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You probably won’t believe it, but our collective hearts sink every time the Sustainable Development Commission has to publish its annual report on the Government’s progress against its own sustainability targets – quite simply because the significance of the Government’s own performance in this area is enormous. Enormous in terms of impact on the private sector, on local authorities, and indeed on private citizens, and if the Government’s performance is rubbish, then the knock-on effects are really bad for sustainable development in general.

And for the last five years, the Government’s performance has been rubbish. Last year, commenting on the 05/06 results, David Miliband (then the Defra Secretary of State) performed the best collective mea culpa on behalf of government as a whole that we’d ever seen. It sounded really impressive – “never again, got to put our hands up on this one” – and so on. Unfortunately, despite the eloquence, nothing changed from that point on.

So this year’s report isn’t much better – as you’ll see if you check out the SDC’s website. Some really good stuff (28% of electricity from renewables, easily meeting the target of !0% by 2008, some rubbish stuff (two-thirds of Departments not on track to reduce emissions of CO2 by 12.5% by 2010), and a lot of what I would describe as just marking time. I find all this so depressing that I now hate having to comment on it. In fact, this year, I opted out of all media work around our report.

But next year (my last as Chairman of the SDC, as I step down in July 2009) is going to be different. Happily, the powers that be in Number 10 and the Cabinet Office have suddenly woken up to the fact that this kind of systematic hypocrisy (lecturing everybody else but barely lifting a finger oneself) just doesn’t make any sense – and is quite seriously damaging for one’s reputation.

The Cabinet Secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, has now charged all Permanent Secretaries with “getting it sorted”, and they have been told that performance on both sustainable operations and procurement will be included in their objectives (a recommendation that the SDC first made four years ago). At the same time, the Office of Government Commerce has moved with uncharacteristically speed and purpose to improve the quality of data management, agreed proper Delivery Plans, set up a centre of excellence for sustainable procurement, and bring some serious leadership to bear on this hitherto neglected area of government performance.

Hallelujah!