Rights for the Unborn: How Should We Protect Future Generations? (Sophie Howe)

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1:16Gabriel Gatehouse:Hello and welcome to Radical, the show where we dig into radical ideas and speak to the people who want to put them into practice. Last week, we were talking about prepping for the future, with Mike Chappell, who's got his bug-out plan and filled every cupboard space in his home with tinned food and bottled water in case of climate or societal breakdown. If you missed that episode, you can always catch up on BBC Sounds, but be warned, you might become radicalised. My wife listened last night, and she's now searching for emergency water filtration systems online. This week, our guest is someone who's prepping for the future in a different way.

1:54Gabriel Gatehouse:Not for themselves or for their loved ones, but for people who don't yet exist. Let me explain. Once upon a time, during the sunlit optimism of the post-war years, people in this country, and in many parts of Europe and America, assumed that they could expect to be a little better off than their parents, and their children could expect to be a little better off than them. Hands up who still believes that now. Not too many, I guess. Somehow, somewhere around the end of history, faith in the inevitable march of prosperity and progress evaporated. Where did it go? And can it be resuscitated? What can we do to ensure that generations to come won't be cursing us in the future for the mess that we've left them?

2:38Gabriel Gatehouse:To focus on long-term rather than short-term thinking? This is the mission that was entrusted to Sophie Howell by the Welsh Government in 2016, when she became the world's first Future Generations Commissioner, a representative in government for the unborn. So, what did she achieve when she was in the job? What were the obstacles? And can we, should we, in a democracy, prioritise the well-being of the unborn over living citizens? As ever, we'll approach the subject with an open mind and a critical lens. Sophie Howe, welcome to Radical. Thank you for having me. Before we get into the backstory of how you got there, just tell us what, in brief, is your radical idea?

3:30My idea is that every country in the world, and indeed every multilateral institution in the world, should have someone who is holding that government, that institution to account on how they act for the interests of future generations.

3:46Gabriel Gatehouse:You were described as the government representative for the unborn, a tricky constituency. Yes. I mean, they don't talk to me an awful lot, the unborn. Maybe at some point we might find an AI that enables that to happen. But essentially the concept is that children don't have a voice in the decisions that people are making today in governments across the world. And future generations, those who are yet to be born, certainly don't have a voice, and yet the decisions that are being taken today will fundamentally affect the lives that they lead. So putting in place an institution, a commissioner, a person who has their interests in mind and can advocate in the here and now for their interests is really important if we're going to make sure that there's a planet that future generations are able to live on and able to thrive.

4:41Gabriel Gatehouse:OK, well, we'll get into how you advocate for that, how you figure out what it is that you should be advocating for. But first, how did you get into this? Tell us a little bit about yourself. So I grew up in Cardiff in Wales in a place called Ely, which was often in the headlines for the wrong reasons, high levels of worklessness, high levels of poverty, poor health, poor educational outcomes and so on. I grew up in the 80s under the Thatcher government. And I, however, went to school, not in the school, it was a three times failing school at the end of my road, but instead to school in a more affluent area where my grandparents lived.

5:25and what has really stuck with me throughout my career and you know the things that I'm passionate about is the difference in the life chances of the kids that I used to play with on the street versus the kids I used to play with in the playground in school so the level of resources they had the aspirations they had the access to different clubs and activities and and so on and that was immediately visible to you as a kid immediately visible my parents were quite politically active. My dad was a trade unionist and so on. And I felt that there was a, you know, a distinct unfairness about this. And I suppose that led me into pursuing a political career initially in local government.

6:07I was elected when I was 21. I think you were the youngest elected councillor in Wales? I was at the time, yeah. And also six months pregnant when I was elected, not a planned pregnancy. He's 27 next week. But I think that also brought a different perspective to my, you know, political career. A young mum, considerably younger than almost everyone else on that local authority, who were making decisions for people like me and my kids, but perhaps without fully understanding their lives or what the consequences of those things might be. So increasingly, I started thinking about why should your life chances be determined, in not just on the basis of where you're born, but actually when you're born as well.

6:51And why is it that decisions are generally taken by, you know, 50 plus white males and don't account for other perspectives and dimensions? And how do we start to fix that?

7:04Gabriel Gatehouse:So when you first got into politics, you were quite literally carrying the unborn and therefore thinking very much about that. I was, yes. Yeah. That makes your origin story very, very clear. and you just to stick with your backstory for a bit you now have how many children five children so I've got my my own kind of live experiment across age ranges from 27 down to down to 12 and you know there's some really interesting things there just looking at maybe we'll get into it that some of the education reforms that we've seen in Wales to change the curriculum to make sure that it's fit for the future the differences between the way in which my 27 year old was educated he's dyslexic he school wasn't for him school didn't cater for him at all my youngest age 12 she's dyslexic as well quite a different experience not perfect but quite a different experience and so it's really interesting to see that in my own front room as well as you know through my professional career and I suppose you're getting feedback or people feeding into whatever it is that you're doing from if not unborn kids your own kids who are kind of got a wide age spread.

8:14Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think anyone who's a parent or an aunt or uncle or what have you will see the very different lives that children, young people are living today. You know, they're digital natives. We weren't. They have climate anxiety that we have never, probably will never. So difficult to navigate that digital stuff.

8:37Gabriel Gatehouse:I mean, Is that part of the stuff that you're thinking about? Absolutely. And I think that the issue is with digital, as with practically any issue that you might consider for the future, my job was not to predict the future. Nobody can predict the future. My job was to help stop governments just sleepwalking into the future. And when we think about the digital world, I think that's exactly what we're doing. So the signs of the impact of social media have been there for very many years now. But it's only in this last year, really, the social media ban in Australia, the proposed ban in the UK and so on, that we're really starting to perhaps, well, we're probably not getting a grip of it.

9:25We're starting to dip our toe in the waters of what we might do about it.

9:28Gabriel Gatehouse:At least grapple with it. Same issues with AI and the warnings that we've seen over the last few weeks, which have come to the fore, but they are warnings that you didn't have to dig very deep to find over many years. And yet there is no country in the world that is adequately regulating or getting an adequate grip of this. And those pose some real challenges for the future. I mean, we'll get into in a minute the questions of how somebody in a post like yours that you held until from 2016 to 2023, right, future commissioner for Wales, can influence an industry like the AI industry, which is literally worth hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars, perhaps.

10:16Gabriel Gatehouse:But before we get there, just tell us, how was this post created? Because Wales was and remains, I think, the only country in the world to have one in its government. Is that right? There are some countries that have commissioners now, different terms of reference perhaps and different powers. Wales still remains the most comprehensive approach to legislation and the role of a commissioner. It came about, I suppose his origins was back when the Welsh Parliament or the Assembly, as it was called then, was first formed following the devolution referendum in 1998. So when the Government of Wales Act was set up, it had this clause in it which said sustainable development should be a central organising principle of the government, which is nice.

11:06Nothing to disagree with there.

11:08Gabriel Gatehouse:Sounds very unremarkable. Sounds like this kind of thing that sits there ignored on the statute books. Absolutely spot on. You know, and it was really considered to be something that maybe the environment minister would report on, you know, once a year or when they fancied it. There was absolutely no way that we could say that sustainable development was, you know, framing all of the decisions that government were taking. It was words, not actions. It was words, not actions. And do you know what? You know, I've worked, you know, I've worked in frontline politics. I've worked behind the scenes in politics.

11:41I've worked in the civil service in a range of different roles. And I've been on the end of phone calls in government to say, oh, the minister's got a report on this sustainable development thing. Can you tell us stuff you've done in your department that we can put in this report? And that's the way these things often go. Box ticking. Yeah, absolutely. What then happened is there was one particularly vociferous minister who was very passionate about this, Jane Davidson. And she was also working alongside civil society who were questioning. It was mostly environmental and international development type NGOs who were questioning how is this principle being embedded?

12:17And she worked with them to say, OK, I will establish a non-statutory sustainable development commissioner to provide advice to me and report on how well the government is doing. And that was quite clever because she was just as frustrated in government that why was this seen just as her job to do? It wasn't the business of the transport minister or the economy minister or any other minister. and so she was working up this sort of I suppose external critique of how well the government was doing whilst internally trying to drive change she brought a bright team of civil servants who were scanning the world for the best examples of things happening elsewhere and then like we see in many countries there was a political moment and the political moment was in 2010 the Labour government lost power in England or in the UK.

13:09And it was a Liberal Democrat and Conservative coalition. And one of the first things they did was to abolish the Sustainable Development Commission in England. And if there's one thing to know about Wales, it's that we like to do whatever it is as the opposite of England. I shall pass no further comments other than that. But that actually enabled her to take this issue to her cabinet colleagues who'd previously been uninterested and say, not only should we not do what England have done, we should actually go further in the opposite direction and put our commissioner on a statutory footing. And we should describe through new legislation, what does sustainable development being a central organising principle actually mean?

13:49And that's how the act came about.

13:51Gabriel Gatehouse:Okay. So big shout out to David Cameron and George Osborne and Nick Hague. Okay. So there was the Wellbeing of Future Generations Act of 2015, which I think essentially established your post. That's right, yeah. And you were the first incumbent. What did it say that your remit was? What were you supposed to do? So put simply in law, my remit was to be the guardian of the interests of the future generations of Wales. No pressure. and but how far how many future generations well um really good question so the legislation itself is silent on that the statutory guidance talks about at least a generation so and we frame a generation as about 20 to 25 years the reason however why it's not a firm criteria is it actually depends on the issue that you're looking at looking at so if you're perhaps thinking about education policy, then thinking ahead to 25 years is probably about the right time.

14:57Beyond that, you know, you would have wanted your education system to be changing and evolving. But when you're building homes or infrastructure or planting trees, the period is much longer. So, you know, houses can be around for maybe 100 or more years, likewise, infrastructure and so on. So it really depends on what we're talking about in terms of how long the timeframe goes. But I think an important practical point is, you know, if we're talking, you know, a thousand years into the future, it's very difficult practically to get, you know, your average local authority, chief executive or, you know, your average minister to be thinking that far, you know, that far ahead and kind of a little bit pointless.

15:45Gabriel Gatehouse:OK, so we're not talking 1 ,000 years in the future, but we might be talking more than 25 years. Yes. So 100 years? Yeah, potentially. OK. Yeah. And what exactly were your powers? I mean, did you have statutory powers? Could you force anyone to do anything? Could you haul them over the coals if they weren't doing it? Did you have a budget? Yeah, so I had a budget. Not enough. I imagine every commissioner says that. Go on, what was your budget? So my budget was about one and a half million per year. Per year? Over what, a seven-year term? A seven-year term, which is, you know, tiny, really, if you think about the scale of what we were trying to do.

16:23That equated to about 30 staff on a good day. Lots of those staff were joint appointments and secondments because I took the view of, you know, how do we bring people in from different sectors, infect them with future generations thinking, and then they go back out to implement. Like a radical virus. Yes, indeed. A good virus, I think. But in terms of my powers, so I describe them a bit like coach and referee. So coach in that I could advise and support all of the public bodies covered by the legislation on how to implement the legislation. And so the public bodies was everything from government right down to community, some community councils, local authorities, health boards, all of the main government institutions in between.

17:10And that advice and support, you know, sometimes came in the form of written guidance, but mostly it came in the form of walking alongside some of these organisations and people grappling with issues within it to help them apply a long term lens. because your average civil servant has never been trained in foresight or future generations thinking or how you might apply different scenarios. And everything in the system that had come before almost actively works against them doing that.

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18:49Gabriel Gatehouse:I hope you're enjoying my conversation with Sophie Howe. Don't forget you can subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds so you always know about future episodes and make sure you've got push notifications turned on. That way you'll get an alert whenever we publish a new episode so you'll never miss out. Now back to Sophie Howe.

19:11Gabriel Gatehouse:can you just give me a concrete example um so that we get yeah so to bring it out of the abstract like what what was an example where local government or the welsh national government was going to do something and you said hold on a second you've got to do it differently and think about this yeah i mean i'll i'll give you two so um if you think about our health care system it's all measured on how long does it take your ambulance to arrive how quick are you going to be seen in A &E? How satisfied were you with your 10-minute GP appointment? Actually, the questions that we need to be asking is, why did you need an ambulance in the first place?

19:44Could the condition that you've had be prevented, either completely prevented, you know, at source, if you like, or could we have intervened earlier so you don't need an ambulance? How satisfied were you with your 10-minute GP appointment? A much better question, actually, is how satisfied are you with your life, because that tells us much more about people's health and so on. So the performance measures were butting against what was a statutory duty to think and act in the long term and to take preventative action.

20:13Gabriel Gatehouse:But these seem like things that, you know, people in the NHS should be thinking about, and it all sounds very sensible, but it doesn't sound like it specifically addresses future generations, unborn generation. Well, I mean, the other thing to say about this concept of future generations is that what we took in Wales was what we described as a life course approach. OK, so I'm 49. Hopefully I'm a future generation of an 89 year old. And how public policy interacts with me now will determine to a reasonable degree the sort of life that I will live when I'm 89. So am I going to be in good health?

20:52Am I going to have the right sort of housing that meets my needs? You know, will I have access to the health care system when I need it and so on? So when we're talking about future generations, we're not just talking about the unborn. I suppose that's the more interesting concept in a way. But the very live issues that are being dealt with in government now or often being, you know, not being dealt with in government now is just about long termism. It's about what we do now. How is that going to play out in 20, 25, 30, 40 years?

21:24Gabriel Gatehouse:It sounds like you're saying if we make life better for people now, life will also be better for people in the future and possibly unborn people in the future. Yes, but there's an important kind of nuance to that, isn't it? Because it's about how do we think about how the decisions we take now are going to play out in the future. So another good example of this was the first big test of the legislation, which was that the government had plans to spend the entire of their borrowing capacity building a 13 mile stretch of motorway to deal with the problem of congestion at the M4 around Newport. I've sat in that traffic jam.

22:06Yes. Well, many people have, and I'm generally not popular with those people. But let me just outline the case for the intervention that I made. So what public policy tends to do is what it's always done. We've got a problem with congestion, so we need to build another road. The backdrop to this is that, meanwhile, our car use in Wales had been going up. We had the lowest levels of investment in public transport. Our carbon emissions from transport are going up. So again, the broader context that we look at is that we need to reduce our carbon emissions, but they're still going up in transport, one of our major sectors.

22:49We've got illegal levels of air pollution. We've also got really poor rates of ill health. And so when you think about, OK, if we need to solve a problem of congestion, How do we solve that whilst considering the future impact? And the really critical thing about the Welsh legislation is it doesn't just say, oh, think about the future and what might happen. It also sets out a vision for the future. So this vision is set out through seven interconnected well-being goals. Another really cool thing about that is that those goals were devised by citizens. So the government held a national conversation called The Wales We Want.

23:28and it posed the question, what's the Wales you want to lead behind to your children, your grandchildren, future generations to come? And so citizens set out these seven wellbeing goals. They were about creating the conditions where people's physical and mental health can thrive. They were about having connected and cohesive and safe and attractive communities. They were about an economy which works for people and planet. They were about a more equal Wales and so on. And so when we are taking decisions in Wales, and let's come back to that motorway issue, The question is not how do we solve a problem of congestion, answer, build another road usually.

24:05The question is how do we solve a problem like congestion whilst considering the best route to achieve in those seven wellbeing goals and the impact on future generations. So when you play it out in that way, the questions that I pose to the government there is, can you explain to me how you've considered this decision is in line with the goal of a prosperous Wales, which talks about a productive, innovative, low carbon society, because we're going to be increasing carbon emissions.