Disingenious

Sorry, thought I was done with the last post, but still me (Nick) here - I've been cleaning up all my papers and files to hand on to Jenny, but came across this recent change to the Energy & Water Management policy that was slipped in without me realizing at the time:

A section of the final policy statement reads, under a general 'Energy and Water Management' section:
"Reinvest a proportion of annual savings into future saving initiatives."

However, the first draft that was presented, discussed and commented on at the first meeting of the E&WM group read:
"Reinvest 50% of any annual savings into future saving initiatives."

Now, this seems to me like some serious backtracking on a policy even before it formally comes into operation! Fifty percent is a concrete number, and we know that if the university saves £X it will end up with £Y to definitely be invested into a further program of action. With this change, the university can waffle and fudge and well, only spend 'a proportion' of savings into future initiatives and justify spending only a ridiculously low amount of money with this policy.

What I'm incredibly angry about is how this change, which is by no account insubstantial, was put in without being brought to the Energy & Water Management group as a whole. Part of me is extremely annoyed at myself for not spotting the change, but a bigger part of me is annoyed at university management for not highlighting that the change was made in between the two meetings.

Pro-Vice Chancellor John Harries, introducing the final document, said that only minor, wordsmithing changes had been made, and that is true for the rest of the policy - consolidating headings and word changes that don't affect substance - except for this one. I asked him if he would go through the changes that were made and he reassured me that they weren't substantive ones (so we didn't need to go through them), and I took him at his word. Trusting him was quite clearly a mistake on my part, and I've learned my lesson.

Quietly making this shift amidst a raft of other wording changes is disingenious and dishonest at best, and seriously calls into question the university's alleged commitment to student engagement with environmental progress if they weren't willing to at least discuss the change.