CITY AND SUBURBAN
John Gummer's bureaucrats set out to win the Green Housekeeping Seal of Approval
CHRISTOPHER FILDES
Iam sending John Gummer a rubber plant — just what he needs to make the Department of the Environment a greener place. It is my contribution to green house- keeping. This concept has moved on since Flanders and Swann encountered it in Scarsdale Villas:
We're terribly House & Garden Now at last we've got the chance The garden is full of furniture And the house is full of plants.
In Marsham Street, Mr Gummer's environmentally unfriendly headquarters, green housekeeping is creeping up the building like an ampelopsis and generating paper work on an expanding scale. It is looked after by the department's Office Services Division, which called in consul- tants to tell it what to do. Now that govern- ment departments spend £500 million a year on consultants, they have learned how to tailor their advice to their customers. The department's top brass, so they said, was totally committed to green housekeep- ing. The only trouble was that, down the line, nobody was doing much about it. The answer was for the top brass to have more and better meetings. The department was so tickled that it sat right down and wrote itself a memo, which has floated down to me. 'The principal recommendation', so it says, 'was for the establishment of a high- level steering group within the department, to develop green housekeeping policy, and with authority to direct its implementation. It would be supported by a secretariat which would have the job of handling a reg- ular input of information from specialist advisers within the department, and also' — but you guessed this — 'disseminating and maintaining advice and guidance, co- ordinating, monitoring, collecting data and reporting outcomes, developing proposals for revisions to the policy statement and generally preparing papers for the board.'
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