Thank you very much.
I would just comment from the U.K. government's experience, and working as a practitioner within the government on the sustainable development strategy. I was very interested to go through the testimony of your last hearing and hear from the commissioner that she did not have enforcement powers.
It is very important to distinguish between a body that is a watchdog that monitors and a body that actually is able to exercise compliance through enforcement. The two need not be the same. It was not the case in the U.K. government, where for five years we had a strategy, “Securing the future”, the sustainable development strategy by the former Labour government, which was then thrown out by the coalition government. It had a very brief lifetime.
There was an independent watchdog, the Sustainable Development Commission, on which Peter was one of the commissioners, which was also abolished. The purpose of the Sustainable Development Commission was to monitor but to be a good friend of government. The requirement to ensure compliance with government directives lay with the departments.
There has been a debate in the U.K. government, including through inquiry by the Environmental Audit Committee, as to whether there needs formally to be a compliance mechanism and whether the strategy needs to be locked into either the Treasury or in the Cabinet Office, because Treasury is able to enforce and perform sanctions to errant departments. Fundamentally, this is about the management task at the front end, and then later on a political task.
I've served for many years in very large multinationals, which have extremely effective sustainable development strategies. Ten years, working with Unilever on the Unilever sustainable development strategy, it was very clear. We have annual reviews. We have regular reviews. We are constantly looking at and revising our targets. We are resetting and people are held to account. If they're being held to account in a company, why should we not expect people, managers, to be held to account in a government department?