This gives an outline of how I think sustainable development should work - and the type of questions it generates for each of the main areas of policy.

1. Making Sense of Sustainable Development
How should we think about sustainable development as an organising principle for a
government or society?
We can frame an approach to delivering sustainable development under three
headings:
1. Pursuit of an overall objective: wellbeing or quality of life over the
long term. A clear sense of what we are trying to achieve – the
maximisation of wellbeing or quality of life over the longer term, together
with greater fairness in the distribution of wellbeing. This is a ‘meta-
outcome’ for a government, embracing environmental, social, economic
and individual wellbeing.
2. A set of ‘hard choices’ that the objective implies in the present. This is to
prevent SD being just an aspirational statement about the future and to
give some sense of how the SD central organising principle means we are
different to a government that doesn’t adopt this principle. These hard
choices include:
(1) Long-termism: giving greater weight to better long term outcomes at
the expense of lesser short term outcomes. Investing in prevention and
early intervention where this gives better cost-effectiveness.
(2) Silo-busting: breaking down barriers and reconfiguring what we do to
achieve longer term outcomes in the most cost-effective way.
Although this sounds obvious, it is a hard choice because the
institutional architecture and inertia that maintains existing service
configuration is very robust, with hard silo walls and strong defensive
tendencies.
(3) Evidence-based. This means upping our game on the use of evidence
– especially cost-effectiveness evidence. The idea is to make the
budget stretch as far as possible in achieving the objective.
(4) Investment orientated: a focus on investment at the expense of
consumption, building resilience and future proofing, to serve citizens
better in the future.
3. A political project, recognising that Ministers need to bring voters and
stakeholders with them and be open to feedback from them. We could
qualify the objective to reflect politics: the maximisation of wellbeing or
quality of life in Wales over the longer term, stretching but respecting the
art of the political possible. The ‘political possible’ isn’t fixed, but means
we have give attention to how the government works – building trust, being
transparent and accountable, having a clear consistent narrative about the

2. future and hard choices, becoming skilled at behaviour change and
persuasion etc. We need to recognise that governments tend to
overestimate what they can achieve in the short term, and underestimate
what they can achieve in the long term.
What does this mean in practice? The idea of applying the SD principle as
defined above is to engage us in developing and addressing strategic
questions about long-term purpose and how well we are factoring that
purpose into current decision making and organisational design. A selection of
‘starter’ questions of this nature is included in Appendix 1 to stimulate
discussion. The aim is for ministers and their officials to draw up their own set
of strategic challenge questions as a basis for implementing the SD central
organising principle.
Strategic questions arising from the sustainable
development principle – some starters
These questions are to stimulate discussion about how the SD principle would
apply to policy-making in the Welsh Government. It is for ministers to
determine whether these questions or others are the right way to address the
SD principle. We should also recognise that the Welsh Government has
made many advance in this agenda and is far from starting from scratch.
Education & skills
• What should be taught in schools to best prepare young people for an
uncertain and rapidly changing future? Is there too much emphasis on
knowledge and not enough on capability or resilience? Note Eric Schmidt
of Google raised this question as a strategic challenge for the UK.
• For a fixed budget, what is the optimum distribution of resources between
tertiary, secondary, primary and early years?
• Are the long term costs (to public services, themselves, their communities)
of a person’s failure at school properly internalised into the incentive
structures for schools, so that they give the right emphasis to avoiding
failure?
• Should the school system do more to address the great disparity in
parental capacity so that it mitigates the disadvantage of coming from a
home where the parenting skills are weak, or the parents chaotic - for
example by having a longer day and four terms, or more activity during
holidays?

3. Families & community
• Should we adopt family integrated services and intervene intensively for
the 2-3% families at most risk? What is our model for drawing together
multiple services to create a coherent support offering for such families?
These families can cost £250k /year – to what extent are these future
costs internalised into the approach we take to helping them?
• Should the focus of help be on adults or children? Should assistance
focus on improving parenting skills or on reducing dependence on the
capability of parents to support children?
• What are the quality of life implications of increasing isolation of older
people – what are policy implications?
• Relationship breakdown has negative wellbeing consequences for
families. Do we have the right mix of measures to provide support for
couples in difficulty and address potential drivers of breakdown (drugs,
debt, prison)
• Is there a ay to promote opportunities for neighbours to get to know each
other, based on clear evidence that this tends to enhance wellbeing,
improve resilience and self reliance?
• Do major interventions like Flying Start and Communities First do what we
hope they will – are we clear on who benefits and how?
Health
• What emphasis and resources to evidence-based preventative measures,
and relatively less to treatment of illness – though recognising that
demographics and societal preference will drive underlying demand. How
would a financial transition to great investment in prevention work?
• How to bring health and social care together to optimise care pathway and
efficiency?
• Is there a better ‘wellbeing’ approach to the last years of life – considering
whether the expense and intensity of interventions in the last two years of
life provide the dignified death that most people say they want
• Is mental health a poor relation in health care spending and is there a case
for greater investment in cognitive behavioural therapies?
Crime
• Given persuasive costs effectiveness evidence, should we be expanding
‘youth inclusion’ programmes?.
• Focus prisons on reducing reoffending, with greater attention aid to
preparing for law-abiding life outside, avoiding extremely disruptive short-

4. stay sentences and greater attention to transitions from custody to the
community?
• Are there better ways to handle transitions from prison back to the
community?
• Adopt a harm minimisation approach to illicit drugs – perhaps including
prescribing?
• How do we deal with savings made in crime prevention or youth inclusion
through spending Welsh public money that creates savings in non-
devolved budgets like prisons? Do we underinvest as a result? Should
Wales receive ‘payment by results’?
Economy
• Which government interventions for long term economic success? Is it
down to major slow-moving drivers: skills, regulation, tax, bureaucracy,
infrastructure, entrepreneurship – or are there also ‘industrial policy’
measures to take with firms or sectors?
• Give due weight to GDP – but are there other critical measures of
economic ‘progress’ that could shape policy? Wealth, household
disposable income, measures of income corrected for depreciation of
natural, human and physical capital?
• What works in helping transition from economic inactivity to productive
activity? Should the focus be on unemployment and jobs at all levels in the
economy, not just hi-tech or knowledge-based?
• Reshape apprenticeships and other programmes for teenagers to
strengthen psychological fitness to help young people find and keep work?
• Can reshape transportation, housing and economic policy to reduce
commuting time and allow a more localised economic and social
geography?
• Should Wales tend towards light-touch in regulation? Only go beyond
regulations made at UK or EU level where the wellbeing case justifies it
(applies generically)?
Environment
• What levers do we have to promote resource efficiency as a dominant
environmental strategy?
• Is there a more efficient way to fund flood protection through insurance:
recognising total cost of flooding includes private costs (pooled cleaning
up costs through insurance) and seek harm minimising allocation between
avoiding floods, reduction of impact and costs of damage/repair.
• Does the planning system block to much development? Should we give
greater weight in the planning system to the high value that people place
on owning their own home and living in pleasant surroundings?

5. • Should we more carefully differentiate protected areas – avoid
overprotecting some and under-protecting others and give weight to
access as a wellbeing driver.
• Recast farming as a land management occupation and production of a mix
of market good (food) and non-marketed goods and services – for which
payments are made.
• In energy sector transition, should we place even greater emphasis on the
demand side and energy efficiency and relatively less on renewables. Be
wary of high carbon cost technologies (microgen, PV etc)?