Hello!
Hello, and welcome to Policy Pulse, a new Substack about public policy.
Every week I’ll be sending out a pulse of interesting things that have caught my eye from the world of public policy in the UK.
There are many fascinating and important issues that never make the news headlines, with policy organisations of all types constantly putting out material that provides insight into the world around us – if only it was a bit easier to find out about.
Each week, I’ll be tracking down a selection of this, and compiling it into a hopefully interesting (though definitely not comprehensive) round-up. This inaugural edition seems to have taken on a bit of an environmental and agricultural flavour; I’ll see about finding some nice technical tax policy or similar for next time…
Report of the week
Each edition of the newsletter will feature a policy report that is in some way of interest. Dozens of these things get published each week, most to little or no fanfare outside the sector in question.
This week, a report from the Brussels-based Carbon Market Watch makes the case that claims by energy companies that the energy they generate from fossil fuels are nonetheless “carbon neutral” are to a large extent false. The companies claim to be offsetting their emissions by buying carbon credits from other sources, but mostly do not make clear exactly what activities are undertaken to generate these credits, still less whether they truly offset the emissions from the fossil fuels. In short, the companies are not showing their working, and their claims can’t be verified.
I find the way language is used to present policy issues both interesting and, often, frustrating. The use of language here is a case in point: it suggests this is an organisation working in a well developed discourse and not necessarily seeking to reach out beyond it. In particular, the report’s main charge is of “greenwashing”, as if that is self-evidently a heinous crime with terrible consequences. Maybe it is, and most people with awareness of these issues will have a rough idea of what it means. But the report doesn’t explain to the reader exactly what they mean by the term, or why it’s important. Given that the report calls specifically for new laws to ban greenwashing, this undermines the strength of its argument a bit, although the underlying case that energy companies are exaggerating the environmental credentials of their work appears well supported.
The challenge for bodies working on this issue is to put the importance of their case across in language that enables regular people to understand it, and buy into it. To an extent that’s true of lots of policy areas, but for an issue of such importance, and that will require democratic consent to substantial lifestyle changes if the challenges are to be addressed successfully, it’s particularly critical.
Letter of the week
Policy organisations are constantly writing to ministers and other decision-makers. Sometimes those people even reply. I’ll highlight an interesting letter in each edition of the newsletter.
This week it’s a letter from a minister in a devolved administration, specifically Scotland’s Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and Islands, writing to the Secretary of State for International Trade about the UK’s free trade agreement with New Zealand, which was agreed in principle earlier in the month.
Mairi Gougeon raises concerns that the deal will result in Scottish farmers, particularly of cows and sheep, being undercut by cheaper imports of meat from New Zealand, produced to standards lower than those applied in Scotland. She cites the difference between farmgate beef prices in Scotland and New Zealand as around 25-30%. The National Farmers Union for Scotland are also quoted for support, expressing the same concerns.
Question of the week: do we only have 60 harvests left in the soil?
Each week, this newsletter will highlight a question on a policy issue of significance, and provide some reading material that might suggest an answer to it – although usually, this is likely to lead to more questions. The idea is for this section to be reflective rather than topical.
We’re starting with the eye-catching claims published in multiple outlets a few years ago that our soils (variously in the UK and globally) are capable of yielding only an alarmingly small number of harvests – variously 30, 40, 60 or maybe 100. This was even repeated by Michael Gove in 2017, when he was Secretary of State for the Environment, in a speech that has remained notorious in agriculture policy circles for its accusation that farmers “drench” their soil in chemicals.
So, is the claim of limited harvests true? Fortunately, no. Several robust fact-checking exercises have looked into it and found it to be unsupported. Studies of soil suggests that its yield might indeed drop considerably if it is badly managed, but that it will plateau at a low level rather than become entirely barren or automatically get eroded entirely away. Soils globally are a mixed picture: some are growing, some eroding, but the great bulk have many more than 100 years of harvests in them.
However, there’s something of a consensus that we could be doing better at managing our soil. We don’t measure the quality of our soil in the same way as we do with water and air, and there’s not agreement on exactly what should be measured – is a fertile soil the same as a healthy or high quality soil all-round? Approaches differ. The question links to more policy discourses than just food production: soil’s ability to hold water, or propensity to let it run off, is important for the ever-more topical issues of flood prevention, for instance.
There is also an interesting link with climate change: organic matter in the soil can store a considerable, but finite, amount of carbon. As a one-off hit, it might seem attractive to make maximum use of this during the period when we are de-carbonising our economic activity. The snag is it’s not permanent: if we up the carbon content of our soils, then slacken off on our soil management a hundred years later, that carbon will get released straight back into the atmosphere. Any strategy to use soil for decarbonisation will need to be a strategy for good soil management in perpetuity – a challenge!
The policy framework for soil is shaped by Brexit, now that the UK is free to change rules arising from EU directives in this area. Agriculture policy is also devolved, so different replacement schemes are being developed in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. England’s approach is to base payments to farmers on defined “public goods”, across three categories: sustainable farming, nature recovery and landscape recovery.
Last week, the House of Commons Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs Committee issued a report raising concerns about the handling of the seven year transition period to the new regime: if badly handled, as seems likely, the Committee argues it could lead to both business problems for farmers, and poorer environmental practices.
We’ll see in due course whether this proves to be another prescient and insightful parliamentary report that gets blithely ignored by the Government. Either way, while we don’t appear to be facing an urgent crisis for our soils, we could probably be doing rather better than we are.
The website of the Sustainable Soils Alliance (at whose launch Mr Gove made his much-quoted speech, in fact) contains a wealth of further information.
Matters of note
A few final items of interest. I will try to keep these as items from policy organisations rather than magazine columns or other pieces of comment, though obviously if something is particularly worth reading it will get included here.
Sewage discharge and water management has been one of the zeitgeist issues over the last week, and arguably month. Surfers Against Sewage wrote to The Times condemning the widely publicised vote on the Environment Bill (pre-U-turn… although the detail of HMG’s new approach isn’t yet as clear as the proposed amendment was). Also last week, SAS’s Chief Executive grumbled about water companies blaming individuals for flushing wet wipes, citing it as an example of the industry attempting to deflect attention from its own responsibilities. In fact, the industry had been going on about the issue all through #Unblocktober (did anyone notice that? Or was it another discourse talking to itself?) – a campaign that had not just wet wipes in its sights, but paint, fats and all sorts of things that ought not to be put into the sewer system. Indeed, it was a hashtag that Surfers Against Sewage had joined in with.
Perhaps bearing out SAS’s critique of the industry further, water company trade body Water UK has been calling for action beyond the industry. Which doesn’t make the substance of their argument wrong: there are certainly some interesting pointers in there, for instance about developers’ “absolute right” to add new drains to an already overloaded sewer. The graphic at the bottom of that page puts 24% of the causes of inadequate river status at the feet of industry. For a decent big-picture review of investment in water treatment and management, this piece from the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management is worth a read.
Finally, and on another note entirely, radio broadcasting has had an active period of policy attention. DCMS’s radio review was published on October 21st, and makes clear what an interesting journey radio has been on this century. The item in it that got some media attention was the headline of no FM switch-off before 2030, although the report advises the industry to prepare for it at some point after that date. This follows the roll-out of DAB, which the report judges to have been broadly a success, probably fairly. In another recent development, community radio stations are now reaching a million people per week. (I may return at some point to the very different story of community TV…) Also this century, regulatory change has allowed a major consolidation of local commercial radio, which has been transformed into a set of de facto regional-cum-national networks, with genuinely local programming left largely to the BBC and the community sector.
The report predicts, with caveats, that live radio will still account for over 50% of UK audio consumption in the mid-2030s. Questions for the future include how to ensure it remains free-to-air when it increasingly uses non-broadcast infrastructure (ie the web).
The second publication in the field was the first set of new RAJAR (radio listening) figures for 18 months. They showed some interesting changes brought by the pandemic: a slightly later morning peak, and a noticeable shift from car to home listening. Internet listening has grown, and there has been a slight drop-off in younger people (under 24) listening to radio: they spend less time listening, and to fewer stations. No doubt that’s a trend that the sector will be watching closely.
Thanks for reading
That’s it for the first Policy Pulse. Please do subscribe if you found it interesting, and forward it on to anyone else who might. If you’re on Twitter, you can find me @JMKPolicy. Let me know on there or by reply what you liked and didn’t like about the newsletter – I’ve no doubt it will evolve as we go. See you next week!