UK 2009 Where We Are Now

Where we are now

A review of progress on sustainable development

A support document for Breakthroughs for the 21stCentury

July 2009 

Introduction

When the Sustainable Development Commission decided to launch a project to identify potential breakthroughs in sustainability, we began by taking a look at what has happened since the launch of the UK Government SD strategy, Securing the Future, in 2005. Collated mostly from existing published sources -often from within government departments -we identified trends in areas as diverse as housing policy, the environment, health, inequalities and waste. The picture that emerges (see below) iscomplex, with substantive progress in some areas undermined by stasis or even reversion in others. It could perhaps best be summarised as‚ winning battles but still losing the war. 

The material we assembled has triggered a lot of interest. We have therefore decided to publish it on our website under the title Where are we Now?We do not make any special claims that it is comprehensive, and some of the data sets are by now a little out of date. But the juxtaposition of so many pieces of information has clearly been of value to others and we wanted to share it.

Securing the Future was launched by Tony Blair in 2005, along with a common framework to be used by Whitehall and the three Devolved Administrations in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The title of this framework document -One Future: Different Paths ”turns out to have been accurate. Faced with broadly similar but nationally distinctive sets of issues, each administration has charted its own course on sustainable development. In Wales, sustainable development principles have beenat the heart of government since the creation of the Welsh Assembly Government, made substantive through its SD Scheme. In Scotland, the original SD Strategy Choosing our Future, produced by the former Labour/Liberal Democrat Coalition Government, has been replaced by the SNP with a national performance framework which puts the achievement of sustainable economic growth as its overarching purpose. In Northern Ireland, the original SD Strategy First Steps has struggled to gain any traction.

Embedding sustainable development as the central organising principle of Government is a tough challenge. In addition to Breakthroughs for the 21stCentury and Where are we Now?, the SDC will be publishing a third document, titled The Standing of Sustainable Development in Government which provides an overview of how, from our point of view, this challenge has been tackled by the four administrations across the UK.

Turning again to Whitehall, the SD programme based upon Securing the Future has recently been reviewed by Defra, with the intention of renewing and refreshing it. Any decision to update or replace the strategy itself is likely to be made the other side of a General Election.

In the central part of this document we look in more detail at some of the data sets which sit behind the four priority areasinSecuring the Future: climate change & energy, sustainable production & consumption, land use & natural resources, and sustainable communities. A brief summary of key trends follows here. Where the data has been disaggregated we have tried to include the relevant figures for, for example, Scotland, but many of the data sets are UK wide.

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