As we emphasised in the Introduction, this Sustainability Audit of Advantage West Midlands' draft Economic Strategy should be seen as no more than an initial assessment of the extent to which the Strategy meets the requirement to contribute to the achievement of sustainable development in the United Kingdom, and specifically in the West Midlands Region. It would be wrong to read too much into the results. We believe that it is important not only for AWM to take up as many as possible of our specific suggestions for improving the Strategy before it is submitted to Government, but also for an effective sustainability appraisal to be built into their procedures for developing policies, programmes and projects in the future. Continuing vigilance will be needed to ensure that sustainability considerations are not subjugated in a drive for improvements in GDP per capita. There is much more to quality of life than that.
In the Introduction, we emphasised that the score we have awarded the Strategy against each Sustainability Principle is subjective, and that it would be wrong to add up scores to give an overall 'sustainability score' for the Strategy. Nevertheless some general conclusions can usefully be drawn from the assessment.
Our assessment suggests that in sustainability terms the draft Strategy is neither particularly good nor particularly bad. There are very few double ticks or double crosses. There are slightly more ticks than crosses overall, but this should certainly not be a cause for complacency. The fact is that a great deal could be done to make the Strategy more sustainable, by strengthening and redoubling its positive elements, reducing and if possible turning around its negative points, and above all by addressing the 'neutral' elements where either a principle is not addressed at all or the effect of the Strategy on it is indeterminate. The fact that about 40% of the principles fall into this category is disappointing, and suggests that the Strategy has not really begun seriously to get to grips with some important elements of sustainable development. We hope that our many practical suggestions for improving it will help.
Looking at the different types of principle, it seems that the Strategy is stronger on Economic and Social principles, where ticks outnumber crosses, and weaker on Natural Resources and (particularly) Environmental principles. However it would be wrong to read too much into these differences. Although Economic principles attract no crosses, more than half of them have a neutral score which could easily become a cross in due course if the principle continues to be neglected. On the other hand, Environmental principles have a rather low proportion of neutral scores, suggesting that the pattern is already fairly fixed.
Nevertheless we wish to emphasise that we believe that all negative scores are capable of becoming positives. We recommend that AWM learn from RDA strategies in other regions, which contain a number of examples of good practice in the way sustainability principles are addressed, and from the sustainability audits and appraisals of those strategies which are increasingly being carried out. For example in the North West the draft RES has integrated economic, social and environmental objectives and a common appraisal framework is being used for the RES and Regional Planning Guidance.
The analysis of the Strategy against individual sustainability principles tells us a good deal, but there is also a broader level of sustainability analysis. To achieve sustainability as a society, we need to reduce the total burden we place on our environment to a sustainable level by cutting back on the amount of environmental resources we consume, distributing access to those resources fairly and using them to improve quality of life. This can be achieved in a relatively rich region such as the West Midlands given the necessary will. It will involve analysing our global contribution to environmental destruction as a result of our own consumption as a region.
Wealth needs to be redistributed both fiscally and in terms of access to facilities such as education and health, and we need a major improvement in the efficiency with which we consume and dispose of resources. The Strategy has yet to get to grips with many of these issues at the fundamental level which is necessary. We welcome AWM's consultation process and hope this continues as action plans are developed. It will be the involvement of people from all walks of life and all parts of the region which ultimately determines the success of this and future strategies.
We recognise that AWM have little time to finalise this particular Strategy and submit it to Government. Some of our specific recommendations on action to meet particular principles may require further discussion or research which is simply not possible in the limited time available. Where that is the case, we recommend that AWM give a clear commitment to follow through the principle concerned in action plans or the corporate strategy. Whatever happens, the principle should not become 'lost' in the rather complex relationship between these various documents.
It may be, of course, that AWM will disagree with us about the relevance or importance of a particular principle, or about the ability of the Strategy to meet it. Where that is the case, we recommend that AWM should give clear reasons for rejecting the principle or our recommendations on it, possibly in a separate document which acts as a specific response to this report.
It will important for AWM's developing work on sustainable development to tie in closely with related work in the region. We welcome the statement in paragraph 74 of the draft Strategy that AWM will promote the work of the West Midlands Round Table for Sustainable Development in helping to develop a Regional Sustainability Action Framework (RSAF) which should help to provide a context for the Strategy and action plans. We recommend that a representative of AWM should be actively involved in the project team which will be preparing and finalising the RSAF over the next six months or so. AWM should also take an active interest in the development of Local Agenda 21 and Local Biodiversity action plans throughout the region.
In the final column of our assessment table, we have indicated wherever possible how progress or otherwise against a particular principle could be measured, and where targets might be set. This is a fast developing subject, with a variety of indicators being suggested at the national level and from many particular parts of the country. We have done our best to take on board the latest thinking, but the indicators we propose cannot be the final word on the subject. It will be important for AWM to keep abreast of developing thinking. It is extremely unlikely that AWM will wish to adopt all the indicators we have proposed. This would be a long and unwieldy list, leading to a potentially laborious and costly process of data collection and analysis. However many indicators AWM eventually select, it is important that they are a representative cross-section of those available and that there is no inherent bias towards any one type of activity. The Regional Indicators currently listed in Section 5 of the Strategy are strongly biased towards economic considerations and give adequate coverage of only a part of the agenda AWM have set themselves.
We also recommend that AWM should work closely with other organisations to develop a common set of regional indicators. In our view, there is a very substantial overlap between the coverage of the various regional documents and it is confusing and perhaps damaging for each document to contain its own, separately arrived at set of indicators. We therefore recommend that efforts should be made by AWM and the organisations responsible for Regional Planning Guidance, the Regional Sustainability Action Framework and the European Single Programme Documents among others to arrive at a set of regional headline indicators and broader regional indicators which would be common to all those documents and can be directly related to the headline indicators set out in the Government's Sustainable Development Strategy. There is no reason why particular documents cannot then add further indicators relating to their own particular role provided they are not inconsistent with and do not duplicate the agreed set of regional indicators.
Our final comment is a more general one. We believe that sustainable development is here to stay as one of the central tenets of government policy, irrespective of the political complexion of the government. There is strong international momentum behind it and it is increasingly being taken up locally. It concerns itself with taking a long-term perspective on, and a holistic approach to, policy-making, and with adopting a balanced approach to the underlying quality of life issues which concern those who are on the receiving end of policy. It argues particularly strongly against sacrificing long-term, underlying benefits in pursuit of short-term, superficial gain. Having audited the draft Regional Economic Strategy, we are not yet convinced that Advantage West Midlands have understood the implications of sustainable development for the wide and important task the Government has given them. We hope that our report will help to set a course for the future, but in the final analysis what matters is whether AWM are genuinely determined to infuse the whole of their work with the spirit of sustainable development, using it as a framework against which to develop strategy and policy, or whether they see sustainable development as merely one of many hoops they must jump through in the pursuit of economic growth. The jury is still out, but it is our fervent hope that the former approach will prevail.