Oral evidence: Sustainable development goals, HC 452Wednesday 19 November 2014
Oral evidence, 19 November 2014.
Witnesses
Thomas Lingard, Global Advocacy Director, Unilever, Michael Gidney, Chief Executive, Fairtrade Foundation, and Jamie Agombar, Head of Sustainability, National Union of Students, gave evidence.
Chair
Good afternoon. Thank you very much for coming to give us evidence this afternoon. I would be grateful if you could please introduce yourselves for the record, perhaps, Jamie, starting with you.
Jamie Agombar
I am Jamie Agombar, Head of Sustainability, NUS.
Michael Gidney
Hello. I am Michael Gidney, Chief Executive of the Fairtrade Foundation in the UK.
Thomas Lingard
Good afternoon. I am Thomas Lingard, Global Advocacy Director at Unilever.
Chair
Firstly, I would like to find out from particularly a business point of view what involvement your organisations have had in the sustainable development goal process. I know Unilever, for example, has been involved in the High Level Panel.
Thomas Lingard
That is right. We have been very involved, largely through the involvement of our chief executive, Paul Polman, who was invited by the Secretary-General to serve on the High Level Panel on post-2015, and since that process we have remained involved in a number of business coalitions that have been actively engaged on the issue.
Chair
Have either of you been involved?
Jamie Agombar
NUS has not been directly involved by any UK agencies. We have been informally involved by the European Students’ Union, but there is no direct UK involvement for us.
Michael Gidney
We have been involved through BOND, which is the association for British NGOs working on private sector.
Chair
Thank you. From a business perspective, what do you think about how you might place the importance of sustainable development goals as far as reporting within businesses and as far as changes in business practice?
Thomas Lingard
From Unilever’s point of view, this is a terrifically important agenda. As a global business that operates around the world, it helps us to organise our business and understand what the world thinks is important, if the world has a very clear set of objectives about where it wants the world to go in the next 15 years. Having an international process and a set of goals that demonstrate that consensus makes it very easy for the business community to rally around it and play a role in support of delivering the outcomes that are defined.
Michael Gidney
Fairtrade’s mission is fighting poverty through trade. It is our belief that if you organise trade in a certain way, then trade can be the most incredible vehicle for fighting poverty and achieving sustainability. To do that you need good standards, standards across the range of sustainable goals, so environmental and social and economic standards, but you need also the highest standards of accountability and transparency, accountability to both ends of the supply chain, to consumers and to producers. Our interest in the sustainable development goals is that they seem to be a step change from the MDGs because of the universality of the proposition, because of the interconnectedness of the goals, and the understanding that, for the first time, the market has an incredibly important role to play.
Chair
What have you observed from your somewhat inside perspectives about the extent to which other organisations in the UK may be reviewing or changing their strategies in the light of the goals, certainly once they are finalised but even in the context of where we are now?
Thomas Lingard
Companies start out from a point of view of knowing that is important to them, but also to companies, particularly like ours that are consumer-focused, what matters to people also inevitably matters to companies. There are things that we know more about because of the nature of our business. Water sanitation and hygiene are very important to Unilever because of our interest in and knowledge of hygiene behaviours and soap products and so on, particularly in developing countries, but also you come into these broader discussions and have other issues put in front of you that you perhaps had not considered before, and that begins an internal process of going, “Is there something we could do here that would help, which wouldn’t be particularly disruptive to our business and actually would help to contribute to building a more sustainable world, which in turn is good for the business?” We find these discussions helpful. We bring expertise in particular areas, but we are also very open to listening to the views of others and understanding other issues that are not in our day-to-day business but on which we can make a positive impact.
Michael Gidney
I think there is a great deal to learn from the leaders, and there are leaders developing, Unilever among them. That is a response to increasing public interest and to an increasing understanding of the need to invest in your supply chain if you are going to have a secure supply of product in the future, all of these things. What concerns us in Fairtrade is that the pace of change is not fast enough. There is very little to distinguish between leadership and the laggards. There are many laggards still who are trying to continue with business as usual for as long as possible. There are perhaps two areas worth exploring. One is around trade practice: what can the Government do to incentivise leadership but also to regulate against or defend the weakest against the laggards? The other area of trade policy is: how do we create a truly enabling environment that does not work against pro-poor and sustainable trade?
Jamie Agombar
I think there are some interesting parallels between the business world and tertiary education in that in tertiary education quite a lot of the addressing of sustainability is about doing less bad through their campus estates, which is not really the purpose of tertiary education. It is all about how the students they turn out at the other end of the system can be part of the solution to the world’s problems. You see that in the business world too, and Unilever is refocusing its business proposition all around sustainability, and that is a visionary example. There are a few universities—not that many in the UK as yet—that are starting to do that too.
Mrs Spelman
That leads on to the question of whether it is realistic to expect the sustainable development goals to help companies improve the sustainability of their operations, particularly, for example, if you focus on sustainable consumption and production. Unilever is here to prove that it is possible, but it is very much, as you said, in the vanguard and there are rather a lot laggards that are not on the page. How realistic is this?
Thomas Lingard
I think one has to consider the whole political spectrum, so you have this process, you have the climate process and business is looking at the state of the international politics, trying to get a read on the level of political ambition to make a shift in the trajectory of business as usual. This is particularly true when it comes to climate and decarbonisation and the kinds of shifts that are required in the energy system. I think these international statements of intent to go in a particular direction at a particular level of ambition are incredibly powerful because of that signalling value. Businesses will look at this; they will judge where they place investments, what kind of investments they make, the level of confidence. We know that in a lot of renewable energy investments, political risk is seen to be one of the largest variable costs that increases the difficulty with getting these things through, and the more people sense a real willingness and a higher level of political ambition to do something meaningful in the next 15 years, the more business will rally around that and align with that future that they see coming.
Mrs Spelman
Jamie, you mentioned some evidence of this in higher education, but is this a trickle or are we on a watershed? Is this going to happen fast enough? These goals are going to be time-specific, so how fast do you see these changes happening as organisations review their working practices because the SDGs are coming? Do you want to have a try at that?
Michael Gidney
Shall I have a go? I do not think we are going to see enough change fast enough, or at least not sufficient, reading the ambition of the SDGs. Part of the problem perhaps is that maybe we are a little bit naive in the way we think that the private sector can solve all of these problems on their own and there is bit of a style about optimism that the private sector will do a lot of this heavy lifting. But let us not forget that the corporate governance of companies is that they have a primary responsibility to their shareholders and even the best intentions will be subject to those caveats. There are only a certain number of initiatives that an individual company can take on unilaterally, and that is where I think there is potential for better regulation to encourage a reasonable level playing field, whether it is on climate—and we have seen an increasing number of companies calling for better planning regulation—or in the area where we work on, on supply chains. It is interesting to see the coalition of people who are calling on a stronger Modern Slavery Bill. The transparency of supply chains clause, which has just gone through, is a interesting initiative, partly because it was not just the usual suspects calling for it, it was also companies calling for it too, so those who want to be accountable, who want to go further are enabled with some kind of minimum regulation so that they do not feel they are sticking their neck out and making themselves unviable to their shareholders.
Mrs Spelman
It is a good illustration. You have touched on supply chains, which are critical for stamping out slavery. How do you ensure that supply chains minimise their impact on the environment while maximising the benefits to local people? You may have a worked example of that.
Thomas Lingard
These things are connected, in our view. We are trying to tackle a number of big challenges: increasing food production, raising human rights standards and value chains. Big companies like Unilever have a role to play here, but so do national Governments, so do NGOs. I completely agree with the point that we cannot assume that big business is going to go away and do this on its own, that Governments can go, “That is fine, we will set some goals” and then walk away. The spirit of partnership working is fundamental to how the private sector sees the SDG agenda. To your point of the urgency, will we be able to do enough fast enough? That has been one of our primary concerns and one of the reasons we are pushing so hard for there to be clearer implementation plans behind every goal that is agreed. In our view, what we cannot afford is to agree a set of lofty ambitious goals in September next year and then spend five years working out how we are going to implement. I think if the conversation is had at the same time and not just in a linear process, you start to see what might be possible. Rather than just putting the goal out there and then having the conversation, say, “What could the private sector do? What do we think is deliverable?” and maybe there are some areas over here that lend themselves to a more ambitious goal, because we already know a way to make a big impact. I think linking the how and the what is going to be an important part of turning this from just a set of goals into something that impacts on the ground.
Michael Gidney
I think it is about accountability and openness, isn’t it? There is a very good case, finally, to encourage companies over a certain size to report on the top or bottom line rather than just on their economic performance. It has been a debate for years; it has been avoided for years. It is absolutely necessary so we can understand two things: first of all, the extent to which companies themselves are trying to understand the scale of the problem and then what they are doing about it. Whether that is for investors of the future or for new generations of consumers or employees coming through, increasingly that is going to be necessary.
Caroline Lucas
Just a very quick follow-up with Mr Lingard. I was very pleased to hear what you were saying about your vision of the role of business. Can you say anything about what you can do in the business circles within which you move to persuade colleagues as well? Particularly when I was in the European Parliament more than here, the strongest pushback on the proposals for greater regulation are the industry groups. Often they are the lobby groups who claim to speak on behalf of lots of individual groups, and within those lobby groups the individual businesses are often a lot more progressive than the common voice you hear as the one that is doing the lobbying. What can you do to make sure that as policymakers, the strongest voice we hear is not one calling for deregulation?
Thomas Lingard
We are very aware of the dynamics. Trade associations play a valuable role, but in some conversations there is a division of opinion and it is difficult always to land the message that you want to land. We work very actively for a number of global and regional business associations that are trying to put a more progressive view. We are very active through the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. We were in Atlanta a couple of weeks ago for their annual council meeting. Again, our CEO happens to chair the WBCSD, and that is a place where you see—to the earlier question of trickle or flood—a huge step up in increase, a lot of CEOs showing up to the meetings, participating, new CEOs and new sectors coming in and wanting to be part of the solution. WBCSD has about 200 members and a global network, with 35,000 local companies in their global network, the UN Global Compact, 9,000 organisational members. It is not just Unilever and a few other companies; there is now a groundswell of business leadership. But there are millions of businesses, you are right, and not all of them will share that opinion. We are doing what we can. We have preferred to run with a coalition of the leading who want to go further, rather than spend all the time bashing on closed doors. We think it is better to try to show the way and get visibility for that and pull people along with us.
Caroline Lucas
I suppose my point is that I have never been lobbied by any business saying, “Why don’t you make that timetable a little bit more ambitious? Why don’t you make that deadline a little bit closer? Why don’t you push it?” The voices we always hear are the other voices. I appreciate that is not you or indeed the business within which you move, but what other leverage might you have over them to make the business case for regulation, apart from anything else?
Thomas Lingard
It is a good question.
Caroline Lucas
Good.
Jamie Agombar
There is a group, as I am sure you are aware, called the Aldersgate Group, of which we are a member, which is a green business lobby. I do not know if Unilever are involved or not.
Caroline Lucas
I am talking about how do they talk to the ones that are a problem.
Peter Aldous
Just to state I am a supporter and a member of the Aldersgate Group. Looking at the public-private collaboration, what do each of you see as the contribution of business in that relationship to achieving sustainable development goals?
Thomas Lingard
If you look at what is likely to come out of the SDG framework, a lot of the action will be delivered in some way or other by the private sector. Whether that is investment in agriculture or renewable energy, whatever it happens to be, when the rubber hits the road the private sector is going to be involved and that is why we have been so keen to ensure that the private sector has a voice within the process. The process has been very open and there have been opportunities to help shape that. I think more could still be done to engage more businesses. As I think was said in the earlier evidence session, there has been a very good international conversation about the SDGs, but there is a need now to bring it down to a domestic level so that we get national businesses, who maybe do not play on the international stage but will also, in their own parts of the world, be very involved in delivering whatever comes out of this, involved in the conversation so that this is not presented as a fait accompli when it comes back and it is translated into national action plans.
Peter Aldous
That is helpful. Just moving on, perhaps Mr Gidney might put a variation on this. He has identified between leaders and laggards. Do you think if we look at the laggards, we might be able to make some sort of excuse for them that Government have not engaged with them sufficiently for them to understand their role?
Michael Gidney
I think that is reasonable. Look at the grocery sector: the news over the last few days has been that for the first time in more than 20 years the grocery sector in the UK is shrinking, and then of course there is some turmoil among some of the retailers about their market share and what their plans are and how they retain profitability. The grocery sector, which of course is the source of market access for many developing country farmers, who we might work with in Fairtrade as well as other supply chains like Unilever, is pretty much a race to the bottom on price. The proposition is that consumer prices, the three-for-two promotions and so on are a good thing if you can offer consumers cheap. The difficulty there is if that devalues the supply chain so much you commoditise things and you strip value out, down through the supply chain there is a very little for the farmers or workers at the other end to invest in their businesses. We have been working on bananas this year in Fairtrade for just that reason, because the consumer price in the last 10 years has halved, while costs have more than doubled in origin countries, and still there is endemic poverty among small farmers and workers. The price needs to go up, but the way the business is articulated in the UK, nobody can make that first move. The price wars are such a part of life that no single retailer is going to say, “I am going to make myself uncompetitive by charging a reasonable price for bananas”. What we do in Fairtrade is protect those farmers from the price wars, but the retailers who engage in Fairtrade take that hit. That is fundamentally difficult to sustain for them in terms of their profit, but also in terms of driving real value so that farmers can achieve environmental and social goals that would be in the spirit of the SDGs. One of the ways in which I think Government could help there is trying to find a better balance, so if you look at competition law and things like the Grocery Code Adjudicator, the articulations are all about, “Cheap is always a good thing”. I am not suggesting that we should contribute to food price inflation in a naive way, but we should try to find a better balance between consumers’ rights or needs for food security in the UK and affordable food with the needs of the supply chain to make it sustainable economically and environmentally. That is completely absent at the moment from the regulatory environment.
Peter Aldous
Jamie Agombar.
Jamie Agombar
I do not think I have anything to add.
Peter Aldous
Just moving on then, do you think the Government—and indeed, internationally as well—has the balance right between voluntary agreements and international standards?
Michael Gidney
Fairtrade is a voluntary scheme, and I think there is a huge amount of potential in voluntarism. In the UK we are working with 500 companies. All the Ben & Jerry’s all over the world are Fairtrade, there is the Unilever brand, but we also work with some pioneering trade crafts, Divine Chocolate, Cafédirect as well, lots of the retailers. There is a lot of potential in voluntarism, but only to a certain extent. For example, one of the things that we are struggling with at the moment is the EU change in sugar rule means that cane sugar from Africa, Caribbean and Pacific countries is, at a swoop, much more expensive, so the price has dropped because there is so much beet sugar available, meaning ACP sugar is suddenly uncompetitive and we are seeing 200,000 sugar smallholders in some of the poorest parts of the world fundamentally at risk. What is the point of trying to engender voluntarism, where we have been working with committed brand-owners like Tate & Lyle over the last few years to drive more benefit for the farmers, if along comes a political or technocratic decision that may have all kinds of good reasons for it but the application of it is unthought through, too short a timeframe? I do not know if you have been to the Shire Valley in Southern Malawi, but you cannot suddenly find an alternative livelihood for the sugar smallholders. They were food insecure before they started working with us. They have just achieved food security, just starting to scale up, and we have taken that market away from them.
Thomas Lingard
Regulation versus voluntary agreements is a false dichotomy, in my view. This is about a system change process and it is about how different types of initiative at different points in the process on different issues can be played in a particular way to drive that change. Things may start out as voluntary agreements, the leaders start to move, sometimes the pack follows, sometimes it does not, and then regulation can often follow up and bring the laggards along. I do not think it is an either/or. It is very context-specific, very issue-specific, and one has to look at what one is trying to achieve and is it too early in the process to regulate or is it exactly the right time. The solutions are there and we just need to bring everybody along.
Peter Aldous
That is helpful. Finally, do you think there is more that Government departments could do working together to promote sustainable development? Do you find the frustration that perhaps there is too much silo working between departments?
Michael Gidney
That is a fundamentally important point, isn’t it? I do not think the SDGs are going to have a hope of success unless we get a much clearer policy coherence, and then also a preparedness to act. If you look over the life of the MDGs, there has been a sense that too often trade or trade policy has pulled in one direction while the MDGs and civil society initiatives like, for example, Fairtrade are pulling in another. The example of the Economic Partnership Agreement roll-out over the last 10 years or so would be a case in point. Too often the effort was to understand the impact by commissioning very good research but then not to act on the findings, or not to act on the findings in good enough time. My example of sugar a minute ago is another case in point. The impacts are not surprising. The likely impacts were known, but the adjustment window is just too short to be viable. We absolutely fundamentally need it. There are examples now of where we are struggling to see how trade and development policy can support each other. One of the consequences of the East African communities EPA being delayed is putting under threat the Kenya horticulture business. 500,000 people in Kenya depend on the flower industry and if flowers are suddenly subject to tariffs because of the deadline signing, it creates a problem. I think for this to work, it is about political capital. DfID is very good at understanding impacts and researching the findings, but then we need as a community to require Government in its entirety to act on those findings, which is more than just DfID. I think it needs to be supported within the Foreign Office and within BIS as well.
Thomas Lingard
I agree with that. I think the structure of Government makes it difficult and leads towards silos and you have to try extra hard to break those down. Again, it is not just DECC and DEFRA; it is Treasury, it is the Foreign Office. This is a whole system development agenda and I think Government has a responsibility, as does business, to take a whole system view on the issue and what can be done. This is not led in Unilever from a sustainability department, it is led at a strategic level. We have bits of our business that work on sanitation products or hygiene products or food products that are engaging actively in the agendas linked to external agendas. It is not a small sustainability and I think the same has to be true in Government.
Jamie Agombar
If I can say something on education and the interconnectedness of that, I think there is a real disconnect between the different forms of education: primary, secondary and tertiary. I think you get quite a lot on sustainable development in primary, not too much in secondary and a fair bit, depending on where you study, in tertiary. That could certainly work better, because I think it is quite confusing for young people as they transfer between the different forms. I have recently returned from the UNESCO Conference on Education for Sustainable Development last week, which was the end of the Decade for Education on Sustainable Development, and it was quite surprising and disappointing there was not a UK delegation there. We used to be leaders on this field maybe 20 years ago around education for sustainable development; I think we are now laggards, having seen what other Governments like Japan and Germany are doing, how they are embedding it into the core purpose of that education. Part of that is that our departments do not talk. I do not think BIS talks to the Department for Education, talks to DECC and talks to DEFRA.
Chair
Mr Gidney, we have discussed the question of sugar producers and how Fairtrade may protect those producers to some extent, but perhaps not from the wider waves of price reduction. To what extent do you observe there is a constituency for Fairtrade, to the extent that members of the public are beginning to be willing to pay differential prices if there is a Fairtrade logo, and to what extent is it alternatively the case that there is a Fairtrade logo from you but that has limited defensive capacities over and above the other forces that you have described?
Michael Gidney
It is a very good question and I think there is some optimism in what you are saying as well. The next generation of consumers is likely to be much more sensitised to these issues. The Fairtrade mark is 20 years-old this year and we have seen a change in attitudes over that time that will mean that people are more aware of impacts across the supply chain and more aware of the interconnectedness of things and their role as responsible consumers. That could be a very powerful lever for encouraging a step change in corporate behaviour over the life of the SDGs. You do need to keep banging on about it though and you do need to keep finding ways of reaching new people. One of the most exciting areas of Fairtrade is we have local groups, volunteer groups, who get together on wet and windy Saturday afternoons and give out leaflets in the high street. There are 9,000 groups around the country, and within that the most exciting bit is one-third of the schools in Britain are voluntarily working towards Fairtrade status, which means you are using Fairtrade as a way into understanding the wider interconnectedness of development and social things in schools, so it might be within a citizenship or geography or PSHE classes or whatever. There is an incredible opportunity to work with that group to think about what it means to be a responsible consumer, what does sustainable growth look like. Some of the rather challenging language in the SDGs could be worked through in that kind of way. That said, also part of our job is to encourage people to see that Fairtrade is only a piece of one solution, a very viable and useful piece of a solution for driving better terms for farmers and workers, but you need a systematic and system-wide change to make that lasting and long term.
Jamie Agombar
May I add that it is not necessarily just about students or young people as consumers but about them as the future employees of companies? We do an annual survey with the Higher Education Academy, which has surveyed 20,000 students over the last four years, and consistently more than half of students would sacrifice £3,000 of their first job’s salary to work for a company that they deemed to be ethical or environmentally friendly. There is this kind of latent student interest and demand to go and work for businesses that get it. I think that gives quite a strong message of hope.
Simon Wright
I wanted to ask some questions that link to goal 12, which includes references to the importance of technology and information in driving behaviour change in relation to sustainable development. Some of you have touched on this in some of your comments already, but what, in your experience, is the best way to influence people to have a positive impact on sustainable development and what do your organisations do in this area?
Thomas Lingard
We are in the business of behaviour change, whether that is as simple as persuading people to buy our products rather than someone else’s or the more complex ones around environmental behaviours. Behaviour change is an outcome and there are a number of inputs to that. Some of that can be around consumer message, product innovation and can also be regulation and legislation, so again, this is something where you have to look at everything in the round. We have done a lot of work taking what we know about behaviour change from a traditional marketing standpoint and published that for the public good about how we drive behaviour change, a theory called the Five Levers of Change and I would be happy to circulate information on that.[1] That does not give you the solution; it gives you a framework in which you can explore solutions to any particular behaviour change problem. There is a huge amount we can do and we are starting to learn more about how people respond to cues around environmental behaviour and not necessarily messaging environmental benefits upfront. People are busy and stressed and short of money and if we can appeal to things that are top of their mind rather than long term what appear to be distant issues of climate change, you can get engagement with people. If you make it fun and interesting and engaging, again you can get more engagement. But to say that the solutions to all of these challenges lie in getting better at persuading people to do things is probably mistaken. I think it needs to be a combination of hard policy and Government intervention and behaviour change. I was struck by something I saw about the seatbelt legislation, which was a nice case study of legislation and peer pressure and behaviour change, that when we made it mandatory to wear seatbelts in the back that seatbelt wearing in the front went up. The reason was the parents get in the car and say, “Kids, put your seatbelts on” and they say, “Well, you are not wearing yours, Dad”. So it was peer pressure of the kids combined with the regulation to do something that drove behaviour in a different way. It is not always easy to predict how regulation interacts with behaviour and how we can use regulation smartly with behaviour sciences to understand how we can drive behaviour in a particular way. My one caution would be again it is the urgency when we look at some of these issues. Consider behaviour change; if you think about how long it has taken us to ban smoking, we do not have that kind of time to ban environmental behaviours that are extremely carbon-intensive and unnecessarily carbon-intensive. One does have to think through what we are trying to do, the timeframe in which we need to do it and the means that are available to us.
Michael Gidney
What we do at Fairtrade is we try to put the information in the hands of individuals to make informed choices. That can be quite an empowering proposition, so you read bad things and rather than being overwhelmed by what you understand of the way the world works, you can make a positive difference today by exercising a slightly different choice as a consumer or as a campaigner or voter or whatever. That has real mileage. It would be made easier if companies were able or required to be more transparent themselves. You can look through Fairtrade material and you can understand the value distribution across the supply chain. I spend £2 on my cup of coffee; how much goes back to the farmer? How interesting if everybody else in the chain would do the same, so the retailers and the brand-owners, how much could they share? The knee-jerk reaction from some laggards would be it is too commercially sensitive but there are aggregate values and volumes traded you could put in there. There is a description of generic supply chain maps you could start to put in the public domain that would help to put more information in the hands of consumers and then they will make informed choices.
Jamie Agombar
We do quite a lot on behaviour change, which you probably saw in the written briefing, but 10% of everyone that works at NUS these days works full-time on sustainability and that has mostly come around through a behavioural perspective. We took some funding from DEFRA maybe five years ago to run an action-based research project that looked at moments of change. Effectively, if you are going through a big moment of change in your life, whether you are having your first child or leaving home for the first time, it is a great time to break old habits and form new ones, and that is what the research project showed. We get students arriving at university and if you can create the social norm of sustainability and responsibility—they get it in the dormitories, in the departments, on the campus and in the lecture theatres—then you are more likely to get out at the end of it sustainability literate graduates, which is exactly what we need. It is probably just worth saying as well that we are seeing the role of tertiary education as having a disproportionate duty to do a lot of this work. There is a great UNESCO statistic that says globally less than 3% of the world’s population go to university but 80% of the world leaders have been to university. There is a throughput of massive numbers, hundreds of millions of students through tertiary education every three years, and if you can embed it in the right place in this critical moment of change, then the students that come out will. I suppose I am testament to that as well, in that I had it when I went to university and now I am working in the field. But it is not only that, it is around brand loyalty as well. The beer that I started drinking at university is the beer that I drink these days too because of that moment of change. Understanding the social theory behind it and empowering organisations that are at the frontline to do stuff on it can be incredibly powerful.
Simon Wright
Jamie, could I ask you also does the NUS promote the International Citizen Service? Do you have any thoughts on how you can increase the diversity of young people who get involved in that?
Jamie Agombar
I asked around about this and I have yet to find anyone in NUS who can answer the question, so we will look into it and get back to you on that.
Simon Wright
Great, thank you. Could I finally ask then what differences there are in how you communicate sustainable development messages with people who live in the UK compared with poor people overseas? What are the different approaches and different strategies that need to be taken in a global scale?
Michael Gidney
That is where the application of the SDG framework is so incredibly important, isn’t it? If you were talking to Fairtrade in Africa, the producers who are engaged in Fairtrade, what is on their minds? The answer is market access, the sustainability and viability of that, the clarity of the terms of trade, the clarity of the power imbalances and how they can overcome those, but critically, adherence to social, environmental and economic standards, compliance at the very least. If you were to do the same in the UK—I was talking about the schools’ support for Fairtrade— it is about our responsibility as the more powerful in the partnership, which may be less palatable. Some of the changes are going to be less palatable. If you get into a frame of responsible consumption means consuming less, then you have lost people. You need to find a way of making it an empowered choice. But yet for farmers it is absolutely about trade; it is about the viability of their trade on good standards and their negotiating power. That is one of the things we have not discussed yet, but for us to make the progress we need on SDGs, we do have to understand that there is still a very highly-concentrated trade sector where most of the benefits accrue to a very few companies in a very small number of countries.
Thomas Lingard
We spend a lot of time communicating to consumers all around the world, billions of them every day, mostly about products. One of the most exciting things that we are working on now is trying to develop the conversation that we have with consumers to be not just about products but about the broader issues that these products are involved in trying to address. We call that Project Sunlight; it is a website. There are a number of different websites in different countries. That has driven us to do a lot of research in different parts of the world about exactly what messages people do respond to. The reality is you cannot go in and start a conversation by talking about climate change or about poverty in many places, but you can go in and start to talk about people’s children, about the future. It sounds a little bit twee sometimes, but this is a universal theme that people can engage on, “What kind of world do you want to build? What kind of world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want to leave for your children and what opportunities do you want your children to have?” It works obviously better with parents, but there is still something universal and there are a lot of parents. We know that children can be big drivers of behavioural change within homes, exactly to the point about if you can get them young and the kids come home from school or university and say, “Mummy, why are you not recycling this?” that can be a hugely powerful driver, often underestimated. But we are not targeting children; we are targeting the parents who are thinking about children they are bringing into the world and what world they will grow up in. We find that gets very high resonance scores as a way of getting people into thinking about what they can do, what their contribution could be, but a kind of “save the world” type framing, kind of doom and gloom climate change we know does not engage people or at least sufficient numbers of people. There is always a hard core who get it, who can be persuaded with that sort of message, but we are, I suppose, specialists in mass market consumer messaging and that is what the data tells us.
Jamie Agombar
I think our work is characterised by fun. It is quite engaging for both staff and students and we use a lot of social media to advance that. But I suppose if our vision for sustainability is that students turn out of the system as part of the solution to the world’s problems, you cannot just do that through behaviour change, you also have to do that through some institutional change to ensure that they are getting taught what needs to be taught. It is not just about knowledge either, it is also about the attributes they pick up, so critical thinking, global citizenship, all that sort of stuff that comes through inter-disciplinary learning. There is a big job trying to articulate that or turn higher education around so that it can perform that duty. It is not just learning about carbon. We are doing two things, partly in response to the Global Action Programme around Education for Sustainable Development that came out from the conference last week. We are developing an institutional change programme called Responsible Futures, which is an NUS stamp on the whole institution’s approach to sustainable development, building on all our behaviour change work to start to change how the institution does its core business. The second one is we are running a photographic exhibition at 100 universities concurrently at the start of the next academic year that will be on all the continents around the world. We are going to try to connect students up through these photographic images of sustainable development and get them to talk about and discuss how they are part of the solution to those problems.
Simon Wright
That is the Whole Earth?
Jamie Agombar
Whole Earth, that is correct, yes. I think that you probably saw that in our submission.
Simon Wright
Yes.
Jamie Agombar
We want to use that as a way of starting to get students a global voice on sustainability, so in this country, because we survey through the NUS survey, we can say that 60% of students want to learn about sustainable development consistently, but the students in France are asking a different question, as they are in Canada and in the States. So if we can, on the back of that, start to get some collaboration on research, communications and campaigns, then it means that next time round, whatever the successes are to the SDGs, maybe we will have a voice, a more powerful voice, and show that young people are interested in this agenda.
Mrs Spelman
We are a bit short of time, I think. You have used the sugar example to highlight the fact that free trade does not always benefit the most vulnerable countries, but the SDGs currently mention realising duty-free, quota-free market access on a lasting basis. Do we have something fundamentally wrong here or have we failed in some way to adequately deal with the negative consequences of liberalisation at pace?
Michael Gidney
I think the spirit of it is absolutely right, but you just need some accompanying measures, so you need a commitment to good research and then to act on the findings. Nobody engaged in the sugar protocol would have expected the smallholders in some of the ACP countries who are producing to be able to adapt in that incredibly short window. The problem there was not necessarily the wish to change the sugar regime and it was not necessarily the research; it was the inability or the inadequacy of the action on top of the research. What you would need is to understand the implications of liberalisation, understand the risks to sustainability, and put in step a robust plan to mitigate them.
Mrs Spelman
But wasn’t the problem here that the UK signalled that? It was an EU-wide decision and only two countries in the EU import cane sugar, ourselves and Portugal, and the voice was simply drowned out.
Michael Gidney
It is absolutely that and it is political capital, so that is a trade-off in Brussels. Most of the trade agenda that we talk about here as being relevant to the SDGs will need proper negotiation within the EU framework and that is very tough.
Caroline Lucas
Can I ask you one last question, which was one we did not think we would get around to? Could you touch on how can corporate sustainability reporting be improved and made more common as a tool for driving forward these SDGs?
Michael Gidney
I would say make it mandatory for companies over a certain size.
Caroline Lucas
Yes, that is easily said. It has worked for other things.
Michael Gidney
It has worked for other things and what is also interesting is it does not need to be a fearsome tool. It can enable better business practice, so the leaders who are trying to do that kind of thing—
Caroline Lucas
Yes, the proponents of it.
Michael Gidney
—understand more the inadequacies in their supply chains and what they can do to improve. Often it drives profitability.
Caroline Lucas
Given that it was the voice of business that brought about the change to the Modern Slavery Bill because enough voices in business wanted to see transparency in supply chains, what do you think the chances are of achieving corporate accountability for sustainability on the same basis?
Michael Gidney
I am sure you will have a different view, but I think it is to do with the quality of the reporting, so this would need to be meaningful reporting where there is some kind of proper stakeholder engagement rather than just a PR report. If it is meaningfully done and properly accountable, I think people would see it as a good leveller.
Thomas Lingard
I would not disagree with that at all. It is about the understanding. The reporting is the thing that comes out of it, but it is about the internal conversations that happen in the company at a senior level about what are we trying to do here, what is the company strategy, how is the world changing, what are the big social, environmental and economic risks, how are we positioning ourselves to respond to those risks, and then this becomes just part of corporate reporting. Corporate sustainability reporting should not be different from corporate reporting. It is an update to the stakeholders and shareholders on how the business is being stewarded. Businesses that are reporting on numbers but not on any of the risks are just missing part of the picture. So, yes, I would not disagree at all.
Jamie Agombar
Just a slightly different twist; for universities it means trying to get universities and colleges to stop looking at the negative implications of their estates and more at the graduate attributes or learner attributes of the students that turn out of the system. For some time we have been talking about how we can get a question in the National Student Survey on sustainability that would then give us an indicator of which are doing it well.
Mrs Spelman
Thank you. That is a good idea.
Chair
Thank you very much. I am afraid once again we have run out of time. We have green pester power and sustainability reporting well on our map now, but if there is anything else you would like to add either to your written evidence or any further thoughts you may have had from what we have discussed today, we would be very receptive to hearing from you further on that. Thank you very much for attending and for the very significant evidence you have been able to give us this afternoon. Oral evidence: Sustainable development goals, HC 452 21 [1] Unilever have provided additional information contained within this website:http://www.unilever.com/sustainable-living-2014/our-approach-to-sustainability/embedding-sustainability/encouraging-behaviour-change/