the coherence point of the SDGs. The inter-connective nature of them is at risk of being lost. That is where stakeholders can actually add value to the processes, in identifying where coherence is important.
In terms of specific issues with the VNR, we engaged very early on in the process, both Bond and UKSSD together. We set out our expectations for what the process should look like, what a good VNR would be and provided that in writing to DFID. One of the things we can certainly do is follow up with an outline of that engagement activity that we have undertaken. We have not, at any point, seen a detailed timeline, process or budget for the VNR. We have not had the information at hand in order to engage in an effective way. We asked repeatedly for the contact details of the departmental leads, the champions, and we were provided with some. It tended to be those that were more proactive, such as the Home Office, which reached out almost immediately.
Chair: The Home Office are emerging with credit in this one—blimey.
Emily Auckland: Yes, but we were not given details for all of the leads. One of the reasons for that was because those leads were not identified early on enough in the process.
Q8 Chair: When did the Government commit to reporting in 2019?
Emily Auckland: 2017.
Andrew Griffiths: It was in May or June 2017.
Chair: It was almost two years ago.
Emily Auckland: Yes, so there was absolutely plenty of time, certainly from our experience of producing Measuring up. We produced that in 10 months and had over 100 organisations input into that research; we created a space consistently for both stakeholders and for Government Departments to engage, analyse and contribute to that research. That is the type of process we were hoping would be followed.
The issue about departmental engagement has very much been the lack of resource and transparency. We know that they have had issues engaging with this process, because of other demands and priorities, but also when events and engagement activities have been conducted that information has not been public. We have been contacted and asked to promote event, which we have done. We have circulated that with our network and encouraged stakeholders to attend, and likewise with Bond, but that information has not been publically communicated.
For organisations that are not party to the information that we are sharing, they are not seeing that and being given an opportunity. This process could have provided an opportunity to both engage other organisations but also to reach out to those that represent marginalised communities or disadvantaged groups, as well as those that are on the ground delivering some of the activities that are necessary for the SDGs, who maybe are not engaged in the goals as a framework themselves. That opportunity has not been taken advantage of.
Q9 Chris Law: I am just going to go back to your opening statement, Emily, because I was quite shocked. 76% of SDGs are being failed here in the UK. I just wanted to know: was that this year? Has it been increasing or decreasing since it was first set?
Emily Auckland: We have not looked at the data since we launched the report, which was in July 2018. It is probably fair to say that in terms of data, not a lot will have changed in that period anyway. We used the latest data that the ONS had and supplemented that with other national equivalents. What we looked at was both the performance against the indicators at a global and national level, and the policy coverage: “Is this target adequately addressed by current UK policy?” It was 57% that were rated “inadequate” and the remaining ones were “poor”. There was a 3% data gap where we just do not have the information about performance.
The “inadequate” suggests that there is some positive performance there perhaps but maybe policy coverage is weak, or the other way around: that performance is poor but policy coverage is there or is not there. We obviously need to be concerned about the “poor” ones. There are particular issues like, for example food insecurity, which stand out as a critical issue in the UK at the moment and are something that we need to address. We are certainly aware that since we launched Measuring up that has been much higher up the agenda, both politically and in social consciousness.
Q10 Chris Law: It is quite a shocking statistic. I want to keep a close eye on it. I wanted to ask what the practical implications are of DFID being used as the lead Government Department on the VNR. Is it the right Department to lead the process? I notice that Bond said DFID is not the right Department to co-ordinate the UK Government effort. If it is not, where do you think it should lie?
Andrew Griffiths: We do not think that it is the right Government Department. DFID has a big role to play, particularly in the international implementation of the agenda and it should be playing that role. In terms of co-ordination, the Cabinet Office should be playing that role. This is clearly an agenda that covers the whole of Her Majesty’s Government and we would like to see that reflected in terms of where it sits. It really needs prime ministerial leadership as well. This is a wide-ranging policy agenda.
For us as international NGOs, the risk is that DFID is not able and does not have the resources to do both. It is spending a lot of its time co-ordinating domestic implementation Departments, whilst not looking at how it, as a Department, is implementing the SDGs. There is a risk for us, in terms of DFID being the lead.
Emily Auckland: We would agree entirely with that. DFID has a very important role to play and that needs to be recognised, but it is certainly not the right Department for a domestic agenda. Certainly, in terms of perspectives, we have heard from stakeholders, particularly in the private sector in the UK, that leadership from the Prime Minister and a clear statement of support for the SDGs would do a lot to encourage them to take further action, but also that the SDGs are at risk of being seen consistently as an international development agenda and not as a domestic one, because of that DFID association.
Q11 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: I totally agree with your comments that you just made there. Do you know how other countries are managing that? Have other countries created units or Ministries or had it under Prime Ministers? Is there a particular model that has worked from other countries? Lots of other countries have done their VNR already by now.
Chair: You mentioned having looked at other countries.
Andrew Griffiths: There are lots of examples from different countries that have probably done it a bit better than the UK. In terms of SDG implementation, do you want to cover that, and I will talk about the VNR?
Emily Auckland: Yes.
Andrew Griffiths: In terms of the VNR, you have, for example, Poland, which set up a multi-stakeholder group to develop the VNR. That was also then published in draft form and taken through Parliament. It is that approach that I think would be quite good. Ireland published a vision for how they were going to implement the SDGs. Those are obviously quite close allies and contemporaries of the UK.
If you look even at poorer countries, in Sierra Leone, for example, the Ministry of Planning is in charge of this and it has leadership from the President. In most countries, you would say that it is a planning Ministry that takes the role in terms of developing the voluntary national review and there is either Prime Ministerial or Presidential leadership; they take the responsibility for it. The UK is probably quite an outlier when it comes to giving the responsibility to an internationally focused arm.
Q12 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Just on that quickly, in terms of other countries, the Government are very clear that the VNR is the Government’s presentation to the UN. Do other countries see it as the Government’s presentation, or do other countries see it as the country’s collaborative presentation? Is there a distinction there?
Andrew Griffiths: There is a distinction and that distinction has become clearer over time. At the beginning, at the first High-level Political Forum when the first voluntary national reviews on this agenda were presented, that distinction was not entirely clear. Most Governments were reporting on their institutional arrangements for the SDGs. Over time, countries have seen it more as an opportunity to present progress, because there has been some. When they do that, then you see more stakeholders engaging. You see more stakeholders engaging with the development of the voluntary national review and then also in terms of the presentation of it.
Chair: I have members of the Committee stealing each other’s questions. I am going to stop you, Lloyd, unless you ask something that is not someone else’s question.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle: I did not particularly want to. It was not the VNR I was asking about. I was interested in the Ministry and the lead. That was meant to be the follow-up, but sorry that I stole Richard’s question.
Emily Auckland: Just to add to what Andrew has said in terms of the VNR, we could also look to Scotland and what they are currently doing. They have actually, through the process of producing their VNR, established a relationship with a multi-stakeholder network. They have formal terms of engagement, so there are lessons on our doorstep that we can learn as well.
In terms of SDG leadership and implementation nationally, two examples that we would draw on are Finland and Norway. Both countries have had high-level commitment from their Prime Ministers and also Parliaments. Finland established a multi-stakeholder forum very early on, which has been led by the Prime Minister. There is involvement of both finance Ministries in the implementation fit the SDGs, which is obviously critical in terms of budgeting. Parliament reviews processes annually and also check for policy incoherence and conflict. Each has also established separate policy coherence units as part of the VNR process. There is some evidence of monitoring and review processes that were developed at the start of their implementation plans. Both of those examples are great. There is also lots of evidence out there, so we can provide more on that as well.
Q13 Mr Evans: Andrew, you mention, and you have even said in your evidence this morning, that co-operation across Government has not been great on this. What do you think really does need to change? Do you see any evidence that there is a willingness to see the change that you think will then make it more effective?
Andrew Griffiths: Thank you for that. There is an opportunity here for there to be change. The voluntary national review is a moment when these things come out into the open. We have been calling for a voluntary national review for a while, partly because of the recognition that unless a process like this happens there is not much opportunity for change. The first thing I would say is that we really hope and we would expect that the voluntary national review starts a process whereby these things get taken more seriously, and that the SDGs and implementation of the SDGs gets seen as more of a priority.
I would say it is fitful at the moment. Again, I refer to the point I made earlier about the DFID team being a very positive relationship. There seems to be a willingness and keenness from them and from the Secretary of State to start taking this more seriously.
Our concern is that we have until July, when this is presented. What happens after July? That is more of a concern to us than the voluntary national review being good, because the voluntary national review is a presentation at a point in time. It is the longer-term implementation of this that is the concern. If we do not take the opportunity now, through this voluntary national review, to put in place some of the institutional arrangements that are needed to look at implementation of the SDGs beyond July, we will have failed. We are looking at what happens afterwards as our measure of success.
Q14 Mr Evans: Do you think they are taking it seriously enough or do you think they are being distracted? Clearly, Brexit dominates this place at the moment. Do you think there is an element of that: that they are distracted completely by another issue?
Andrew Griffiths: Yes, my interpretation would be, absolutely, that it is distracting. You look at results and you look at what has happened. There is no implementation plan and there has been such a challenge in terms of getting engagement from other Government Departments. For example, we know Defra has struggled when it comes to engaging with this agenda. That is partly because they have a huge amount to do when it comes to Brexit. That is a risk for us and if you look at the evidence you would have to conclude that this has not been seen as a priority so far.
Q15 Mr Evans: If they are getting this wrong on the voluntary national review today, do you think that this really does not bode very well for cross-departmental co-operation on delivering on the SDGs?
Andrew Griffiths: Yes, I do. If the DFID team are expected to continue to co-ordinate on SDG implementation but they no longer have this report to the UN in order to try and get momentum, then they are going to struggle even more. It is quite unfair to expect a team in a smaller Government Department to play that cross-Government co-ordination role when they have not got the political backing.
Q16 Richard Burden: Could I ask you to say a few words about this Emerging Findings document that came out last week? How would you say that compares with the level of analysis you would expect from a VNR at this stage?
Emily Auckland: It is important to note that it is not the VNR, so it is hard to say conclusively what is going to be within the VNR when it is actually published. Overall, our perspective is that we are very unclear why certain information has been included in this document and not other information. There are some particular things that we would note about the Emerging Findings document. There is certainly some acknowledgement of the challenges faced in the UK, which is positive, but the general tone of the document is very much about Government wanting to hear from stakeholders about what they will do next to support the delivery of the SDGs, rather than a sense of responsibility from Government about what they can do to enable more action, particularly with the point about partnerships, which is repeatedly made in that document. Partnerships are critical, but they need the right enabling conditions to develop. That is something that the Government should be leading on.
One of the major issues is that “leave no one behind” appears to be missing entirely from that document. That is a principle that underpins the SDGs and is something that the UK Government champions. For it to not really be apparent in this Emerging Findings document is important to note. Certainly from a domestic perspective, the contents of the goals sections of that document are very much weighted evenly between domestic and international. Actually, as a national process and a national agenda, there should be more of a focus on the domestic implementation and policy agenda.
There is also an over-reliance on case studies from stakeholders. This has been the issue that we have seen throughout this process. Stakeholders are seen as valuable in providing information on what they do, but not actually on contributing to a review of national progress on the SDGs. Case studies are great, but they only illustrate the national picture. They do not actually review it. Case studies are repeatedly referred to in that document.
From our perspective, having produced Measuring up and having got this evidence on performance in the UK, it is also very clear that there is not a systematic approach within that Emerging Findings document. It is not target by target. It does not even refer to SDG targets. It is very hard to consider whether the assessment that has been taken is robust, because you need to take that systematic approach across the framework in order to review performance appropriately.
Q17 Chair: Yesterday we had the parliamentary engagement event with Penny Mordaunt. Without revealing things that were said under Chatham House rules, those points were all made very clearly and robustly on a cross-party basis, by parliamentarians from both Houses.
Andrew Griffiths: It is worth noting that this has been produced. That, in and of itself, is quite a good thing, because it does give us an opportunity to reflect and to give back a perspective. We do not think that this has been a particularly well-run stakeholder engagement plan from the beginning to now, but it is welcome that there is an opportunity to consult on this. There have been organised meetings for different stakeholders to reflect on this document and to give perspectives back. We would be interested in seeing how those reflections are then taken forward into the VNR, into the document that is presented in New York. That will be something we are very keen to look at.
Just to say, we will be doing an analysis of the Emerging Findings document and we would be very happy to share that with the Committee as well.
Chair: Thank you very much indeed.
Q18 Richard Burden: Accepting what you say about case studies, is there, from that document, any evidence that the kind of level of analysis that you have put in so far to Government, or indeed the data that has been put in by bodies like the ONS, actually is feeding into informing the review, as opposed to providing a few examples for the Government to quote in documents that they produce saying they are having a review, if you get the distinction?
Emily Auckland: We have seen no evidence that there has been a gap analysis conducted, which is effectively what this document should be. It should be looking at performance and policies across the UK in relation to each of the SDG targets. We have great statistical reporting on the SDGs in the UK. We should recognise that the ONS is performing far above many other countries. That is something that is beneficial and should be beneficial in this process, but certainly the Emerging Findings document is selective. It definitely does not cover the SDGs in a coherent way. It definitely presents limited information, much of which we would question why it is included at all or highlighted by being included in this document.
Andrew Griffiths: Just to note as well, Bond SDGs Group has provided very detailed input into the voluntary national review from the international perspective. We recognise that Measuring up is a really excellent review of the domestic implementation. We have supplemented that with international. Yes, the Emerging Findings document has not answered that question about how those inputs and others—I am sure others have provided input as well—are then being transferred and reflected in the voluntary national review.
We would really welcome a commitment as to how that would look. It may be that you would want to see an annex that outlines particular key issues that there is some kind of joint ownership of. What we do not want to do is to ask our members to provide feedback, which then gets sucked into a vacuum that we never see again. Good stakeholder engagement and good consultation involves clarity about how that information is going to be used, and what outcomes we should expect from that. We would really welcome some form of commitment about that.
Q19 Richard Burden: You have referred to places like Norway, Finland and Ireland to some extent as benchmarks of good practice around ensuring cross-governmental leadership on their VNRs. Are they or any other countries useful examples that could be put to the Government to say, “Actually, in terms of what methodology you use and how you present information, they are good examples for Government to follow and learn from as well”? In other words, are there documents a bit like this, but less selective, more comprehensive and more methodologically robust? Are there examples of those in other countries that could be pointed to?
Andrew Griffiths: Yes, there are. We have got this. I will happily send this on. We are part of an international consortium of many organisations that have looked at voluntary national reviews over the last few years and done reviews of what good practice there is, set against the UN Secretary-General’s guidance on voluntary national reviews and a few extra things that we, as a consortium of civil society organisations, think are important. There are plenty. There is not any lack of guidance as to what a good voluntary national review looks like.
Have countries done it perfectly? I am sure that there is no country in the world that would have civil society sitting there and saying that everything is perfect; that is the role that we play. There are many good examples of how that progress could be. We will happily send this report on. It is a very detailed review of that.
Emily Auckland: I would also just add, going back to Andrew’s earlier point about having an implementation plan that you can review yourself against, that is maybe the critical lesson that we can take from other countries: where that implementation plan exists, the VNR can be a much more effective process.
Q20 Chair: Just as a supplementary from me on that, Emily, you referred to how the Emerging Findings document is half international and half domestic. We have said as a Committee that the international focus, through DFID, on SDGs has remained pretty good, whereas it is the domestic where the Government have been found wanting. Looking at some of these other countries, perhaps very comparable countries such as Sweden, Norway and Germany, which do spend high on ODA, what sort of mix have they had in their VNRs between talking about their contribution internationally and their contribution domestically? If you cannot answer now, perhaps you could write to us.
Emily Auckland: Yes, if I can follow up, we do have a breakdown of the VNRs that we can send to you.
Chair: There is a slight risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is right that we home in on the weaknesses on the domestic side, but the international side is very important and should be a big part of our report when it goes into the UN.
Q21 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Just before that, you mentioned the Secretary-General’s guidance. Do you think this Government are following, to the letter and to the spirit, the Secretary-General’s guidance of what a VNR should look like?
Andrew Griffiths: It would be interesting to see, at the end of the process, whether or not the report itself follows some of that guidance, but in terms of the process I would say that there are many challenges with answering that question in a positive way.
Lloyd Russell-Moyle: That is a very diplomatic way of saying that you do not think so.
Andrew Griffiths: That was a politician’s answer, was it not?
Chair: That was a civil servant’s answer.
Andrew Griffiths: It was. I am going to answer in a civil society way: no. No, it has not been. If we look at the Emerging Findings document and we compare some of the criteria that exist within the UN Secretary-General’s guidance with the Emerging Findings document, then there are a lot of challenges. We have highlighted some of those. There is a commitment for evidence-based, but we have not seen that with selective evidence. In terms of wide-ranging outreach, again, we have not seen a proper stakeholder engagement plan that has been followed through and budgeted for. There is a need for reflection on challenges and achievements. We see some of that but again it is quite selective.
The final thing is about “leave no one behind” and the importance of “leave no one behind” within the Secretary-General’s guidance. Again, we are not really seeing that being reflected here. We are hopeful. There remains time. This process is still running, but at the moment it is not really aligned.
Q22 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: It is an interesting question about what is more important out of this. Is it the process, which you are highlighting as not necessarily fulfilling the letter or the spirit of the Secretary-General’s guidance, or is it the outcome? Do we work for the outcome? Turning maybe more to the outcomes and the issues, rather than just the process, are there, in your views, areas, warning lights or priority areas on which you think the Government, both domestically but also internationally, are pulling their weight and are really leading the way?
Emily Auckland: Is that within the VNR or within the Emerging Findings document or within SDGs generally?
Q23 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Within the SDGs generally, yes. Moving away from the VNR as a process and more about the SDGs, are there particular SDGs that we can be particularly proud of, and are there particular areas that should be warning lights for us to say there is something drastically going wrong? You mentioned food security earlier on, but are there other areas that are real warning lights, and are there positives as well?
Emily Auckland: There is a lot to celebrate and there is a lot we should celebrate. That is what we identified in Measuring up, but it is quite difficult to answer that question, because on every goal we are failing in some way. There is no goal that you can say, “Actually, we are ticking all of the boxes here and the UK is performing well”. On every single goal within the SDGs, it is very apparent that there are both issues and positives. This is really where this process should fit in allowing the Government and others to understand where those priority areas should be, where we can focus on systemic issues that require a much more concerted effort.
There are particular things that stood out in Measuring up, and this is perhaps from my personal perspective. Certainly, here were issues around food and security and some of the figures around child poverty, and particularly childhood food and security. For us as the fifth largest economy in the world to have these issues is quite shocking. That is recognising it is relative to other national contexts as well.
Looking at some of the evidence around loss of biodiversity, and certainly the risk to life from heat as a result of climate change, in that example we have a Climate Change Act, which is great, but we are not actually addressing some of the issues in terms of the supply of housing and how that is going to ensure that people are resilient to the effects of climate change. That is a very specific example.
It is a mixed picture across the board. I cannot really select one or two things that the Government are doing very well, or that we are doing very well or very poorly on nationally. You need to use the SDGs to look across the spectrum.
Q24 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: You are saying nothing is doing well and nothing is doing really awfully. There is a mixture. “Mediocrity” is the word that comes to mind.
Emily Auckland: I would not say “mediocrity”. I would say that we have some great policies in place that are allowing us to perform well on some targets within the SDGs. We have a real absence of a concerted effort where we are performing poorly.
Andrew Griffiths: In the international arena, DFID as an independent Department is a good thing. That speaks well for the partnership for delivering the agenda across other countries. In terms of the commitment for 0.7% and spending 0.7%, again, those things are very good, but it is very hard for us to do a proper analysis when plans are not made and put in place that align with the agenda.
It is very hard for us to sit here and say what the UK Government are properly doing in their international agenda, because we do not really know. That information is not public. It is not presented in that form. We have done an analysis goal by goal of the UK’s international agenda, both ODA but also things like the international footprint of the UK through supply chains or climate and environment. Actually, we cannot really say that this is where it is doing really well or this is where it is doing really badly, because it is not delivered in ways that are consistent with the agenda.
Chair: You have both said, linked to that, that a weakness is the lack of an implementation plan. We know from when we did our inquiry, almost three years ago now in the previous Parliament, that this was a criticism that we endorsed. We looked at other countries, including Germany, which adopted a plan quite quickly. There are two things: can you highlight countries that have been particularly good on having an implementation plan, regardless of VNR? Are there any examples of where the VNR itself has resulted in there being a plan or a significant improvement to the plan? Perhaps optimistically, something that could come out of this is maybe we will adopt a plan, even if we are doing it four years later than other people have done it.
Andrew Griffiths: I am very hopeful that will be the case. Germany is a good example. They have also had an independent peer review process of their plan, which was led by Helen Clark, who is the former Prime Minister of New Zealand. She led a panel that reviewed that plan. They not only have a plan but they have done an independent review of it. Spain has done some really good work in terms of legislation. It has a process whereby legislation is checked against the SDGs and is aligned to the SDGs. You have mentioned Ireland. It is fair to say that the process in Ireland was done because of the VNR. They did a VNR last year. Even in Germany, Germany did their first VNR in 2016. That probably prompted them to develop that goal or that plan. The VNR is often a very good opportunity to develop a plan or to think about developing a plan.
Emily Auckland: Again, I would not add anything on to what Andrew has said, other than it is the leadership question and the ministerial leadership point. How the SDGs are used as a tool for creating a vision for a country is also really important. There are lessons from Colombia that we could take there, in terms of them using the SDGs as a piece of the building process for society. We could learn something from that at the moment, given the current context of the UK. It is actually about how we use them as a tool to try to look to the future and create a plan around the vision that they provide for us. Again, there is lots of literature out there that looks at different countries and their approaches.
Chair: Can I thank you both very much indeed for your evidence this morning? It has been illuminating and extremely helpful. Please feel free, if you have the time, to stay to listen to our next panel.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Donna Ward and Sam Lister.
Chair: We are moving now to our second panel as part of our evidence-taking for an inquiry into the UK’s progress on the sustainable development goals and, in particular, the United Kingdom’s voluntary national review process. Welcome, Donna and Sam.
Q25 Chris Law: Good morning. I want to specifically ask you both how long you have been sustainable development goal champions in your Department. What does your role involve?
Donna Ward: I am happy to start with that. I am not the champion. I am the SRO for goal 1, which is eliminating poverty in all its forms. The way we have done it in DWP is that we have the champion role sitting inside our central strategy team. That person has an oversight across all of the goals that we are contributing and is playing that liaison role, but I am then drawing in all the other people across Government who need to contribute to my particular goal on poverty. That is how we have done it in DWP. I apologise if you were expecting the champion but I was invited through this process.
Q26 Chris Law: That is okay, Donna. How long have you been in your role?
Donna Ward: Just so that people know, I am the director of children, families and disadvantage. I have been doing this particular role for nearly two years. In terms of leading the poverty goal, it has been just a few months. However, poverty is a core part of what DWP does and it is a core part of my team anyway. I already have a poverty team.
Sam Lister: I am the director of industrial strategy. We were sent a letter that I received on 22 October appointing me as SRO and as champion. To echo Donna’s point slightly, we have three different SROs within the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Each of us is a champion, so we were each appointed to be, effectively, a policy champion. Then there is, a little like the system that DWP has devised, a central senior civil servant who is effectively the process champion and the co-ordination point, who keeps all three SROs to task, and is the liaison with the Cabinet Office and with DFID.
Q27 Chris Law: Pardon me for sounding a bit confused, but I would have thought, if each Department had a goal champion, they could speak to each other. Cross-departmentally, who liaises with whom? Who is in charge?
Sam Lister: Cross-departmentally, there is an SCS process lead who sits on the interdepartmental group, as there is for DWP as well. They meet as a group every couple of months, and I know, through the VNR period, they had about 20 meetings with the DFID liaison. They are the key co-ordination point.
Donna Ward: If you take, for example, my goal on poverty, it is exactly the same as my day job on poverty. I have key Departments that I work with all the time; it is mainly the Treasury, and is also BEIS and the Department for Education. In terms of bringing together the evidence for my goal on poverty, I am liaising with those Departments.
In terms of DWP contributing to other goals, if I am the right person to be the key contact on somebody else’s goals, then I do that, but we do have our strategy team co-ordinating that activity, because there are quite a number of goals where DWP might have a smaller contribution to make.
Q28 Chris Law: The questions I have here are going to be a little bit difficult because neither of you are champions; am I right in saying that?
Chair: Sam is.
Chris Law: You are. Sorry, my apologies.
Chair: Do not get too hung-up on the word “champion”.
Sam Lister: To be honest, I do interact with the process, so I can talk about it from my perspective.
Q29 Chris Law: What I wanted to know is what resources are given to allow you to be that champion, and how much time do you have to dedicate to your role and responsibilities?
Sam Lister: From my perspective, making the distinction between the policy champion and, effectively, the process champion, as policy champion within my goal, innovation, infrastructure and industrialisation are absolutely core policy commitments that I have as director of industrial strategy. I have established meetings, programmes and channels that track those key policy commitments. They are the policy commitments that sit within the SDG as well, so there is that interlink.
In terms of the process side, they have a team of three. It sits as an SCS lead. It sits within the finance and portfolio office, so it is reasonably appropriately sited, because that is the office that drives things like the tracking of the single departmental plan and its development, and all that sort of stuff. I could not speak to quite how much time. As a policy champion, I probably have contact with them a couple of times a month. As SROs as a group, the three different goal leads probably interact once a month or a couple of times a month.
Donna Ward: On my side, I have no additional resources for this particular exercise but I do have a team that works on poverty anyway, and we have taken on the role of reporting against the poverty goal. It is quite a small team but poverty sits in quite a few different places in DWP, so we liaise with the disability team, the pensions team and lots of analysts to bring that story together.
For the champion role inside strategy, that has been absorbed as part of their business as usual, because they are already set up and resourced to do co-ordination across the Department and across Government. That is why we have the strategy team, so it is just subsumed as part of that.
Q30 Chris Law: Do either of you get sufficient support either from Cabinet or DFID in your roles?
Sam Lister: Clearly, it has been something of an evolving process. We are four months into having done that role. The biggest challenge, probably, in terms of doing that role—and as said, the mainstream policy commitments that I am responsible for or responsible for co-ordinating are those policy commitments within the SDG. Particularly with stakeholder engagement, the area that DFID has very helpfully stepped up into more and is providing more support is a lot of our stakeholders want to have conversations across the goals. In particular in the current climate, they are fairly time-poor and they would rather have a holistic conversation across the entire span of the SDGs and where their interests lie. Clearly, I do a lot of engagement through my day-to-day working life on the specific policies in my area. Sometimes it will drift in other directions, and DFID have taken forward a programme of work to have much more of that cross-cutting engagement, which was support we really needed.
Donna Ward: We have had a good amount of support and understanding of the goals and their history, and the reason why we are doing a voluntary review right now and all of that. Also, in stakeholder engagement, there has been some useful help. There has also been useful help around having consistent use of data across the different chapters. Where we could have more support is around what the vision is for what the final review is going to look like. When we drafted the first chapter, it was in a vacuum, not knowing how other people were drafting theirs. We now have to bring this together and really be clear about what the vision is for the final product and how all of these really quite crosscutting and overlapping areas will come together to tell a coherent but still fair story about the UK’s progress towards the goals. That is why I am hoping we will get quite a lot more engagement between now and this becoming public.
Q31 Chris Law: It is certainly helpful to hear that. I noted that both of you did not really focus on the Cabinet Office, which was part of the question, and I wonder if that is where we need to go. In the Measuring up report we just heard about in the last session, 76% of our SDGs are either inadequately or poorly met by our Departments. Would you suggest that what is needed, really, is that vision to be carried forward by the Cabinet Office, and much more centrally so from the Prime Minister?
Sam Lister: Within my goal, there is an interesting parallel because I am responsible for the industrial strategy, which has 200 policies within it, of which my Department has about 15%. A lot of it is a co-ordinating role, so I can sympathise with one Department trying to co-ordinate across lots of Departments. Where we get useful support is that the Cabinet Office is supporting from the perspective of setting the framework for the single departmental plans and how they position those. How we adhere to that guidance is an important part of mainstreaming the SDGs.
Also in terms of the governance around the key policies within the goal that I am responsible for, there is an implementation taskforce that the Cabinet Office runs, chaired by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, which gets all the Ministers round the table once a quarter and does pretty heavy scrutiny and tracks the 25 key policies within my portfolio on innovation, infrastructure and the business environment—the key things that are relevant.
Q32 Chris Law: Are they measured against the sustainable development goals? Are they compared to see if they are lining up in a line?
Sam Lister: Within the single departmental plan, yes, they are. Our view would be that an absolutely core part of what sits across everything that I do is about rebalancing the economy and there is a place-based agenda: can we make productivity fairer and more even across the country? When we think about how we interact with Cabinet Office on that agenda—forgive me. What was your second question?
Q33 Chris Law: Should the Cabinet Office take the lead and should it be centrally managed?
Sam Lister: The Cabinet Office is setting through the single departmental plan and tracks us through the taskforce. The second bit of your question was about measurement. We feel that quite a lot of what we are doing is this placed-based agenda. Quite a lot of the measurements that we are held to task for on the SDG are very national-level. In terms of a slightly more sophisticated picture on where the balance is locally and regionally, they do not quite capture that for us. We have set up an Industrial Strategy Council that will be looking at issues of place and of innovation. We will be looking at all these things but we will be looking at it at a geographical distributional level as well, which is vital for us in terms of what the SDG-level data does not really do. These are national ONS statistics. We have about 11 of them that we report to. Seven them are ONS ones.
Donna Ward: I can give a briefer answer. For the purposes of doing the review, it is fine that it is with DFID. For the purposes of really embedding the goals into business as usual, it is more of a Cabinet Office role.
Q34 Chair: Sam, you said, in answer to one of the earlier questions, that you have been doing this for four months. The SDGs were adopted three and a half years ago. Would it be fair to say, for both your Departments but, no doubt, for other Departments as well, apart from DFID, that we have come rather late to the table on this?
Donna Ward: Yes, I think so. On the poverty side, there is a whole history about the measurement of poverty and the extent to which we have had goals. We had our Child Poverty Act 2010, which had a series of targets. Those targets were then taken away in 2016. With all of that evolution on poverty, whether we have binding targets or not, as far as I know all of that debate took place without particular reference to these goals. This is my first policy-director role. I was chief analyst in DfE before this. It might be my failing but I knew a lot about poverty and I knew a lot about the Child Poverty Act and the whole history of that. I did not know about these goals until the process of the review.
Q35 Chair: Thank you for your refreshing honesty in answer to that question. Sam, did you want to respond?
Sam Lister: Certainly, when we were formally appointed to these roles, it changed the dynamic a bit. I sit on the Global Britain board—the national strategy implementation group—that is chaired by the Foreign Office, and DFID is part of that. There is an economic pillar as part of that programme of work, so the sustainable development goals do come up in those conversations. Was it absolutely mainstreamed into my thinking? It is certainly there in the single departmental plan and we are aware of that, but you could certainly argue that more strategic alignment was required.
Q36 Chair: Thank you. I am going to come back to single departmental plans a bit later.
Q37 Mr Evans: Thank you for your refreshing honesty, absolutely. It does appear to me that there may be difficulties in delivering all of this in the timescale that you have.
Sam Lister: On the key policies that I am responsible for, both as SRO and within the Department, a lot of them are high-impact and long-term. In a way, the biggest challenge is going to be consistency and commitment to the policy. One of them is a really significant push around spend on innovation, both in the public sector and the private sector. We have set a target for 2.4% of GDP being spent on research and development by 2027. We are edging in the right direction. If you look back to 2010-2015 to now, we have moved from 1.5% to 1.7%, but we have a long way to go and we need absolute commitment to be able to drive that through. Without doubt, a lot of the policies I am responsible for have that level of long-term challenge and commitment.
Q38 Mr Evans: We heard from Donna about small teams and all this, and also the frustrations of both of you, and the hope that, somehow or other, this all gets drawn together, because you cannot quite see the whole picture yet. Who is going to do this? There does not seem to be any urgency.
Sam Lister: I differ slightly from Donna on this. There is an interdepartmental group. They are getting together. It does feel like stuff has ramped up. Chair, to your point of the very fact that we have been appointed in the last four months and we have suddenly become the SROs in a much more formal way and we have become the policy champions—and there are central champions—does suggest that there has been an acknowledgement that this needed to ramp up and it is doing so. There is a greater urgency around that and it is being pushed forward. I cannot comment as to whether this is later in the day than we would have liked but, certainly, on the policies that I am responsible for, which are core to the SDGs, we are just trying to crack on with them.
Q39 Chair: BEIS has, as you rightly said, an international element and a major domestic element. Can I tempt you to comment on whether there has been a difference in the level of priority within the Department between the global-facing elements of BEIS’s responsibilities and the domestic?
Sam Lister: I can speak a little bit to other policy directors but not with great authority. The majority of the work I am doing is domestic-facing but we do absolutely have an international agenda in the very fact that we sit on the Global Britain board. We are taking forward a programme of work to be able to advance that.
Q40 Chair: That is kind of what I meant. You gave that rightly as an example where the SDGs are there—it is the global side—whereas it is not so clear to me that the SDGs, until very recently, were really much on the Department’s agenda for the domestic side.
Sam Lister: It would be through the single departmental plan. That is the core way that that happens.
Donna Ward: We need to make a distinction between whether the review will all come together, which I think it will—it will at least be a high-level statement of where we are—and how difficult it is to reach all of these goals in the time. That is a real challenge.
Q41 Mr Evans: The review is supposed to be with the United Nations by May.
Donna Ward: We can all give an assessment of where we are. I can give an assessment of where we are on poverty. We are on top of that information. The real challenge is to make real progress on the goal itself, because I am an expert on poverty but it does not mean that it is all going in the right direction.
Q42 Mr Evans: I just have a final question to Sam: the whole of Government are dominated by Brexit, and your Department particularly, so how much do you think that you have paid the price within your Department for the fact that you are 98% just thinking about Brexit?
Sam Lister: I would see it slightly more optimistically. The main policies that we are pushing through goal 9 are core to what we are doing for the economy post Brexit. We are looking in terms of innovation, in terms of rebalancing the economy geographically and in terms of supporting small and medium-sized businesses to be more productive around the country; those things are critical to the goal and are also critical to the future of the economy. They are not mutually exclusive.
Q43 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: I want to ask both of you about your engagement of external stakeholders in a collaborative approach. Sam, do you want to go first?
Sam Lister: It was agreed that we would be using—and we have tested this a little with stakeholders, and it was their preferred approach—established channels in terms of how we are approaching that engagement. It has been good on the core policies. If you look at, for instance, infrastructure and our commitments around things like digital connectivity, which sits as a DCMS policy but sits within the industrial strategy, there has been the Future Telecoms Infrastructure Review. There has been a lot of engagement about how we develop policies to improve the outreach of broadband around the country.
Q44 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: If I went to your BT stakeholder or your Ofcom stakeholder and asked them about the sustainable development goals and their involvement with you in that, would they have a clue what I was talking about?
Sam Lister: That would be a question for DCMS colleagues who have been leading on that engagement. It is a fair challenge because I do not think, necessarily, they would. All I would say is that I do sympathise from my perspective running this crosscutting programme that I run. I turn up at certain boards with certain sets of policies that I know are absolutely integral to the delivery of the industrial strategy. Whether or not they are referred to as part of the industrial strategy or they use the terminology of industrial strategy around them, if they are talking about female participation in STEM subjects or whatever it might, I know that that is absolutely critical for the industrial strategy. I am relatively comfortable. There needs to be that organising framework but I am relatively comfortable with the engagement being on the core policies and driving those forward, and then, at certain points, we will draw that back together.
Q45 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Donna, particularly on poverty and child poverty, how have you been engaging NGOs and civil society in this VNR and assessment of where we are?
Donna Ward: I do a lot of work with stakeholders generally on poverty. I did convene one big stakeholder event specifically about the VNR on 4 March, which had representation from disability groups and from some of the well-known poverty-action groups, think-tanks and academics. We also had the Trussell Trust there as well as people representing housing. I invited Treasury colleagues as well as MHCLG. There was a varying degree of understanding about the goal itself. Some of the stakeholders knew about all of the goals very well. Some had been to other stakeholder engagements on other goals. Some people did not know, although they knew a lot about poverty. I would say that that is the only really specific piece of engagement that we have done on the VNR itself, but we do a lot of stakeholder engagement on poverty generally.
Q46 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Poverty is a good example. We have also had a UN report around poverty and those issues—something that is not mentioned in this snapshot. The UN report was widely supported by civil society. How do you square not including references to the UN report and civil society’s absolute criticism of universal credit, for example, and instead, in the poverty section, there is included a positive reference to universal credit and the role of tackling poverty? How does that square? Have civil society organisations just been ignored in that process? That has not been their voice outside of this.
Donna Ward: I hosted Philip Alston’s visit to the UK, so I know all about that. I set up his meetings with our Ministers and other Ministers. I have seen his draft report, which I know will be finalised in June. Yes, it was very critical of the UK’s Government progress on poverty.
Q47 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: What I am trying to ask is how civil society, in your discussions, has reacted to that. I am interested in the civil society reaction and how you have taken that on board? Civil society reaction to the report was that the report was telling the truth, effectively; I am summarising generally. How has that civil society reaction then fed into the VNR?
Donna Ward: You will probably know that DWP has a lot of negativity around universal credit, and any big welfare reform that is being rolled out is bound to cause a lot of anxiety, so we do hear that all of the time. However, we also know that there is a positive story to tell around universal credit and around the Government’s strategy on poverty, which has largely been around supporting people who cannot work—pensioner poverty is a really good news story—as well as encouraging people who can work to work. We have a record labour market. There is a positive side. We will have a section, because you have probably only seen the one-slide summary, that goes through all the challenges, because there are a lot of challenges. We have had 10 years since the financial crisis where the economy has not really grown. There has been a really difficult climate in terms of the public finances. It has been really difficult on the welfare front. We are going to expose some of those problems.
Q48 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: I get that. What I was looking for is the bit that you mentioned: that there will be some negatives as well as positives.
Donna Ward: There will be.
Q49 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: It is a critical report as well as just a flag-waving report. In terms of both of you, what role have Ministers played in pushing this agenda, particularly in terms of the VNR? Have the Ministers engaged in this directly?
Sam Lister: On our side, I understand Claire Perry has been before this Committee to talk to you particularly with reference to goal 13.
Chair: That was part of our climate change inquiry. It was not an SDGs-focused evidence-taking.
Q50 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: She did not mention VNR and SDGs in that evidence session. Has she engaged in the VNR process with you directly? Is that something that Ministers have a hands-on appreciation of?
Sam Lister: Speaking from the perspective of doing this for four months, we came in and there was a fairly rapid timeframe around getting some information together for the Emerging Findings document. The view has always been within our Department that the different goals are owned by different Ministers, who will get the draft of the VNR very shortly, because we are in the final stages of drawing that together. That will go to them and then up to the Secretary of State.
Donna Ward: Our Secretary of State and our Minister, Justin Tomlinson, are both very aware of the VNR. Justin met with Philip Alston when he was here from the UN. Our Secretary of State only got appointed the day of Philip Alston’s press release and he was flying back to New York. She did ask to meet him but he had already gone. I would say our Secretary of State has been incredibly engaged on the issue of poverty generally, and it is a top priority for her in the forthcoming spending review. I would say that I have met her at least half a dozen times on poverty.
Q51 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: Have you ever discussed the VNR in particular with her?
Donna Ward: We have discussed the VNR, yes, but she has not been out and about talking about it with stakeholders at this point.
Sam Lister: I would just add that, clearly, there have been Cabinet discussions about this.
Q52 Lloyd Russell-Moyle: It is just about how it co-ordinates up and down and across.
Sam Lister: Again, it would come to the distinction of policy versus the overarching framework. The Ministers within my Department are absolutely committed to the core policies within goal 9.
Chair: I am going to come back to something on that. I should say that Claire Perry did mention the SDGs but certainly did not mention the VNR.
Q53 Richard Burden: Just relating to the Emerging Findings document, could you perhaps say a little more about how far from your particular areas of work and your chapters you have been able to feed into that?
Sam Lister: In terms of how far we have fed into that particular slide?
Richard Burden: Yes.
Sam Lister: We did. It was co-ordinated by colleagues in DFID. The original deadline for it was 16 November and, clearly, we were appointed on 22 October, so the timeframe was fairly narrow. That deadline then stretched, so it allowed for a couple more weeks of being able to input into it. I know DFID colleagues have taken a certain approach to it that is high-level and designed to engage but, clearly, we have a lot of detail that we would want reflected in the final chapter that we are working on at the moment that sits underneath that.
Donna Ward: On my side, lots of those headline messages have come from the first draft of my chapter. There is a lot of detail that is not there. It is also worth saying that we publish poverty statistics every year. We have a statutory duty to publish poverty statistics across the UK and the next publication is coming out on 28 March. We have been quite careful about exactly which headline messages and exactly which statistics come in here, because we do think it is all about to change, or potentially. We have much more up-to-date data that is about to come in here but some of those headlines are right in terms of the message around supporting people into work and some of the key areas around in-work poverty, still having to roll out the rest of UC, and housing being a main issue on poverty. That is all right, all condensed into a very high-level single side.
Q54 Richard Burden: There has been some criticism of the Emerging Findings document in that it seems to be a bit selective about what it covers and that it is just very snap-shotty: a few titles of policies with case studies backed up. Is this the kind of thing you think the VNR will look like? Will it look much like the Emerging Findings document with more statistics to back it up, or will it be a document that is a very different sort of document to this one?
Sam Lister: Talking from my perspective and my goal, the information there is as much as you can put in an attractive format on one slide. The chapter that I am working on is pages and pages and pages, and has a proper setting-out of what we are trying to achieve, what the key policies are that we are pushing out and how we are doing on them.
Q55 Chair: Does it go through it, target by target, indicator by indicator, including where we are failing as well as where we are succeeding?
Sam Lister: Yes. Just to reiterate, the challenge that we have on some of the indicators is that they may not be quite the right indicators to capture the outcomes that we really need to track, but yes.
Donna Ward: That is an excellent question. The first draft of my chapter on poverty had lots of charts on long-term trends. It also talked about the history of measuring poverty and all of the concepts. This has been a long history of political debate over time. I would not want to see the final product being somehow dumbed down into something that is very high-level with a few case studies and boxes or whatever. We are being led by DFID as to exactly how the final product should look but we should be pressing for something really quite thoughtful and statistically driven, not just, as you say, cherry-picking particular bits. I do not really know what the very final product will look like but we really do not want something glib, because there is a whole world out there that understands poverty in quite a lot of detail and will know lots of the more difficult messages.
Sam Lister: From my perspective, just very quickly, timing is everything. The Industrial Strategy Council’s single priority task is to create the best set of metrics to be able to work out whether we are succeeding with the industrial strategy and with the policies that we are selecting to improve productivity. That will report annually but it will report at the back end of the year. Andy Haldane, the chair of the council, has committed to reporting by the end of the year, so it is not going to help the timing of the VNR, but this is an ongoing process and it will put us in a very robust place beyond that VNR.
Q56 Richard Burden: Would you expect that the final VNR will contain the ONS data on the SDGs, and data from them on progress against the SDGs?
Sam Lister: Certainly, where appropriate, yes, it absolutely will. Seven of our 11 measures are ONS measures and we have a few others from various other sources. We would argue that there are some other measures that do need to be in there. I would just reiterate that, on the “leave no one behind” agenda, which is absolutely critical, it was the framing language we used when we went out to consult on the industrial strategy originally. Some of these ONS measures do not really get to the crux of that issue.
Q57 Chair: In terms of the indicators, you suggested previously you might have some concerns about the indicators. These are the indicators that every other country has to answer to, so, presumably, you will have something about each indicator, even if that includes a commentary on why you do not think it is the best indicator.
Sam Lister: Exactly.
Q58 Richard Burden: Would that be the same in terms of DWP?
Donna Ward: We are very rich in data on poverty. All of our poverty statistics are national statistics, so we work really closely with the ONS. We have data on all of the sub-goals.
Q59 Chair: Drawing towards a close, with just a couple of further questions from me, the point of the SDGs is to drive behaviour, so that no one is left behind. Could each of you give an example from your own Department of where there has been a change of policy or approach as a result of the sustainable development goals?
Sam Lister: We did a very significant consultation around the industrial strategy. I do not think that it is any coincidence that the core findings that came back from that reflect the same things as the SDG. They are the pressing issues, so we have been, effectively, working in parallel. We are putting forward and revising against the manifesto commitments. On one level, I would say that it is absolutely integral already.
On the “nowhere left behind” agenda particularly, it was interesting that we changed the language around “no one left behind” and “left-behind places” during the course of and following the consultation, because areas did not like being referred to as potentially in the “left behind” category. They wanted to build on their strengths and wanted to have the opportunities, et cetera. They found it quite patronising, so we reframed, but it is absolutely integral.
If you look to a policy, I would not say it was directly as a result of the SDGs but we have committed to having local industrial strategies in every area of the country—every local enterprise partnership for England. Those will be economic plans and productivity plans for those areas, explicitly about ensuring that we raise the bar across the country rather than in pockets that are successful.
Donna Ward: We have lots of policies that are consistent with the SDGs, and lots of positive ones as well as the fact that not everyone has been positive about welfare reform. For example, 1 million more disabled people in work, which we want to be a more stretching goal, is consistent with a number of the goals. However, I cannot honestly say that that came about because of the SDGs.
Q60 Chair: Sam, you referred earlier to the single departmental plans, and Government Departments, we have been told, have been implementing the SDGs via the single departmental plans. What does that mean in practice?
Sam Lister: In BEIS, we have a set of headline policies that are set out in the single departmental plan. Clearly, the Cabinet Office provides the guidance on how they would like that alignment to the SDGs reflected in that plan. It is an evolving process. For 2017-18, it was an annex in the back of the single departmental plan. As directors within the Department, we have to report against those policy commitments within the plan, and we do that. It goes to the departmental board every other month. It goes very regularly—monthly, I think—to the executive committee within the Department. The single departmental plan does drive the business of the Department and is clearly tracked, and that is why the process champion role sits in the middle of that, which is not unhelpful, because it can hold us to task and think about it from the perspective of the SDG as well.
Q61 Chair: Building on that, would you foresee that, when it comes to future departmental annual reports and accounts, we might see reporting of progress against the SDGs, the targets and the indicators in the annual report of your Department at BEIS?
Sam Lister: Certainly, it was in the last annual report but it was at a pretty high level. I would expect that to expand out with the next annual report but I do not know where the planning process has got to on that.
Donna Ward: As far as I know, on the single departmental plans, our strategy team has done a lot of mapping to make sure that our SDP, which is quite high-level, reflects the goals that we should be contributing to, but there are no metrics that directly map on to the monitoring of the goals themselves, so that would still be to do, if all Departments went down that road.
Q62 Chair: Thank you very much. I have a final question: what would you see for your Department as the most challenging SDG target to reach?
Sam Lister: In many respects, it is the economic rebalancing around the country. That is clearly much more than one policy and reflects a whole variety of things. We have some very interesting and exciting things. We use things like the sector deals programme, where we are really trying to drive diversity. We had an offshore wind sector deal last week, where we are trying to increase diversity in that workforce. We are trying to double it in 10 years. There are some things that we can get our hands around more easily and are more within the gift of a relationship between the Department and industry. If you look at 2.4% of GDP spent on research and development in this country, and we are at 1.7% now, that is a big step up. That is in the tens and tens of billions.
Donna Ward: I am the SRO for the one that I think is going to be the most difficult. On poverty, there are a lot of things pulling us in the wrong direction, which is exactly why you have said we got that report from the UN and we have to be reporting in the context of that. As I said, since the financial crisis, it has been a really tough economic climate. There are a lot of things going in the wrong direction on poverty.
Q63 Chair: We heard earlier in evidence about specific issues around food insecurity, perhaps particularly amongst children—hunger in school holidays and those sorts of issues. I guess that is part of what you are referring to.
Donna Ward: Yes, and we are connected into goal 2 on that side.
Chair: Can I thank you both very much indeed for your evidence today? It has been extremely helpful, if I may say, both in highlighting where you are now and making progress, by the look of it, as a direct result of there being a voluntary national review but also some of the challenges in terms of leadership across Government, which we will return to when we have witnesses from DFID, and hopefully the Cabinet Office, in the week or two ahead. Thank you both very much indeed.