#69: Is Wales Showing Sussex How To Do Devolution Differently?

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[00:01:22] Always Possible.co.uk You're listening to Sussex And The City with Richard Freeman. Hello, hello, hello, hello. And welcome to Sussex and the City. I'm Richard Freeman. I hope your early November is going well.

[00:01:41] And if you bonfired and fireworked last week, and given that bonfires and fireworks are a pretty big deal in Sussex, so I'm sure you did, then I hope it was as community focused and as heartwarming and as slightly weird as we do so well down here. Right.

[00:02:01] In this episode, it's quite timely actually, because the Sussex and Brighton Strategic Authority's draft prosperity strategy is being ratified by the board this week. Now that sounds very, very bureaucratic. Actually, it's really significant.

[00:02:16] The prosperity strategy is going to be a fundamental document that underpins investment and policy and engagement and accountability across Sussex for the next two, five, ten plus years. This document has been assembled hastily, but with the input of lots of people and as a chance for you to input slightly more following the publication in the next few weeks.

[00:02:45] And we'll share more details on that soon. But the prosperity strategy is the first time that there is a kind of pan Sussex strategic document that tries to get a sense of where Sussex is going and how we get there. So this conversation in this podcast is very much rooted in thinking ahead.

[00:03:07] What would happen if the decisions we make about Sussex today had to take account of the people who will live here in 20, 30 or 50 years time? And my guest is one of only a very small number of people that I think are well qualified to explore that question.

[00:03:24] My guest is somebody who I've been asked repeatedly by many people in Sussex to get on the podcast because she's such an influential and inspiring figure for many in thinking quite big about prosperity and about flourishing and about how we develop a future through the decisions we make now. My guest is Jane Davidson. Jane was a Welsh Government Minister for more than a decade, first in education and then as Minister for Environment, Sustainability and Housing.

[00:03:54] She introduced the UK's first charge for single use carrier bags, something we now all take for granted, and helped drive the policies which took Wales to among the world's leading recycling nations. She created the Wales Coast Path and a Welsh Climate Change Commission, proposing how to put sustainable development at the heart of how government makes all of its decisions.

[00:04:14] That work ultimately helped lead to the wellbeing of future generations Wales Act 2015, a really pioneering piece of legislation that requires all Welsh public bodies to think about the long-term social, economic, environmental and cultural consequences of every single decision they make. This is now the law that every bit of policy making, spending in Wales must consider the impact it's going to have on people that aren't even born yet.

[00:04:44] Jane has also since been the pro-vice-chancellor at the University of Wales Trinity St David, chaired the Wales Net Zero 2035 group and written a really important book, Hashtag Future Gen, Lessons from a Small Country, which tells the story of how Wales became the first country to legislate specifically for the interests of future generations. And that makes Wales a really fascinating comparison for what Sussex could be doing right now, certainly how many people in Sussex are starting to think.

[00:05:13] Because our new strategic authority and our forthcoming mayor will be beginning to make decisions about prosperity, infrastructure, transport, housing and investment that will shape the region for decades. So what decision-making and what considerations should sit underneath those decisions? Jane, in this conversation, talks us through the Welsh model. Seven national wellbeing goals covering everything from prosperity and health to equality, resilient ecosystems, cohesive communities, culture and global responsibility.

[00:05:43] Perhaps more even interesting are the five ways of working that she builds into it. Thinking long-term, preventing problems rather than continually repairing them, joining up outcomes rather than treating everything as a separate policy silo, and learning how to collaborate. And crucially, Jane talks about involving the people whose lives will actually be affected by the decisions being made.

[00:06:05] This feels very relevant to Sussex because we're already wrestling with the definition of prosperity and how to bring people along within it. So does this simply mean more investment and economic growth? Or does it also mean healthier people, affordable homes, thriving places, functional ecosystems, and leaving something better behind for the next generation? I think you'll probably know what our take is. Jane's answer is from Wales. So maybe we're still in the process of choosing, but we can learn from what they've done.

[00:06:34] She also makes an important point about devolution itself. The structures created by government are only the starting point. The interesting bit is what a place chooses to do with them. Wales became the world's first first trade nation, she argues, not because government told people to do it, but because schools, universities, businesses, churches, communities had already built a movement which government could then support and amplify. So what can we learn here? The question is not just what our strategic authority or our future mayor is going to do,

[00:07:02] it's what kind of long-term vision the rest of us build around them, and whether we can create what Jane describes as a genuinely distinctive Sussex way of doing things. One little note before we get into the conversation. This kind of comes in two parts, and you might notice that in the audio, and you might notice a weird sort of edit in the middle. That's because we originally recorded it some months ago, and I suffered a major technical mishap which just destroyed the first half of the conversation,

[00:07:29] and Jane, who is one of the busiest people I know, very generously agreed to come back and reconstruct the missing bit. So if you do notice a bit of weird joinery, that is why. But perhaps that in itself is a wonderful metaphor for a conversation about systems that are being stitched together as we speak. When something doesn't work, you have to redesign it. Here's my conversation with the fantastic Jane Davidson.

[00:08:11] I'm so delighted to be joined by the legend that is Jane Davidson, and I don't think that Super K is undeserved. But as a confession to listeners, we're doing this in a slightly odd way around, in that we recorded this conversation many months ago, and due to faults entirely at my own door, a technical mishap meant we lost the first half of the conversation. So Jane's very, very kindly agreed to come and redo the first bit so that we've got a bit of context and a bit of history.

[00:08:39] Jane, I'm incredibly grateful for you doing this. You're a very busy woman. So to introduce you to the world that doesn't know you, and I hope there's not many people that don't know you. First of all, how are you? How are you today? Oh, I'm incredibly well because I have a new grandson, and I think that in order to qualify for being a legend, you have to be old. Not at all. So I'm really here to talk about why we should all be looking after current and future generations together. Absolutely right.

[00:09:09] And congratulations to your family. What delightful news. You're not old, but you have had a rich and fulfilling career to date. What was the sort of first point in your career that you thought, huh, I can do more here? You realise you've taken me straight back to the age of nine. Oh, good. So I was brought up in Zimbabwe, and we used to have school milk, actually,

[00:09:36] sit outside in the morning sun, which was then given to us at break time, by which time it had curdled. It just seemed to me as though it would be much better if it was squash. That would make more sense. So I won my campaign to make sure that those of us who wanted squash could have squash. I think by the end of my time at school, we're pretty well switched over. So yes, I'm afraid I'm a kind of serial interferer.

[00:10:06] Never for any financial gain, and often not for any personal gain either. I somehow understand now that I kind of think in systems, and if I can see a big fault in the system, which means things aren't working properly, I sort of feel this urge to intervene. And I also have always been trying in that intervention, I suppose, in a way to make life fairer.

[00:10:32] It's just always seemed wrong to me, for example, that if you're poorer, then it's much harder to get housing. It's much harder to feed yourselves. It's much harder to get good education. So all my early work was actually in policy about poverty. I started off as a teacher, and I became a youth worker because I became more interested in informal work with young people.

[00:10:57] So then I became a youth and community worker, and that led me to a particular interest in how people managed in their lives when lives were really hard. And we expected them to be able to send kids to school in proper school uniforms, etc., etc. So we were one of the first places that actually kept some spare school uniform. You're just trying to help.

[00:11:24] But when I got into politics, I realized you could help in ways that were longer lasting. Policy quite often is short term. It's as short as the people who are in authority at the time. But if you make a change that has a regulation attached, you can make it longer term. So I suppose my first significant regulation was what made me the bag lady, the first major bag lady in the UK,

[00:11:50] because I regulated to put a charge on all carrier bags in Wales. And in doing so, we brought down the number of plastic carrier bags that were in our trees, in our rivers, thrown away, down from about 98% in the first year as a result of putting a 5P charge on. And I suppose that was a kind of learning in terms of intervening in systems.

[00:12:18] So the system previously had just been, you went to a shop, you didn't have a bag because most people didn't take bags. And certainly they didn't when I was young. My parents' generation did. The shop would give you a bag, you'd take it home, and then it would get thrown away. And it struck me that if we started using those bags again, then actually the shop didn't need to give us bags, which meant we could take single-use plastic in particular out of the system.

[00:12:46] But because I'd learned from Ireland when they did it, they took single-use plastic out and then found everybody turned up with black bags. And they moved to paper bags, but paper bags don't work in wet weather. So I thought we're just going to do this on all bags, irrespective of what they are, unless they are lifetime bags. So we made a separation from single-use to lifetime. And I suppose in a way, that is what I've been trying to do ever since.

[00:13:16] And we try and look at how policies can be good for more than one bag, for more than one generation, for more than one area, etc. And it's a great example because there won't be anyone listening to this that doesn't now either remember or certainly understand the impact of that small piece of legislation and how it's completely transformed the way that we shop. Within five years, every other part of the UK. Well, this is what I was just going to say.

[00:13:45] People might not know that it originated in Wales and as a piece of Welsh legislation that then absolutely spread elsewhere. Which is going to be my next question, really. So many people through this whole project that we're doing about devolution in Sussex kept saying, look at what they're doing in Wales. Look at the future generations.

[00:14:06] If we've got an opportunity to design or build or think about a sort of systems approach to our region here, wouldn't it be great if it was more like what's happened in Wales? So that obviously made me think, well, what on earth has been happening in Wales and why Wales? Two things. I think it's not all been plain sailing. I mean, you know, the next example linked to the plastic bags was actually, I got terribly excited about the idea.

[00:14:35] Well, now we could transform the whole of our waste system heading for net zero waste by 2050. And I have to say, we're, you know, we're a long way along that. We are second best in the world at the moment in Wales in terms of recycling. And the way we did that, which is important in this discussion, was that we borrowed the same way the Climate Change Act operates in the UK.

[00:15:00] We borrowed the idea of five-year budgets and squeezing performance in the budget. So saying that you had to deliver improved outcomes in specific time scales in order to increase the performance. And that one has actually financial penalties in it, as had the plastic bags. And that has been a real galvaniser.

[00:15:25] Although it would be fair to say that there are some local authorities who are really only starting to do it now. And only doing it now because of the threat of quite large reductions in funding as a result of having a very long time in which to learn what to do here. So I think you learn on a job in a way. You learn the art of the possible.

[00:15:50] And the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act, very simply for anybody who's not heard about it before, is an act that delivers the Brundtland Commission definition of sustainable development into law. Now, I'll turn that into ordinary language. It's about saying that we must take decisions today that doesn't ruin the opportunity for a decent world for the next generation.

[00:16:18] It's development that meets the needs of the present without compromising on the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. So as a new granny, for example, I'm very keen that my grandson inherits a world from my generation and my children's generation that is fit for purpose, that he can thrive in. But the decisions we're making today are doing anything but that.

[00:16:46] So that became the core of everything I did, 1999 to 2009. And it was 1999 because that's when the first government of Wales was created. We tried for 10 years to do that as a policy. We had a duty to promote it in everything that we did in the Government of Wales Act, but the duty to promote turns out to mean absolutely nothing. And therefore, we were promoting away.

[00:17:15] Here there, I'm still promoting away. But promoting doesn't mean anybody, anybody has to change their behavior. So I suppose the thing that I did was actually persuade enough people to support the idea that the duty to promote has to be turned into a duty to deliver. Because delivery is everything.

[00:17:39] Our focus in Wales since 2015, when the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act was passed, is that you have to deliver sustainable development. The people who have to deliver include the government and all its public services in Wales. They have to deliver on seven goals.

[00:17:59] The idea of prosperity, how to be more resilient, how to be healthier, how to be more equal, how to have a Wales of cohesive communities, attractive, viable, safe and well connected, how to support culture and language and how to be globally responsible. These goals inspired imaginative responses from many of those public services.

[00:18:26] They're also asked to deliver on five ways of working, thinking for the long term, being preventative, integrating outcomes, collaborating and involving people about whom decisions are being made.

[00:18:39] And part of the reason that this has become of interest, both to you and your colleagues in lovely Sussex, as well as elsewhere in the world, is being that by connecting this to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, what we did in Wales was effectively create the first law in the world to deliver on those goals.

[00:19:05] Now, I know, having spent some time in Sussex and meeting lots of people really ambitious about what your new opportunities could look like, that you won't have an opportunity to regulate in that way. But actually, there are lots of places starting to think about could they use this act?

[00:19:28] Could Sussex be a beacon in picking up these sorts of ideas and incorporating them into its mission for the future so it actively looks after current and future generations together?

[00:20:10] That's wonderful. Thank you.

[00:20:41] That's alwayspossible.co.uk. Always possible. We make bold business brilliant. And I think that's the way to think about this is how do you engage effectively? How can you think longer term, think more preventatively, collaborate more, integrate more,

[00:21:05] involve more people about whom decisions are being made in order to jointly create a big vision about what the statutory authority and your new mayor will be doing?

[00:21:20] Not their vision, not their vision, but your vision, which the mayor is at that pinnacle of delivery in the confidence that they are delivering a vision which is actually being supported and embraced and celebrated across the geographical area.

[00:21:38] So there's a bit of a double-edged sword at the moment to the process in that the strategic authority has been set up ahead of a mayor being elected and acknowledges that a lot of the big long-term plans that it creates cannot be enacted until a mayor comes in place. They want to do the underpinning work.

[00:22:27] So environmentalists, environmentalists, but also business leaders, developers, planners, all sorts of people, quite a diverse group, came together to write an open letter. A, to sort of try and define what prosperity means in terms of Sussex, but also to try and create some embedded principles. And at the heart of it was exactly what you've been talking about. It's like the decisions we make now cannot only be for now.

[00:22:53] And they cannot be just repairing problems of the past. And they need to be holistic and they need to have nature at the table. They need to address climate challenges in all of its forms that could derail absolutely everything else. We don't have prosperity unless we sort out the place we live in and how we live in it.

[00:23:15] So that's the bit I'm really interested in is how you, how did you bring everybody on board and how did you make it palatable?

[00:23:27] One of the reasons that we deliberately aligned ourselves with the UN Sustainable Development Goals is because the vast majority of countries in the world, including the United Kingdom, have signed up to deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. There are 17 goals and well over 100 actions linked to those goals.

[00:23:55] And so what we did in Wales was look at what those goals meant for us. And it's not a bad place to start, actually, because of the fact that the UK has signed up to the SDGs and the UN General Secretary has endorsed the way we have interpreted the goals for Wales in our context.

[00:24:17] So if I just read you our definition of prosperity, an innovative, productive and low carbon society, which recognises the limits of the global environment and therefore uses resources efficiently and proportionately, including acting on climate change,

[00:24:39] an economy which generates wealth and provides employment opportunities, allowing people to take advantage of the wealth generated through securing fair work. Now, that's our definition of prosperity. It is a legal definition because it's on the face of the act.

[00:24:59] So for people listening who want to see if there's anything from what we've done that might be helpful, it's not a bad place to start, to start with the Brundtland definition, to make sure that people are looking at a future which does not deliver worse outcomes for generations to come.

[00:25:20] When you talk about, for example, when you talk about, for example, businesses in this frame, of course, it's a Welsh business, Faith in Nature, that was the first to put nature on the board. And there's a very good book written about that as well.

[00:25:34] But a London business, House of Hackney, then decided as a result of our work here in Wales, they have created a mechanism to not just put nature on the board, but actually to incorporate nature and future generations into that article of business.

[00:25:54] So if businesses in the area choose to align themselves with sustainable development goals, i.e. a global mechanism that can be brought down to a very local level, you then have a situation where you could have the most incredible set of businesses which were committing both to nature and to future generations in their articles of association.

[00:26:17] And of course, those articles of association become a mission for businesses in the same way as organizations such as universities. And I've spent 10 years in university post-politics where the mission we could use to drive the values of the university, to drive the actions in the university.

[00:26:40] It's up to you to frame it so you're not binding yourselves into things that you don't want to happen, but that you are making sure there is a proper structural framework that is delivering according to the government's baselines in place that actually will give the most opportunities to the mayor when they come in.

[00:27:02] And I think since the ex-Manchester mayor is particularly topical at the moment as our new prime minister, it has been quite extraordinary how a mayor with vision can actually change outcomes. And Manchester is a prime example of that. And if you elect a mayor that is passionate about people and place, those are the core elements of any change of delivery.

[00:27:30] Because you can't do this on your own. You have to do this with a mission and values. You have to network effectively with people, not in a hierarchical way, but to work with people in a way that brings them to the table and can carry on systemically creating ideas. You have to truth tell to power when it's not being effective.

[00:27:53] You have to learn from what other people have done, not just in the UK, but in similar settings in other places across the world. And essentially, and what I'm just talking through now are five principles from Donela Meadows, who I think is one of the greatest systems thinkers, who certainly has ever influenced me.

[00:28:15] You have to love people enough to make the decisions together that will give the largest number of people the best outcomes.

[00:28:24] And the one big advantage you have of any collaboration that comes together, even if it's imperfectly formed at the beginning, is collaborative activity will deliver better long-term outcomes, better preventative outcomes, better integrated outcomes, better ways of involving people about whom decisions are being made for a much larger number of people.

[00:28:50] And if your morality is going to work, the area that you live in needs to cohere on some basic principles. Otherwise, the morality opportunity will not be as great as it might be. I just wondered if you could briefly just talk through these five ways of working that underpin how the act is implemented.

[00:29:13] Because I think a lot of the cynicism here will be, well, you know, commitments, lines in a framework, you know, that's one thing. But actually, Sussex has, you know, it's got so much work to do to think of itself as a whole, to do that collaborative bit. There's lots of collaboration that happens, but at quite small scale.

[00:29:31] If we're talking about a kind of regional way of doing, a lot of people are starting to tout or some individuals the kind of idea of the Sussex way, you know, but we kind of got to build what, you know, we can't just come up with another name. It's got to mean something. So I was interested in these five kind of ways of working that underpin the act. I think that they could be one of the most exciting aspects of what is happening with the well-being of huge generations.

[00:30:00] And I was not involved in their creation. They came through the committee process, the inputs by voluntary organizations. I think it's important to say that some of the words that I read out earlier about prosperity have actually been written into our law as a result of people responding to thinking about the wells they wanted back in 2014, the year before the act.

[00:30:26] And it's people's own words that have been actually now encapsulated in the act, hopefully for perpetuity. But the five ways of working are thinking long-term, not yet defined in the act. I mean, maybe Sussex could be somewhere that took off these sorts of principles and really helped look at what these minds look like.

[00:30:50] But thinking long-term, being preventative, collaborating with each other, integrating outcomes and involving people about whom decisions are being made. And for me, that last one is the most important. Governments at all levels are generally very poor at involving people about whom decisions are being made.

[00:31:16] And yet, if you're going to achieve long-term outcomes, it is the only way to do that. And I said earlier that everything that I've done has always had cross-party political support. And it is logical to me to involve as many people as possible in all the outcomes that you want to see.

[00:31:39] And it's why, probably, I have the largest number of pieces of legislation in Wales that I've been able to deliver because they haven't been me. They have been the people of Wales. They have been the other parties in Wales who want to support that sort of approach.

[00:31:56] So, actually, thinking collaboratively, thinking long-term, thinking preventatively, integrating outcomes and involving people will all help to create a better future, potentially for more people in your new Sussex way. So, I'm going to be very, very interested in what the Sussex way looks like.

[00:32:23] And so, I or anybody in Wales can help in that. And I hope that the Sussex way will also look as widely as possible for other ways people are developing new ways of thinking. Because we are still on a learning journey in Wales. We do have an act. We do have a commissioner. We do have a Welsh government that is subject to the act. We have a set of mechanisms that will not be available at a more local level.

[00:32:52] But actually, the principles that we're working with, the way in which we engage children in schools, students in university, young people in work, all of that learning is available to anyone and everyone through the Future Generations Commissioner's website. So, I hope you'll put that on the podcast. Of course, we will. And I think, I mean, I'll say, be careful what you wish for or offer because I think you might be inundated. But, I mean, what's such wisdom?

[00:33:21] And, you know, I think the learning we need to do is not something we need to do on our own. And I think that's so important. And I think, you know, Sussex, you know, the motto is kind of we won't be drove and it's we won't be done to. And we're quite stubbornly independent. But I think now's the time to really reach out, see how other people have tried things and just find the Sussex flavour on it. And I think there's an ambition for that.

[00:33:51] So, thank you so much for sharing that with us, Jane. And thank you so much for being my guest on the Sussex and the City podcast. There will be a Sussex way, Richard. I look forward to it, hearing all about it. Thank you. Joche Marjan, as we say in Wales. I'm not even going to attempt to say that, unfortunately. But, yes, my Welsh goodbye is in spirit. Thank you so much.

[00:34:26] Thank you very much to this episode's guest and to you for tuning in. Sussex and the City is an independent and non-political project about devolution as it happens, explained in human. It is led by always possible. You can find other episodes, resources, events and blogs about change in Sussex and Brighton by visiting sussexandthecity.info.

[00:34:53] That's sussexandthecity.info. This episode was written and presented by Richard Freeman for Always Possible. The editor was me, Chris Thorpe-Tracey, for Lo-Fi Arts. I did the music too. Production management was by Letitia McConnellogue for Always Possible. Talk to you next time.