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One rule for social mobility, another for sustainability

Government pronouncements on how they will ensure progress on social mobility and sustainability reveal mixed up thinking at the heart of government.

Government pronouncements on how they will ensure progress on social mobility and sustainability reveal mixed up thinking at the heart of government on how to achieve outcomes.

In July 2010, Environment Secretary announced the abolition of the government funded watchdog on sustainability, the Sustainable Development Commission. The rationale was that sustainability was too important to be left to an outside body – it had to be brought in house and "mainstreamed" within government with an oversight role for Parliament’s Environment Audit Committee.

"On sustainability - together with my right hon. friend the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change - we are determined to play the lead role across the whole of Government. We will mainstream sustainability, strengthen the Government's performance in this area and put processes in place to join up activity across Government much more effectively. "I am not willing simply to delegate this responsibility to an external body. I have accordingly decided that I will withdraw DEFRA funding from the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) at the end of the current financial year, and instead take a personal lead, with an enhanced departmental capability and presence." (Caroline Spelman, July 2010)

So far, so coherent. Except the government’s new social mobility strategy (PDF, 2.82MB) takes exactly the opposite tack. It echos uncannily the original rationale for handing scrutiny of the government’s sustainable development performance to an external body.

“We have set ambitious goals for social mobility. Achieving them requires robust mechanisms to underpin the commitments in this strategy. So we are taking steps to ensure: external scrutiny; a new set of leading indicators to help us track progress; and ministerial activity to ensure social mobility is and remains at the heart of our policy agenda. "First, we are creating a new statutory Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission. The Commission will assess progress on both social mobility and child poverty, holding the Government and others to account and acting as an advocate for change." (Government Social Mobility Strategy, April 2011)

What conclusions to draw?

The first conclusion is that there is no overall coherent model in government of what mechanisms are needed to deliver change in Whitehall (memo – I still think the external scrutiny route is the only one for a cross-cutting issue which no department sees as core to its mission – and the social mobility strategy is right to recognise that). The second is that mainstreaming and being held to account externally for performance are not alternatives, but complements – with the latter reinforcing the former. The third is that governments have a strong preference for scrutineers they themselves establish and whose chairs they appoint. So the Milburn commission – another new arm's length body – needs to hit the ground running before it becomes another tiresome body which ministers put out of its misery by mainstreaming.

Publisher
Institute for Government

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