TUESDAY 7 MARCH 2000

MR DAVID GEE, MR JOCK MARTIN, MR DAVID HEATH AND MRS INGER OHMAN

  60. We know about the EPI process and that is to be taken forward and you may have views on the extent to which political leadership is being provided at a European level on that. Have you been involved in environmental policy appraisals relating to Commission policies? Did you contribute in the past to the "Green Star" scheme which I think subsequently died a death or certainly seems to have disappeared? Is there anything which is going to come out to replace that? Are you making an input at what I would call a strategic level into the Commission or ministerial decision making on environmental appraisal?
  (Mr Gee) Not really, no. The way we are beginning to approach that area is in the area of effectiveness of policies. As with the outlook section it the `Turn of the Century', if we were to say anything about what we think might be the position in 2010 it is that you have to take a bit of a view about policies. For that exercise we took the simplistic view that policies would be implemented. That is a bit simplistic but at least it is over-generous to the policy makers. In a more detailed way we would like to expand that area of work using the regulation which says we have to provide information that helps policy makers assess the results of policies, so it is firmly within our mandate to look in more detail at effectiveness of policies because that is not well developed in the whole of Europe. In our little exercise on the standardised reporting directive we found that less than 20 per cent of the returns from Member States to the EU had to address the question of effectiveness of policies. It is axiomatic that most policy makers do not want to have their work examined for effectiveness, it is not part of human nature really. It is up to bodies like yourselves to push this point and say why are we all here? We would like to do a bit more work in this area so that we can say with more conviction it looks like the future state of the environment is going to be X or Y because the effectiveness of the policies in place and in the pipeline is A or B.

  61. You have had your remit broadened because you are no longer just confined to the environment, sustainable development is now part of your remit. How are you putting that into practice in terms of input from you to those same organisations?
  (Mr Gee) Not very much yet. It was brand new and, as you have observed, everybody is trying to work out how to integrate environment and economic sectors by integration. Bringing on board a third circle of the social dimension is not something that we are equipped to do resource wise or time wise at this point except we are creeping towards it. So if you look in the new Transport and Reporting Mechanism which is essentially about the links between economics and environment and getting that right, there are some indicators that one could argue are in the social box. I think access to services is one and possibly air missions that breach health limits is another. So we are tiptoeing into the third circle of social in addition to the two circles of environment and economic, focusing in this period and in the next year or two on the economic environment interface rather than social where we have not got the resources or equipment or time. We would do that part in co-operation with Eurostat which does cover social far more than we do and other organisations like the Commission on Sustainable Development of the UN.

  Chairman: Can we go on to monitoring particularly in light of Helsinki and so on.

  62. What role do you think both your organisations should have in developing reporting mechanisms? Does the Commission automatically consult you? How does it work?
  (Mr Gee) It does consult us sometimes on the monitoring and reporting side of life and Jock has got two or three specifics that might amplify that. In this newer area of monitoring progress with integration our initial approach was to develop these 20 criteria which we think are a generic framework that any sector, be it fisheries, internal market development, could usefully look at at least and maybe consider using as a generic framework across sectors for reporting the progress on integration and, similarly, within the sector reporting mechanisms like TERM for transport. The approach of TERM we think lends itself to other sectors as well and we are developing a generic framework for sector reporting mechanisms that we hope will be taken up by agriculture and energy. We are very much in the business of developing generic approaches that are useful across the board and we would hope, therefore, at some stage to be part of a generic framework for sustainable development monitoring which will have to go hand in hand with the development of the sustainable development strategy of the EU.
  (Mr Heath) It is regrettable—and I speak here as a person who spent his career in statistics—that people do not ask statisticians' opinions early enough when they are setting up administrative systems which could have a useful spin off of data or reporting mechanisms and this is quite a general phenomenon and for a long time we have been saying please consult us early and it is very rare that we are heard.

  63. We understand that both of you are working and collaborating on projects relating to indicators. I wonder if you could each give us a very quick overview of the key areas that you are working on there?
  (Mr Martin) In our new regulation the Agency is mandated to produce a regular indicator report and we will be publishing the first one in the Spring of this year. We have set out a reporting strategy for between now and 2004 which maps our indicator reporting between now and the next five-yearly stated outlook report. The other two areas that we are playing a part in are the Transport Environment Reporting Mechanism specifically and also in the environmental headline indicators exercise through the EPRG expert group. In both of those we are working with Eurostat, whereas the regular indicator report is an EEA commitment.
  (Mrs Ohman) Eurostat is certainly working on the economic and social indicators in a very wide field. Perhaps I could start with a communication in 1994 from the Commission to the Council and the Parliament which set out what should be done for environmental pressure indicators and "green accounting". The wish was to have one single figure at that time, the green GDP. Actions on pressure indicators and environmental accounting started and this exists now, both environmental accounting linked to the national accounts and pressure indicators. We are working very closely with the Agency, with the sectoral integration indicators and with the headline indicators as well. We have also worked with indicators of sustainable development. We have helped the UN Commission for Sustainable Development to test their indicators; we did that in a 1997 publication. We used the data available in Eurostat to see what we got out of it and we will do a new one for the CSD session on indicators in 2001. We have also worked very closely with OECD who was the organisation that started these sectoral indicators in the 1980s.

  64. That really comes on to the next point I was going to raise, which is how far do you find that the work you are doing fits in with OECD and UN level work and to what extent is there now a degree of international consensus on headline indicators or to what extent is there the sort of division that you referred to in relation to chemical indicators in the EEA written submission to the Committee?
  (Mr Gee) I think generally on the institutional co-operation with OECD it is pretty good, developing, getting better and so on. I do not think there is that much agreement yet on which headline indicators for sustainable development should be the ones. We have only got 15 in the UK which straddle the three boxes of social, economic and environment. The developing and emerging and yet to appear first edition of European headline indicators at the moment are just environmental. There is quite a way to go before you would get pan-European agreement on any 18 or 20 sustainable development indicators, but that could be greatly accelerated by activities via committees like yourselves. I think by initiating something pan-European with counterparts in parliaments in other Member States you would find that you could play a key role in getting pan-European Member State agreement to which indicators matter, because if you cannot agree this with your colleagues in Italy and France then probably at Commission level or other levels it will be equally difficult. There is a kind of a political gap there which I think you could usefully fill.

  65. Can I just move on very quickly to sectoral indicators and first of all ask to what extent the sectoral indicators that you are developing compliment the sectoral Council strategies that are being developed following the Cardiff Process?
  (Mr Gee) I think it is right to say that institutionally they started off life in different strands because councils are, as Michael Meacher said in his evidence to you, somewhat autonomous even with respect to the Environment Council, so they are certainly autonomous with respect to the EEA through a gentle approach of producing some indicators we think will be helpful in influencing the future drafts of these strategies. Ideally we would like the strategies to reflect our 20 criteria next time around and we will be working to try and make that happen, but as with all of our products, if they are not useful to people they will not be used. We do not work through any kind of compulsion. So although we have started off life using separate political initiatives we hope there will be a converging as all of us come to realise that decent strategies and decent monitoring mechanisms are what is needed and let us agree what they are and let us have some nice synergy between the monitoring mechanisms and the strategies themselves.
  (Mr Heath) We have heard about TERM and transport so I will talk about agriculture and energy. My colleagues were quite involved in the preparation by the Commission's services of the documents that were endorsed or improved by the Agricultural Council and the Energy Council on the parts which concerned data and indicators because the policy people producing them know that they need to make sure that they will follow what they are promising and, in fact, for agriculture the good thing for us is that there is now a communication from the Commission which will appear at the end of this year or early next year on the data needs for indicators of environment and agriculture and I find this a promising thing because if we can get the right messages coming out of that it will help meet this problem that I mentioned at the beginning of the lack of basic data from which good indicators can be built up.
  (Mr Martin) One thing that is missing in the sectoral indicators development is a read across between indicator needs for sectoral based reporting and indicator needs for reporting on environmental issues and the fact that when you look at a matrix where, for example, you had your environmental issues down the side and your sectors across the top you would start to see there are a lot of cross-linkages. So when you report on climate change as an environmental issue you would want to look at transport and industry and energy and other contributions from sectors. So we are missing this coherence through a matrix-based approach, to identify what the indicators are that we need and how they link to each other. I think it is very important also when we come to trying to streamline data gathering from the Member States to make these linkages between the sectoral needs and the environmental needs coherent because if we really want to streamline the data gathering both with respect to the environment and with respect to the sectors then we need to start by showing what the full picture is of data/indicator needs. This is very much linked to the bridging the gap process as well where we identified that some systems are wasteful and that a key issue is to do with the fact that we are not always identifying why we are asking the Member States to provide information. Such a matrix which tried to read across between the environment and the sectors would be a very useful contribution in this respect and we could then link it to the Member States and their existing obligations and the burden that is placed on them to report data.

  66. Finally, could I ask you to comment on the adequacy of your resources for dealing with indicators for all the sectoral integration strategies. I say that particularly in light of the comments you make about restrictions on in-house sectoral expertise.
  (Mr Martin) We have one person on transport, we have one temporary person on energy and we are currently recruiting a permanent person on energy and a permanent person on agriculture, but even for those three core sectors David identified as perhaps being the most important and most advanced budget restrictions are already resulting in us having to delay the recruitment of these people by a year and maybe not getting them in place until the end of 2001. Going back to the earlier point about sustainable development and fulfilling our commitment under the regulation on the sustainable development issue, we still have some way to go on the integration front.

  67. Mr Heath, you said earlier on that as a lifelong statistician you would like to be consulted much earlier sometimes about the way things are introduced. What input are you having in Eurostat now to the development of the Sixth Environmental Action Programme and is that going to remain the basis for the statistical gathering you are doing on environmental data?
  (Mr Heath) Yes, we will be involved in the part that concerns data needs and it will be the basis, as it has been in the past, for steering our environmental data work because this is the best expression of the Commission's policy situation.

  68. In terms of what we have been hearing this morning about the build up of indicators along a wide range of sustainable development, the environment and so forth, do you have enough resources to get the range of statistics that will build those indicators and to do the work that the Agency then takes on?
  (Mr Heath) To the extent that these become seen by the various sectoral areas as part of their core statistical needs and that comes from the policy situation the answer is yes. All the time the statistical apparatus is reacting to the newest needs and dropping off the last and so providing the policy message is coming through to us from the different sectors to do more on the environmental component that will be the case.
  (Mrs Ohman) The biggest resource problem is in the Member States responding to the data needs, getting the necessary data. It is clear for the Transport and Environment Reporting Mechanism that the lack of data is related to transport statistics and to build up transport statistics in Member States costs quite a lot of money and a lot of resources, that is the weak point in the system. The whole statistical system is squeezed in all Member States, so they can only respond to what is absolutely necessary to report to the Commission and to Eurostat.
  (Mr Martin) I think we need to go back to this point about exploiting the data to its fullest capabilities. I think we have a history of data gathering in the socio-economic sectors where the use of that data have been defined for one purpose (economic). Now we are moving into a different area (sectoral integration) where the use and function of the data are somewhat different, but that does not necessarily mean that we require new data collection, what it means is we need to put existing data into the correct context, which I think was one of the added values of TERM. That is not to say that we do not need new data collection, but I think we have still got some way to go both at a European level and in the Member States to exploit our data and to put it into the right context and have this multi-purpose use for the same data. I think the integration process that we have been going through and the development now of the Sixth programme (a draft will come out at the end of this year) has shown the Commission the need to try and formalise within the Sixth a monitoring and reporting framework and I think that will obviously build up and be synergised with sectoral indicator developments and with the environmental indicator developments and I think that is an important development for trying to put the whole monitoring and the reporting system into the policy context. It does raise an issue to do with how we currently use data in a legislative context, which is somewhat different from the Sixth Environmental Action Programme context, and again we have to look at this issue to do with the multi-purpose use of data and multi-functional use.

  69. Can I just follow through on the data from the point of view of what you get from this country's Office for National Statistics. You have both emphasised in different ways today the TERM and possibly the lack of some statistics there and so forth. How do we compare the other Member countries in giving you the meaningful data that you can put in context, particularly in the context of sustainable development? Are you getting the sort of data and being able to do the analysis on it that allows you to get data from this country and how does it compare with the other countries in those terms? Can you build up a sustainable development picture from the kind of data we are given through you?
  (Mr Gee) If I can answer that by referring you to slide 37 in the background paper which summarises the seven key headline indicators from the TERM and benchmarks across all the Member States. You will see that in two or three areas where many Member States are not yet collecting the information, particularly on access to basic services by environmentally friendly modes, the movement of real prices of rail, public transport and car transport as a driver and reducing energy use per transport unit, there are lots of question marks indicating the data is either not sufficient or useful for this exercise and you will see that the UK is providing data in all those three generally deficient areas and it does stand out.

  70. So the trends are poor but the data is there.
  (Mr Gee) That is right. The trends on prices are doing exactly what you would not want which is to have the price of public transport going up and private transport going down and everybody is invited to take to their car which is hardly a sensible thing to do, but at least the data is telling you that story and that is one of the key driving forces behind transport.

  71. Before I take up the indicator line, is there anything that you want to add from Eurostat's point of view?
  (Mr Heath) I was trying to press my colleague Mrs Ohman to say something on this, but as a Swede she thought here in the UK I ought to say something. My impression is that the performance of the UK on environment statistics reflects its general standing in the hierarchy of European statistical systems of third or fourth, if you want to have a placing, but this is a very subjective thing and I hope it will not be appearing in the press somewhere!
  (Mr Martin) I am on secondment to the Agency from what is now DETR. When we look at the standardized reporting directive for water we see that the UK is the best respondent providing 90 per cent response rates. If we look at the data and its usefulness for environmental assessment purposes where we find that the information is not terribly useful for helping us to understand how effective policy has been in terms of environmental impacts, then one could conclude that the UK may be contributing to perpetuating an imperfect system in the sense of being a good reporter of not necessarily bad data but not the correct information for the context within which we want to work. So the UK may be perpetuating the wrong system.
  (Mr Gee) And to be positive about that, the UK was really at the forefront of this bridging the gap conference that drew attention to this generic point about much of the data being the wrong sort, much information not being there. If we follow up those rather bleak conclusions up with some positive examples of how the information could better serve policy making and if the UK took a lead in that, pushed by your Committee, it would be very good and you are in a good position to do that because you are the best provider of the wrong data anyway, as it were, so you are on stronger grounds to say, "Let's question this and improve it". If you are a non-responder you would be on weak grounds to question the whole system, but as you are playing your part so well you are in a good position to ask a few questions about can we deliver better information for policy making.

  72. How far could there be a danger that if national governments start wanting to get good reportings on this sort of thing one might get what one might call "Sellafield data"? Is there anything one can do about that?
  (Mr Gee) Could you rephrase the question just to make sure I understand the Sellafield point?

  73. I was meaning that there has been a certain amount of publicity that in Sellafield they seem to be going through the practice of inventing data when they had not bothered to take it or falsifying it, which was the word used in the report.
  (Mr Gee) As Jock was responsible for sending data from the Member State to the centre and he is now at the centre, perhaps you are better qualified to talk about whether whatever you sent was true or not.
  (Mr Martin) Of course not! Of course, there is always a risk, as David said earlier, in that indicators are not innocent and so when you bring indicators and data close to policy and policy performance and when you assessed policy effectiveness you could see the information had been tampered with. I do not believe we have the first clue as to the quality of the information that has been gathered in the Member States and we have no intention of getting involved in detail in trying to understand better whether that quality is improving or not as we simply do not have the resources.
  (Mr Heath) Part of the role of the Agency and of official statistics in Eurostat is checking the quality of what you are getting in by a whole variety of techniques and means and it is part of our job.

  74. Mr Gee, you mentioned that less than 20 per cent of the reporting directives required information on effectiveness of policy which I think is all part of this issue of how useful data is or is not. I gather from you that what you preferred was much more of a standard requirement. Who is responsible for framing your reporting directives? What sort of input do you have into that? What sort of inputs are put in from the people who are collecting the data and the people who are going to use it?
  (Mr Martin) Historically the framing of reporting needs has been between the Commission, particularly its legal unit and to some extent its technical unit, and the Member States. The standardised reporting Directive, for example, was developed in 1993 as a means of trying to bring some standardisation to reporting on compliance with legislation and Directives were put in place for air, water and waste. The Agency post-1993 and now in recent years has become involved in helping the Commission to frame the kind of information that it should ask countries to provide under some of the new types of legislation we have seen recently, for example, the CO2 monitoring mechanism and the Auto Oil Programme which will now become the Clean Air For Europe Programme (CAFE). We are also now working with the Commission on trying to develop the assessment framework for the Water Framework Directive. We are increasingly getting involved in this area, but it is important to make a distinction between setting a framework for assessment of the environment and how it is changing with respect to certain policies and setting a framework for compliance, because compliance assessment is very different from what I would call environmental assessment. We are very much involved in the latter through indicators rather than the compliance assessment which is more of a legal-type issue.
  (Mr Gee) Could I just tie this question about effectiveness with the early points about accession which is wrapped up with integration because if the accession countries are invited wholeheartedly to apply a whole series of Directives and legislation, the effectiveness of which we are not sure about because we have done the studies, it is rather an odd way of encouraging people to spend scarce resources and so if we can get more information about the effectiveness of policies in the EU 15 as part of the means of encouraging accession countries to adopt these things it would seem to be a lot better. Personally, I would be very nervous about inviting people to adopt something before I knew how effective it was. Studies of water, for example, which is expensive, by Skou Andersen from Denmark on four Member States showed that there were huge differences in cost effectiveness of the way this series of Directives were implemented on water in Member States. Some got it really right. I think Denmark was particularly bad at cost-effectiveness in terms of water compared to Holland and there were huge differences in terms of cost per inhabitant of achieving a certain environmental quality by the way both those countries went about it. Denmark is normally very advanced, but in this particular case it basically went about it by an end of pipe highly expensive public treatment works whereas Holland went about it more in terms of getting at the origins of the pollution with grants and incentives and expertise pushed into the factories creating the pollution. If you then examine the record of the two countries over 20 years, one country turns out to have been much more cost effective than the other. We need a lot more of that, I would have thought, before we go and invite ten countries to wholesale apply it to themselves because there are good ways of doing it and bad ways. The effectiveness links in with accession quite nicely.

  75. What about Eurostat, how would you be involved in framing reporting Directives?
  (Mr Heath) We are not.

  76. Should you be?
  (Mr Heath) As Jock Martin said, it is about compliance reporting. This standard reporting system did not change any of the requirements. These requirements were put in at the moment the original policy legal instrument went through the Council and so there would be a proposal from the Commission involving legal and environmental elements. This is then discussed in the Council working groups and what tends to happen is that the original proposal is made less biting in this process of negotiation to get agreement and an intervention from statisticians saying, "Well, look, if you do not do it this way the answers will not be any use for numbers," is not a thing which sits very easily at this high political level.

  77. I think the EEA mentioned the possibility of some consideration of changes some time in 2001 at an event that might be held. What sort of changes might you want to suggest?
  (Mr Martin) I think it is really separating out the legal context and the assessment context and looking at how can we assess whether policies are being effective or not. We believe that an indicator-based approach to assessing whether policies are effective or not is complimentary to this legal approach which is to ask countries have you complied with X, Y and Z. So we believe that you need this indicator framework clearly linked to policy objectives from which you can then ask the countries to provide data and from which we can then provide policy makers with an assessment of how the policy is working. At present in a lot of the legislation that assessment framework is absent.
  (Mr Heath) From Eurostat's standpoint, we would certainly support this because we have said that it is just an abstract principle that has not ever managed to work, but what happens is there are decisions taken in certain policy areas which assume that numbers will appear from somewhere to monitor, assess, evaluate and so on, to follow the policy and we have always said if you disconnected this and there are no resources later to provide these numbers later it is not an efficient system. You should link the policy decisions with the tools which are going to enable you to evaluate and monitor and then later improve those policy decisions.

  78. Could I bring you on to an example about climate change and the European commitment following the Kyoto Agreement. What arrangements are there to monitor how each of the Member States meets their commitment under the European "bubble"? Who has the responsibility for monitoring that? Is there a likelihood of European legislation in order to ensure that those commitments are met?
  (Mr Martin) I cannot answer particularly on this "bubble" question because I was not able to get hold of our expert yesterday, but the CO2 monitoring mechanism is effectively a tool that is being used to get the countries to report their inventories on emissions of greenhouse gases and in doing so provide the Community with information on how, as a signatory to the Framework Climate Change Convention, it is meeting its obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. That CO2 monitoring mechanism requires the countries to report both information on the past and also information on the prospects towards the 2012 target. The monitoring mechanism also asks countries to provide information on the policies that it is putting in place to deliver against its targets under the "bubble" and I think increasingly it will require the countries to provide information on how effective those measures have been at the Member State level for delivering on its commitments. The CO2 monitoring mechanism is in many ways an exemplar for how we should be tackling this issue of monitoring, reporting, helping—

  79. You are explaining how it is meant to work. We were at a joint committee meeting with the Environment Committee and I know there were quite a lot of members of that Committee who seemed to be very suspicious that other countries would not meet their commitment. I am not sure whether there are any grounds for those suspicions or not. How do we show—and we need to show fairly early on—that individual countries are meeting the commitments which they have signed up to?
  (Mr Martin) I think our responsibility is on the inventory of greenhouse gases, so that is one means. EEA and Eurostat have responsibility for quality assuring the inventories reported by countries and that is with respect to the past. We also have a role in validating what the countries report on their projections towards meeting their targets. Our role primarily in co-operation with Eurostat is on quality assuring and validating the data as reported by the countries.
  (Mrs Ohman) We do not argue about the commitments themselves, but, of course, with this "bubble" the quality of the data becomes more sensitive and it is data reported from Member States through the reporting mechanism. The data needs to be quality assessed, that is clear and what we see in front of us is the use of other data, energy statistics in particular, to validate the data that is reported by Member States to see if it is correct data which can be used for this "bubble".

  Chairman: Thank you all very much indeed. That was an extremely useful session. We are very grateful to you.