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

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Try for free today at odo.com, that's oddo.com. 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. This 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 radicalized. My wife listened last night and she's now searching for emergency water filtration systems online. This week I guess to someone who's prepping for the future in a different way. Some of 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. Now, 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, to focus on long-term, rather than short-term thinking? This is the mission that was entrusted to Sophie Hall by the Welsh Government in 2016, and 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 Hall, 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. My 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. You were described as the government representative for the unborn, a tricky constituency. Yes, I mean, they don't talk to me enough a 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. Okay, 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. And what has really stuck with me throughout my career and 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 that 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 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. I 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 man, a 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 not just on the basis of where you're born, but actually when you're born as well and 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? 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. Five children. They own kind of live experiment across age ranges from 27 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 aged 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 have kind of got a wide age spread. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think anyone who's a parent or an aunt or uncle or have you will see the very different lives that children, young people are living today, you know, their digital natives. We weren't. They have climate anxiety that we have never, probably, will never. So difficult to navigate that digital stuff, 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, but we're starting to dip our toe in the waters of what we might do about it. At least grapple with it. a'r rhwch i'r rhwch i'r rhwch i'r rhwch i'r rhwch i'r rhwch i'r Ys gweithioedd. Ys gweithioedd beth gweithio. Ys gweithioedd beth gweithio beth gweithio beth gweithio beth gweithio beth gweithio beth gweithio beth gweithio Ys gweithioedd beth gweithioedd. Ys gwaithioedd beth gweithioedd beth gweithioedd beth gweithioedd. Ys gweithioedd. Mae'r gweithio bod yn yw i'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r g a phome 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. Fox ticking. Yeah, absolutely. What then happened is there was one particularly the ciferous 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 and 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. And 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 is as the opposite of England. I shall pass no further comment 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 be an essential organisation principle actually mean? And that's how the act came about. OK, so big shout out to David Cameron and George Osborne and Nick Kabe. OK, so what did, so there was the, there was the well-being of Future Generations Act of 2015, which I think essentially established your post. That's right. 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. But how far? How many Future Generations? Well, really good question. So the legislation itself is silent on that. The statutory guidance talks about at least age 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. So if you're perhaps thinking about education policy, then thinking ahead to 25 years is probably about the right time. Beyond that, you know, you would have wanted your education system to be changing and evolving. But when you're building homes or your infrastructure or planting trees, the period is much longer. So, you know, housing is going to be around for maybe a hundred 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, you know, your average minister to be thinking that far, you know, that far ahead and kind of a little bit pointless. Okay, so we're not talking a thousand years into the future, but we might be talking more than 25 years. Yes. So, a hundred years? Yeah, potentially. Okay, 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? So I had a budget, not enough. I imagine every commissioner says that. So my budget was about one and a half million over a year. A seven-year term, which is, you know, tiny, really, if you think about the scale of what we were trying to do, that equated to about 30 staff on a good day. A lot of those staff were joint appointments and succumbents, because I took the view of, you know, how do we bring people in from different sectors, in fact, and 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. And that advice and support, you know, sometimes came in the form of, you know, 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. Investing with Schwab is like spending a Saturday at a great farmer's market. You can fill your reusable tote with a bit of everything. Maybe you go for some free range self-directed investing. Or perhaps you pick up a few farm fresh trades while you peruse. You can even get help from a dedicated advisor. That's full service wealth management. Mix, match and change your mind whenever you want, because at Schwab, you can invest your way. No matter your goals or appetite for investing, Schwab has everything you need all in one place. Visit Schwab.com to learn more. 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. Can you just give me a concrete example so that we can bring it out of the abstract? Like 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. I mean, I'll give you two. So if you think about a health care system, it's all measured on how long to 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? Could the condition that you've had be prevented, either completely prevented 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?' 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. But these seem like things that 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. Okay, 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? Am 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 2025, 30, 40 years? 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 for 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. So I've sat in that traffic town? Yes, 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. We've got a legal levels of air pollution. We've also got really poor rates of ill health. And so when you think about okay, 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 Wales We Want and it posed the question what's the way you want to lead behind your children, your grandchildren, future generations to come. And so citizens set out these seven well-being 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. The question is how do we solve a problem like congestion whilst considering the best route to achieving those seven well-being 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? I mean, they could argue that getting people to work in reasonable time would be in the interests of prosperous Wales if we set the carbon emissions aside for saying that. Exactly that. And that is usually exactly what happens which is why in these situations economy always wins and environment always loses. But in the long term, there are no jobs on a dead planet. So you have to reconsidering this in the round. But so in this case, the economy didn't win and the environment and the future commissioner did win because the road got scrapped. Yeah, but again, I'd say there was a really important nuance there because it wasn't played out just as an economy versus environment argument. The other questions I was posing was can you explain to me how this is in line with the goal of a healthier Wales creating the conditions where people's physical and mental health can thrive? What is building a road spent in the entire of the borrowing capacity going to do to contribute to that? Can you tell me how it's in line with the goal of a more cohesive way a Wales safe, attractive, well connected communities? Okay, yes, you can get to eight from A to B in your car, but actually low car use areas have much better social interaction and connection. And then the final point which was a really compelling one is can you also explain to me why this is in line with the goal of a more equal Wales because 25% of the lowest income families in this region don't own a car. So are you saying you're spending the entire of the government's borrowing capacity building something that benefits only the already better off? So it doesn't stack up. So you got the road scrapped. Yeah. Is it fair to put it that way? Well, the road got scrapped. The road got scrapped. Use the passive voice. But that happened not because you you didn't have veto power, right? You didn't sit there going, I'm sorry, this does not accord with the legislation. Therefore, I'm saying no to the road. No. So the coach and referee bit. So the referee powers in the in the legislation were powers to monitor and assess the progress that the government and others were making on meeting the wellbeing goals and something called section 20 reviews. So I could go in and review a decision that had either been made or was about to be made and the government or the institution I make recommendations on what they should do. If they weren't going to follow my recommendations, they had to outline the reasons why. I mean, in this case of the road, I would have done a section 20 review. I didn't actually have to the public arguments that we had. I suppose were were enough and I probably would have taken the government to judicial review. But you you have an ally in in the first minister at the time at the time. Yeah. Was that your biggest achievement then the road? They were not road. They're not road. Well, let's just look at what happened instead of the road, okay? Yes, I was going to be my next question. Okay. So instead of spending the money on a road, 1.6 billion pounds. 1.6 billion pounds. We shifted a lot of that money into public transport interventions and active travel interventions. And we've been able as a result of that to build, while it's still under construction, but the first new trains of the South Wales metro came online last year. And in that first year, we've seen a one-fifth increase in passenger numbers. Now, that's good. And there've been a range of other transport interventions. So I also looked at all of the pre-approved road building schemes that the government had on their books and asked them to apply the same test around the Future Generations Act. And as a result of that, I think it was 51 of the 55 were cancelled. Because when you look at that vision for Wales, the well-being goals and intergenerational fairness, building roads, doing the same old thing and expecting us to get different results does not stack up. What's that traffic jam like now? So here's the challenge, okay? Because when you change the way that you do things for future benefit, it doesn't mean that suddenly everything is solved. So we stop spending many here on a road. It takes several years to then redirect that investment, procure, and build, and so on, new infrastructure for metro systems. So we are now, so that decision was 2018. So we are now eight years on. We can see signs of what we call modal shift. If I was commuting to Newport, I say there was silence. The road is still congested, okay? But so there's like a danger zone, right, when you're applying futures thinking, because it's got a long change in the way we do things, has a long tail, and it takes a long time to come out positively the other end of the sausage machine. We look at like you trekked in in the Netherlands. They had a massive shift in public policy around road use and changing the way that they did transport planning to much bigger focus, almost a primary focus on cycling and walking and public transport. And they are now held up 40 years later, as the place to look at when you're doing these things. But that's a 40-year journey. And there's the problem with our political systems. We don't ever take a 40-year journey. We take a four or five-year journey at the best. So yes, so you're saying as the Future Generations Commissioner, you've got to have short-term pain in order to have long-term gain? Well, I mean sometimes that might be the case, but my starting point is to look for the things that work for multiple generations. Don't just do what we immediately always do, let's try and find those solutions, push ourselves to go further to find those solutions that give you multiple wins. Yeah, I mean, I'm not saying that you're wrong in saying that you sometimes need to have short-term pain to have long-term gain, but it remains the fact that that is a difficult thing for democratically elected politicians who have quite a sort of short electoral cycle to deal with, to sell to the people who are actually going to vote, not the unborn, when they're already living in straight and circumstances. Yeah, but you're absolutely right. And the legislation is one piece and a commissioner, I suppose, is a piece or a couple of pieces of a jigsaw that tries to help the system get beyond that, but it still requires political bravery, and I used to have conversations sometimes challenging ones with ministers in government, and sometimes ones where they would say, "I'm trying to shift the system to do the right thing, and I'm trying to, you know, get the politics right on this, and to bring people with me, and that's really difficult, and therefore bringing that different perspective of future generations is actually, can actually be quite helpful to those people, and there are many of them in the system who are trying to do the right thing, but the system, the media, the public often will shut that down, but then, of course, we are very quick all of us to complain when things then go wrong, because we haven't prevented them happening in the first place. Okay, so part of your radical idea is not just we should be making decisions while keeping future unborn generations in mind, you're saying we've got to change the system. Yeah, this is why I applied for this job. My whole career has been about making systems of governance and decision-making, public services better. When we talk about democracy, really what we're talking about is you go and vote once every four or five years. I don't think that that is effective democracy. I think we need to be much more participatory, we need to be having much deeper and ongoing conversations with citizens. We need to be talking to citizens like we did in Wales around what's the vision for what we're trying to create. Can we find a kind of collective vision here? That still doesn't mean that the necessary, you're going to like the steps that you take to meet that collective vision, but it's a starting point. There are a multitude of things that we could do to do democracy better, and if we don't, what we can see where things are headed right now, can't we? We can see the rise of populism. We can see the increasing mistrust and distrust in institutions. We can see the geopolitical tensions and problems that that is creating. I spend a lot of time in the UN and in the EU and various institutions like that, and there is an undercurrent of significant worry about that. Everyone sort of ring in their hands about what they're going to do about it, and I think applying a long-term lens to policy better involved in citizens in that is part of the answer to that. When you were going around government saying, "Excuse me, but what about this? Did you find that you were a popular figure?" Mixed. Early on in my term, I identified what I described as frustrated champions. So these were people who had been working in government or public services for a long time, and could see that there was a better way of doing things. Before I was a Future Generations Commissioner, I was the WPs Commissioner in South Wales, and our police officers were dealing with 35,000 incidents of domestic abuse every year, and we were turning up, filling in a risk assessment form, doing immediate safeguarding, and then probably turning up at the same house next week and the week after and the week after. So we're just going through the motions of a system, and that bakes in a real frustration for those people who are trying to make a difference. How do we get up front to some of these issues? I mean, you can go right down to the first thousand days of life and the importance of interventions there to prevent some of these things, and you can track back to earlier interventions, earlier interventions, okay? So I mean, there's these frustrated champions were really powerful in terms of making the act move and work, because they were using the act as permission to challenge the system. So it wasn't just, oh, this is a good thing to do, we should be changing this, etc. It was like, here is a legal duty that we have to do things differently. And did you find that you got pushback? Not from the frustrated champion, they wanted me to sort of come in. From the system, from what some critics of government civil service called the blob. The blob, yes. Certainly pushback from the blob. You can imagine, if I asked you what were the most difficult departments to convince, what would you say? Well, I mean, isn't it usually the people with the money? There you go. So it was Treasury and it was economy department, okay? So they were the most difficult to get on board. And so I had a kind of, you know, a bit of a toolbox of support, persuade, showcase best practice, walk alongside people to create new strategies and ways of doing things. And then there was a bit of, well, I will help you to craft your new transport strategy, economy strategy, whatever it might be. You're either going to want my help in which case that needs to be embedded into it. If you don't want my help, then I will publicly critique your strategy or whatever it is afterwards in one of the Senate committees in the media. And I will be asking for the same justification here, as I did for the M4. A little bit of carrot, a little stick. Indeed. Can I ask you, you were in this for seven years, the most high profile, your most high profile achievement was not doing something, but it was, well, it was not doing something. It was not building a road. What's the one thing you wish you could have done? I wish that we could have made more progress on our healthcare system, which is broken. And I had plans to do that. I was going to review, use my statutory powers, which I use sparingly to review how well the government was enabling the NHS to apply the principles in the Future Generations Act. And then we had COVID. And so we couldn't do that. But there are some real positive shoots, if you like, that have come from this. And if I had my time again, I would be looking at that, and I would also be looking at the food system. And it's brilliant that the new commissioner is looking at the food system. And I suppose teed this up a little bit by looking, I use my review powers to look at procurement. So we spend about £6 billion a year buying goods and services. We buy at lowest cost. We don't care about the carbon emissions. We don't join the dots and so on. So we are now doing some really brilliant work on food procurement. So why is that so important? Well, you know, Wales is largely, particularly in terms of land mass, agricultural, how do we join the dots between farmers, you know, from farm to fork. We started off in Cardiff with procuring courgettes into schools with one supplier. We are now on about 200 different schools and multiple suppliers. So there's been a 25% increase in the amount of Welsh procured veg that is coming into our schools. Now that's a small example, but you know, that's over, let's say, four or five years. So if we are able to replicate that for all food, into all schools, into all hospitals and so on, and one of the key players in this has been one of the local health boards, then that has the potential to have multiple ripple effects. Diversify the courgettes supply. We move beyond courgettes now. We're on lots of different versions of that. It's interesting how off courgettes seem to crop up in this on this podcast. There was a report wasn't there from the Welsh Government that said that the office for the Future Generations Commission had fallen short and it was falling short on achievements and ambition. Why do you think that was? Well, it wasn't saying the office was falling short. It was saying implementation of the act was falling short. Okay. So outcomes. Outcomes, yeah. And I think that that is fair. So we've still got really high levels of children living in poverty in Wales. Now part of that is because of our devolution settlement, part of that is because of the, you know, two child benefit cap and so on and so on. Part of it is due to our history. There are things where on the face of it, things are not getting better. So our most recent piece of results, these are the education results. So Wales at the bottom of the League of the UK nations on pizza, which measures reading arithmetic and science. Now that's a problem because literacy is a sort of foundation of learning. However you have to balance that against this is the biggest systems change program that Wales has ever seen or any government has ever seen and you can't change the habits of very many lifetimes in the way we do public policy and all of the measures, incentives, resources, policies that have come before in a short space of time. Now there's been ten years and we can see some significant changes from the changes to transport, the changes to education, the changes to our waste strategy. Wales is the second best country in the world for our rates of recycling. We can see changes in the way that we do procurement. We can see the banning of profit in children's care. We can see businesses starting to embrace the Future Generations Act. But you're taking credit for that? No, this is a whole system. The legislation must take credit for that. But the legislation, it's one tool isn't it in a whole system approach and it's not a perfect tool. Would I rather have it than not have it and would I rather every country have it than not have it? Absolutely, but it has to go alongside political bravery, better citizen involvement, better training, development, understanding of how we apply these techniques and so on and better mechanisms in government to join the dots and think to the long term. And you're now, you're not imposed anymore. You work independently. You advise other governments, other institutions. Who's listening? Well, I suppose the most significant thing that's happened in the last couple of years is that in 2024 the UN passed a declaration on Future Generations and I work with an organisation called the School of International Futures and we have been we were heavily involved in advocating for that declaration and that has had ripple effects across the world. So we are seeing an increased appetite now and I'm going to give that a caveat in a moment. So we can see that in Italy of passing into generational fairness bill. So that means all new legislation passing in Italy has to apply into generational fairness test. We can see that in Nigeria the government there are setting up. They've done a whole big vision in exercise with young people and across citizens and are setting up new foresight units and new ways to help government think and plan for the future. There's an indigenous tribal commission in Cameroon. There are moves. There's been a private member's bill in the Australian Parliament. I'm going to be in Western Australia in a couple of weeks where the government there are introducing a 2050 commission. Urs Le Vonder Lane in the EU was introduced the first Intergenerational Fence Commissioner in the EU with a new strategy there. There are multitudes of other countries where there are campaigns for similar legislation. So from New Zealand to the Marciarata region in India to Portugal, Spain, Ireland, I you know I could go on. And this has all come about since Wales blazed the trail. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So for how former government representative for the Unborn or Future Generations Commissioner for Wales and current radical incrementalist. Thank you very much for coming in and sharing your radical idea with us. Thank you. That's it for this episode. To make sure you don't miss future conversations you can subscribe to radical on BBC Sounds and of course you'll get access to all of our previous shows including Votes for six-year-olds could child suffrage revive democracy where David Runtzeman set out his idea to radically lower the voting age in the UK. That episode was from last August. Right. That's it for me for now but there'll be another episode of radical coming very soon. Bye. I haven't seen my son since 2012. That's the last time I hugged him. I know that my son is somewhere alive. This is Deborah Tyce. Her son Austin is one of the biggest missing person cases in the world and for years I've been searching for him. Oh gunshots. Somebody's written a message in a walnut blood. What do you want from me? Why should I have that mystery? I want to know about my son. Where is Austin Tyce from BBC Radio 4? Listen on the I'm not a monster presents podcast on BBC Sounds. Part of why I blew the whistle was I didn't want to lay in bed in 20 years having seen another million people die and know that I could have done something when I had a chance. This week on the interface we're talking to Francis Hagen. The Facebook whistle blower who leaked the documents that changed how the world saw social media. And now she is the subject of Aaron Sorkin's latest movie The Social Reckoning. So join me, Thomas Germain. And me, Jess Maddox, for the interface. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcast.