As a political realist.... As you know, things haven't always gone too smoothly in committees during the last 10 years. I think that's fair to say.
My objective was to create something, I won't say for the ages, but to survive changes of regime. Therefore, rather than dictating in specific detail what should be in the strategy, I thought it would be more powerful if the government of the day started working on that. That would give future governments the chance to build on it, but the main thing was to keep the machinery ticking over. One of the reasons that I spent so much time working with the commissioner of the environment was to make sure we had a review process that forced people on a three-year cycle to keep coming back, reviewing the draft, coming back to these committees, and so on.
I think it has worked as well as could be expected, or even better. The mere fact that we're having a discussion today is a testament to that.