All members of the roundtable at the second Sustainable Development forum agreed that it is imperative the civil service embrace the plan in order for it to work.

The meeting was held last week in a packed Bermuda Industrial Union hall where panellists were invited to speak about the draft document Charting Our Course: Sustaining Bermuda. The invited panellists were Larry Burchall, the Island?s Administrator of Defence; Amanda Outerbridge, a member of the independent Sustainable Development Round Table and former National Trust director; businessman and independence commissioner Bob Steinhoff and Kenneth Dill, Assistant Cabinet Secretary.

The focus of the second meeting was on the draft document?s section, Transforming Governance and the Public Sector, which deals with how to put mechanisms in place in Government to ensure sustainable development is achieved.

Mr. Burchall said it was an obvious statement that the civil service is critical to the success of sustainable development.

?You all know the answer to that because you drive around Bermuda roads and we don?t have things that are elsewhere,? he said. ?We don?t have neon signs or large billboards because we have signage laws that are 50 years old. Someone had an aesthetic in mind, an idea of what they wanted Bermuda to look like and today we still enjoy that.

?The values put in place 50 years ago are still in place and that is because of civil service. Sustainable development can work, it has been working for us for a long time.?

Mr. Steinhoff said it was important to prioritise the suggestions in the draft plan. In his view the two most important aspects of the second section, regarding Government, were to improve the business planning within the civil service and ensure there was effective leadership.

?The improvements won?t be done by the Sustainable Development Unit it will be done by the civil service,? he said. ?It needs to be pushed down through the ministries and have a business plan to assign responsibilities to each person and a timeline and to have a review to ensure that people are doing it.

?We also need to ensure that we choose the right people for management. It needs to be based on performance and not seniority, as it has been in the past. We need training especially at the senior levels and secondments so that they can see how it is done elsewhere.?

Roundtable member Amanda Outerbridge urged the public to continue coming to the meetings, which have been well attended with standing room only so far.

?If there are aspects of the plan that you do not believe are being enacted come to us. The roundtable are the public?s conduit to the Government.?

The Premier attended the forum as well and spoke about the aim of the document. He added that he was happy that Bermudians have embraced the concept of planning for the future.

?This has been far more successful than we could ever have imagined.? he said. ?When you strategise these things everything works better on paper but we?ve seen so many people come out to this. We will be able to capture their views. The people are very into this process.

?As a Government we created and sponsored this and we will see it through. We are already using information from this.?

The Premier pointed to recent announcements of partnerships with the private sector to provide housing as examples of how suggestions in the plan have been applied to Government policies .

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