Those few who spotted the announcement reacted with shock and exclamation. Green MP Caroline Lucas branded the move an “absolute disaster”. George Monbiot called it “irrational and counter-productive”.  Jonathan Porritt, former chair of the SDC, bitterly lamented its axing as being “dogma-driven and brazenly cynical”.

But the demise of the SDC is in many ways no surprise. One need only consult the auguries – that is to say, the small-statist think tanks whose position papers have prefigured much of the Coalition’s programme of spending cuts.

Ample warning of the threat to the SDC was given in a paper jointly authored by the Taxpayers’ Alliance and the Institute of Directors last October, as I highlighted in a blog post at the time. Their report recommended, amongst other things, the SDC’s abolition, castigating it for being “…a Government-sponsored campaign for an increase in green and environmentally aware policy. It is not an expert advisor but a political campaign, and whatever its merits may be, such campaigns should not be paid for through public funds.” This same stance was reiterated again by the TA earlier this year in a wish-list of quangos to cut after the General Election.

Whilst at the time appearing to be just kite-flying on the part of the Taxpayers’ Alliance, their words have clearly been heeded.

This has not been the only time the Taxpayers’ Alliance has agitated against green bodies. Responding to suggestions for the creation of new green regulatory bodies in the Conservative’s Quality of Life Review back in 2007, the TA fumed: “These quangos are unlikely to come cheap and some, like the Climate Change Committee, place policy decisions in the hands of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.” Of course, this was – and is – utter nonsense: the Committee on Climate Change, as it has since been constituted, makes no decisions, but simply – and effectively – scrutinises policy and makes recommendations. (Not that the Government necessarily heeds good advice. The Committee’s latest report, published last week, warned that current levels of UK spending on low-carbon innovation “should be regarded as a minimum, and cuts would be detrimental to the achievement of our climate goals” – just as the Coalition revealed it was cutting £34m from low-carbon investment.)

A similar lack of understanding of the functions of environmental regulators pervades any discussion of them by rightwing pundits. Dennis Sewell, writing in the Spectator last Autumn, called on David Cameron to slash the number of environmental public bodies: “If we have an Environment Agency, why do we also need an Energy Savings Trust, environmental campaigns, Environwise [sic] and an Air Quality Standards?”. It seemed not to matter to Sewell that they do entirely different things.

In fact, the UK’s total spending on bodies to regulate and enforce environmental protection is tiny, as I calculated last year. Axing the SDC and RCEP will save the taxpayer barely £5 million; and only half the SDC’s funding comes from Westminster, with the rest being funded by the Welsh and Scottish governments. The ultimate irony is that energy efficiency measures promoted and regulated by the SDC save the Government about £60-70 million annually. As George Monbiot writes, cutting the SDC will cost the state more money in the long term.

But going beyond the cost-cutting rhetoric that is de rigeur, what about assigning value to the central tasks these bodies actually performed?

On two counts, the merits of the SDC and RCEP ought to have seen them remain:

Firstly, both bodies held a mandate to examine a broad, complex and essential policy area, sustainable development. It appears the Government fails to understand what this term encompasses beyond climate change. Who now takes on responsibility for ensuring joined-up Government when considering biodiversity loss, resource use, oil depletion, GM crops, or any of the huge host of issues that the SDC and RCEP worked on? Defra’s Secretary of State Caroline Spelman claims that “times have changed since many of these bodies were set up, and much of what they do is now everyday Government business.” Times have indeed changed; since the SDC was founded, we have moved still further into ecological debt as a nation; yet Government business remains focused on accounting for merely fiscal debt.

Secondly, and more worryingly still, is the Coalition’s disdain for the watchdog role these bodies performed within Government. The SDC was set up under Tony Blair’s first administration (and prefigured by a similar body under the Major government) in an acknowledgement that scrutiny makes for better decision-making and balanced government. Certainly, it riled civil servants in the main Whitehall departments, who saw it as a thorn in their side. But that, after all, was its purpose. Now, in a frenzy of slash-and-burn, Westminster has rid itself of one of its overseers. Who watches now?

This piece was originally published on Left Foot Forward

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First off, let’s look at what we actually spend on the environment in the first place. The Guardian have made this job rather easier by presenting government expenditure graphically, in the bubble diagram above. You’ll need to download the PDF to see it in detail, but try and guess which bits represent environment spend. Go on. Is it the big blue blob, bottom right? Nope, that’s the NHS. The angry red zit at the top? Nah, that’s what we spent bailing out the banks. Once you’ve got out the magnifying glass, you’ll find two tiny pin-heads nestled on the right of the diagram, representing the budgets of DECC (the Department of Energy and Climate Change) and DEFRA (the Department of the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs).  Add in spending on the environment by the devolved administrations and the Department of International Development (DFID), and you arrive at the princely sum of £6.023bn. Not a small amount in itself, but tiny compared to the other outlays of the modern British state.

Which makes some of the rumours doing the rounds about potential spending cuts all the more worrying. For all his attempts to shed the Conservatives’ 1980s image, David Cameron’s recent speech to Party Conference read like a case-study in small-state conservatism, blaming “big government” for the recession and promising “painful” spending cuts. His Shadow Cabinet remains circumspect and tight-lipped about details, but Tory pundits and thinktanks are starting to vocalise the areas that might get axed under a Conservative government. And the environment doesn’t escape scot free.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance, a rightwing thinktank with links to the Conservative Party, has recently called for the abolition of the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), the Government’s independent watchdog on sustainable development. In their report, ‘How to save £50bn’, the Taxpayers’ Alliance castigate the SDC as being “a Government-sponsored campaign for an increase in green and environmentally aware policy. It is not an expert advisor but a political campaign, and whatever its merits may be, such campaigns should not be paid for through public funds.” After talking to some seasoned environmental campaigners about the likelihood of the SDC being abolished, I’m of the opinion that it may well get the chop under a Tory government. The recent departure of Jonathan Porritt as SDC Director leaves it without its most powerful champion, and I fear that its recent work Prosperity Without Growth, much feted by the environmental movement, has not been similarly appreciated by the growth-focussed Tories.

After all, quangos – ‘quasi non-governmental organisations’, or Non-Departmental Public Bodies, to give them their official title – are not well-liked on the right. Never mind that it was Thatcherite reforms of the civil service that gave rise to quangos in the first place; they are now seen as easy targets by anti-state campaigners, unloved by the public and unknown to anyone who’s not a policy wonk. The right-wing columnist Dennis Sewell, writing in the Spectator recently, called for Cameron to light a bonfire of the quangos when he comes to power – not just to save cash but also to eliminate a ‘fifth column’ of Labour-appointed cronies who, he claims, could hinder a Tory government enacting its policies. Sewell doesn’t spare the environmental bodies, bemoaning: “If we have an Environment Agency, why do we also need an Energy Savings Trust, environmental campaigns, Environwise [sic] and an Air Quality Standards?”. Too bad that they all do different things.

And what about sales of government assets? Over the weekend, Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox suggested in a BBC interview that the MoD could cut its budgets by selling off assets like the Met Office.  The Met, besides delivering weather forecasts, is well-known to climate campaigners as the home of the Hadley Centre. What might privatisation mean for the delivery of the UK’s climate projections? Curious, I took a look at the Met Office’s website, to find out what its current organisational arrangement is. It seems that the previous Tory administration already part-privatised it: “In 1996 the Met Office became a Trading Fund within the Ministry of Defence. As a Trading Fund we are required to operate on a commercial basis…” I’m reminded of former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s complaint about privatisation in the Eighties: “First the Georgian silver goes… then the Canalettos go…”

But how much do we actually spend on environmental quangos? I dug up all the figures I could find – from websites, Annual Reports and statistics from the Taxpayers’ Alliance themselves. The results are in this Excel spreadsheet.  They show that spending on environmental quangos comes to a little over £1bn (all of which comes out of the funds allocated to DEFRA and DECC discussed above). This is a tiny percentage of all spending on quangos, which the Taxpayers’ Alliance claims to be some £64bn – in itself a small fraction of overall public spending.

This isn’t to say there’s no waste in government bureaucracy. The environmental movement has been calling for more ‘joined-up government’ for decades. That’s why the Sustainable Development Commission, for example, was set up in the first place – to provide better coordination to policies, and prevent one department undoing the good work of another. Certain proposals for streamlining government might improve delivery:  if the Energy Savings Trust were merged with the Carbon Trust, for example, few environmentalists would shed a tear.

But I object to the current mantra of cuts, cuts, cuts – on two counts. Firstly, it’s clear that we don’t spend nearly enough on tackling climate change. Public R&D into renewables is only just starting to recover after two decades of being run down thanks to privatisation of the utilities; and the UK needs to spend some £100bn over the next decade in order to meet its 2020 emissions targets. Balancing the public debt needs to happen, but tackling climate change is far more urgent – and will in itself help the public finances recover, by providing green jobs and hence boosting income tax receipts.

Secondly, if we have to talk about cuts, let’s talk about carbon cuts. The public sector uses an enormous amount of energy – some 8% of total UK emissions, according to the Committee on Climate Change. Rather than cut frontline services or regulatory capacity, the government should sign up the whole public sector to a stringent energy efficiency regime. That would help cut the public debt – and more importantly, it would cut emissions, too.

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