Measuring and reporting the SDGs: Last push to help the ONS sufficiently report UK progress

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) is commendably consulting with us until next Wednesday on its approach to SDG measuring and reporting. 

We’d love you to make a quick submission. Here’s why and how.

Why bother?

In September 2015, the SDGs replaced an older set of United Nations developmental goals, the Millennium Development Goals.

Whether or not we think the SDGs do enough to transform our broken economic and political system would be the subject of another blog. But we’re stuck with them until 2030 and they’re an improvement on the MDGs.

For example, they balance economic, social and environmental areas, they’re multi-dimensional, and they do include some transformative targets.

 In theory, a country that met all the targets would be:

• a peaceful, just and inclusive society;
• free from poverty, hunger or inequality;
• effectively protecting human rights;
• gender equal, with empowered women and girls;
• protecting the environment and natural resources. 

It doesn’t stop there, that country would also work to:

• secure the lasting protection of the planet and its natural resources;
• contribute to creating the global conditions for sustainable, inclusive and sustained economic growth, shared prosperity and decent work for all. 

Secondly, the SDGs are ‘universal’ – this means all countries have to meet them and are encouraged to report progress two to three times before 2030.  This means the can be used to hold governments to account.

And we’ll need to because even where the data is available, where it’s a transformative target governments are avoiding reporting. See, for example, the lack of reporting to the UN for target 10.4’s indicator ‘Labour share of GDP, compromising wages and social protection transfers’.

So, how’s the UK doing?

The British government was a major supporter of the SDGs.  By law, the UK provides 0.7% of Gross National Income in foreign aid. But the UK is far from meeting the SDGs itself.

Graham Long at Newcastle University concluded in his blog for the UKSSD (a diverse network of civil society organisations) that there is a clear need for UK progress across all the goals and specific targets too.

For example:

• Nearly 17% of people live in poverty according to our national definition
• Three million are undernourished, including 1.3 million elderly
• 47% of young people fail to achieve the minimum expected outcome of 5 GCSE’s when leaving school
• Nearly a fifth of 16-59 year old females have been victims of sexual assault
• 21% of people in the UK live on less than 50% of average income (that’s less than £14,100 annually for a full time job

And for Goal 8.8, we’ve got much to do to protect British workers’ rights too. 

So, although it’s early days, the UK government could show leadership by ‘walking the talk’ here too.

But they’re not.

There are no current plans to develop a national action plan for reaching the SDGs across government.  Instead they say the underlying aims of the SDGs are already reflected in the government’s work plan which each department will deliver.

And they haven’t yet volunteered, unlike Italy, Sweden, Brazil, India, Ghana and even Zimbabwe, to put themselves forwards for a review at the UN’s follow-up review process.  Instead they’ve published an implementation paper filled with cherry-picked examples which only show progress.    

So is the government side-stepping its responsibility?

No government should be able to cherry-pick what progress they report and get away with it. We need to support the ONS so it can report accurate progress where relevant, towards the 17 goals, 169 targets and 230 indicators. 

And so to the consultation

Gaps were expected because many indicators are grouped into ‘Tier II’ or ‘Tier III’ which mean they need developing.  Graham Long is right when he says, the consultation feels a bit overwhelming but it’s the start of an important conversation with the ONS. 

In response to some of the questions, we think that any data that is collected and reported needs to directly correspond to the SDG Goals themselves and not be merged into topics or any other fudge.  We also need to be able to compare the data against other countries like us and unlike us and see change over time.

And when it comes to equal human dignity, the ONS ranking question that corresponds to data disaggregation is unfair but income, gender, age and race were in our top four.  We don’t think the ONS should dwell on having the best data, good enough is enough. At the least, we’d accept rough and ready or proxies instead of nothing. 

So please support the consultation, fill it in and help make sure the ONS can produce a set of data fit for an advanced economy that enables us hold the government to account for goals that are as crucial for citizens and migrants in Sierra Lone and Bangladesh as they are for us.