I went to a wake last week. A valedictory seminar to mark the demise of a small quango that is being axed along with others that deserve to be abolished because they are expensive and self-regarding and their shoddy work could be done more cheaply, if not better, by someone else. Given my views on quangos, I ought to have been celebrating. I wasn’t. I emerged convinced that this particular body’s demise will impoverish us.
Many people will not have heard of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution — its name itself a throwback to the era when setting up a royal commission was Harold Wilson’s favourite way of making difficult problems go away for 18 months or so. Caroline Spelman, the environment secretary who axed it, wasn’t familiar with its name either because she got it wrong when she announced its demise in parliament last autumn as part of 30% budget cuts in her department and stumbled over it again in the press conference afterwards.
After hearing the case for and against abolition, I believe Spelman has made a mistake that will one day have to be rectified, not unlike her decision to sell off the nation’s forests.
You would have thought someone would have reminded her that the commission has a far more distinguished history, and at £1m a year a much smaller budget, than most of its fellow victims. It has existed for more than 40 years — three-quarters of the lifetime of the environmental movement if you date its birth to the publication of Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s seminal book about environmental pollution, in 1962 — without ever being uncritical of the interest group that spurred its creation.
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That marks it out from the self-serving environmental bodies that mushroomed under Labour (the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment] and the deservedly axed Sustainable Development Commission).
Someone should have reminded Spelman how much the royal commission is responsible for transforming the world in which we live. When it was set up there was still lead in paint and in petrol, incinerators spewed out dioxins, we built roads in preference to railways, organochlorine pesticides were used in agriculture and boffins allowed water laced with plutonium to flow into the Irish Sea out of simple curiosity as to where this most traceable of pollutants would end up. It was a world in which, as Professor Sir John Lawton, the commission chairman, put it: “The solution to pollution was dilution in the ocean.”
I believe Spelman has made a mistake on this quango that will one day have to be rectified All that was changed by the commission. Its 29 often blisteringly sharp reports to the Queen and government were at times as welcome as “a rattlesnake in a lucky dip”, as one supporter put it. The most influential — on nuclear waste, chaired by Sir Brian Flowers, in 1976; on lead in the environment, chaired by Sir Richard Southwood, in 1983; and on transport, chaired by Sir John Houghton, in 1994 — had a seismic effect on government policy at home and abroad. The calibre of people who have served on the commission — including Richard Doll, the 20th century’s foremost epidemiologist, who linked smoking to cancer — together with its multi-disciplinary nature, contributed to its world-class reputation.
A glorious past does not by any means justify a continued existence. And, if one is honest, there was a sense of finding something to do about some of the commission’s recent reports. But not its last, a survey of the implications of an expected 10% rise in Britain’s population, which caught the government on the hop.
Has the world passed the commission by? Robert Watson, chief scientist at the environment department, argued at the seminar that while the commission had performed superbly, advice to government has become more international, more internet-based. Some of the tasks of the commission could be picked up by the Royal Society, others by the government’s Foresight think tank or research sponsored by departments.
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Few present were convinced, least of all people who care how information gets into the public domain without being subject to political influence. The commission, being independent, always published first and briefed ministers second. Who would look into the potential environmental impact of low-carbon energy generation — such as a new generation of nuclear power stations? Or the planet’s dwindling supplies of phosphate? Or the growing amount of acid and plastics in the oceans? It was difficult to think of anyone with more authority to perform those tasks than a body whose members have tackled other environmental problems for many years.
The coalition is in a mess over advice from experts. It has given the impression that it doesn’t see the need for any, which is absurd, whereas I suspect it is simply opposed to paying for it. It also needs to resolve the question raised by its bonfire of the quangos — which part of government is responsible for ensuring we develop sustainably from an environmental perspective? Until it sorts those things out, its thinking will look short-term and its claim to be our greenest government will remain questionable. An option discussed last week was to revive the commission as an independently funded panel of environmental advisers and see how long it is before the government comes creeping back to ask its opinion. I rather like the sound of that.