Meet the world’s first future generations commissioner

Appointed with the purpose of holding the Welsh government and others to account, Sophie Howe is on a mission to shift the whole system towards ‘future-thinking’, she tells Heather Martin

Howe’s brief as commissioner, a role she’s held for the past six years, is to discourage short-term thinking and get ahead of the game (Matthew Horwood)

Every country needs a Sophie Howe, the world’s first future generations commissioner. If we want a future, that is. But not every country has the foresight of Wales. When the Welsh Assembly was formed in the late 1990s, the Government of Wales Act included a clause stipulating that sustainable development should be a central organising principle. “Lofty ambitions,” Howe says, wryly, “but not much meat on the bone.” In reality, no one was checking. But still, it was “quite a thing at the time”.

Then along came Jane Davidson, “a particularly brilliant environment minister” and later, author of #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country, who decided it was time to step up. There was no point asking her to help the government meet its obligations, she argued, without also asking the economy minister and the housing minister too. The first principle of sustainability was joined-up thinking. “Everything is connected to everything,” Howe says. “We’re not going to meet our carbon emissions targets if the housing minister is still building rubbish houses.”

In the run-up to the 2012 local elections, while the coalition government in Westminster was rowing backwards on sustainability, Davidson convinced the first minister that the Labour Party should commit to legislating for sustainable development, to put more meat on the bone. Then, having got the commitment into the manifesto, she promptly retired. “It could have completely flopped,” Howe reminisces, but luckily the brief landed on the desk of a minister who “could see that the principles were critical to the reforms Wales was trying to take forward in public services”.