Local Sustainable Development Lens
"CAA is inherently about sustainability... our assessments will embed sustainability by making explicit assessments of outcomes to determine whether the performance trends in an area are in fact sustainable."
CAA: Joint Inspectorate Proposals for Consultation – Summer 2008
What is it?
With plans now afoot to make sustainable development integral to the new Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA), and with expectations that Sustainable Community Strategies will be genuinely sustainable, the need to track progress towards sustainable development at the local area level has perhaps never been so great.
The SDC’s proposed Local Sustainable Development Lens (LSDL) provides a means of doing this. Designed for local authorities and their Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) partners, the Lens is a voluntary basket of local indicators that provides a starting point - based around the national indicator set - for tracking progress towards sustainable development at the local area level.
| » Download the LSDL proposal - COMING SOON! |
The Story So Far…
The proposal has been developed iteratively through engagement with a range of stakeholders including CLG, Defra, Government Offices in the Regions, the Audit Commission, the Local Government Association (LGA), the Improvement and Development Agency (IDeA), the Environment Agency, a number of local authorities, and CAG Consultants:
June 2007 – Defra proposes "selecting a small number of social, economic and environmental indicators" from the National Indicator Set to track progress on sustainable development.
October 2007 – SDC holds workshop with CLG, Defra, LGA, Audit Commission and Environment Agency to develop key ‘success criteria’ for this ‘basket’ of indicators.
November 2007 – SDC produces initial proposals for the basket, now called the Local SD Lens.
March 2008 – Government’s SD Programme Board agrees to champion the Local SD Lens and use the proposed indicators as Defra’s local measure of progress towards its own Departmental Strategic Objective to champion sustainable development within Government and across the UK.
April 2008 – A pilot study on the Lens from CAG consultants is completed.
May 2008 – SDC and IDeA host a workshop with the local authorities from CAG’s pilot.
Sep 2008 – Government Office West Midlands (the lead Government Office for sustainable development) – host a Lens workshop with IDeA for local authorities and LSPs in the West Midlands.
What happens next?
The IDeA have agreed to develop the SDC’s LSDL proposal with a view to producing a user-friendly tool for local authorities and their LSP partners to track area progress on sustainable development. To do this, the Government Office West Midlands, the Academy for Sustainable Communities and a number of local authorities have also agreed to support the IDeA’s work on this.
For more information on next steps, contact Dan McCartney at the IDeA.
The SDC is also discussing with the Audit Commission and other CAA inspectorates how the Local SD Lens can be used to help inform judgements in the new Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA).
Papers
» SDC Local SD Lens Proposal – the SDC’s final proposal for a Local Sustainable Development Lens. (Coming soon)
» CAG Pilot Report – CAG Consultant’s report on the results of a pilot of the Lens with four local authorities. The report details the purpose, criteria and the limitations of the Lens, followed by a description of the methodology used and recommendations.
