Coalition cuts could achieve much more with 3D leadership

The first 100 days of the UK coalition government have made it clear that this government is going to cut, and cut in a big macho way, but is it really going to ‘cut it’ from a sustainability point of view?

I would suggest not. The sort of leadership that is going to take us towards a sustainable future looks further, engages widely and is authentic (connected to people’s core values) – the characteristics of 3D leadership, as we call it at Forum for the Future. And that is not the sort of leadership that we are seeing.

If the proposed higher cuts in Defra (the Department for Food and Rural Affairs) and the axing of the Sustainable Development Commission are anything to go by, it is difficult to see how the Tories’ promise of ‘vote blue, go green’ will ‘be authentic’. And if the rumours in The Times this week are true - that the Treasury is "planning to axe hundreds of millions of pounds from Britain's renewable energy and nuclear clean-up budgets" then we can ask serious questions about whether the coalition is ‘looking further’ or taking a shortsighted approach. But it is the lack of the systems thinking that underpins what we mean by ‘engaging widely’ that is the real missed opportunity.

The coalition promised a ‘root and branch’ review of what government is there to deliver and I was mildly hopeful. This was a chance to look at the whole system of public services, what we receive and how, and to find efficiencies by preventing problems rather than fixing them.

It hasn’t really panned out that way. Instead we have the Ministry of Justice proposing court closures one day and Defra talking about selling off nature reserves the next. You can’t look at the whole by asking each department to cut on its own. Prisons are being thought about separately from education; health separately from housing, education, nature... and so it goes on. Yet all these things are intrinsically linked. The ring-fencing of the NHS, although welcome, is symptomatic of this end-of-pipe approach. It shows that the government is not thinking about how to provide health – through good housing, fulfilling work, education and indeed a high quality natural environment - but how to deal with illness.

I fear that this reductionist approach is only going to lead to more end-of-pipe solutions with prevention continuing to be the poor relation of cure. We will have a smaller deficit, but we will have missed the chance to actually become more efficient. It is invariably more cost effective to prevent a problem than solve it – as the Stern review showed in relation to climate change. This is a big missed opportunity.

By engaging widely through a real root and branch approach we might spend less and get more, rather than spending less and getting less. This would mean that instead of asking people what they think we should cut and asking departments to find their percentage, you would ask them what they want delivered and rebuild public services on the basis of the things that society needs and wants. It would take a bit more time, but would certainly lead to a better outcome. That’s a big part of 3D leadership, and we will need more of it if we are going to get a good outcome from all these cuts.

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