Sheffield Council is heading for another disaster similar to the tree-felling programme with clean air zone policy - David Behrens

What kind of politician would even countenance using disabled children as a bargaining chip to get his own way? Yet Matt Hancock’s sole response to the revelation has been to condemn the fact that his messages found their way into the public domain – even though he released them willingly to his biographer in the hope of shoring up his reputation. His line of reasoning seems to be that it was acceptable for him to have written them, but not for us to have found out.

The publication of texts that are overwhelmingly in the public interest has happened relatively quickly, because the writer in question, Isabel Oakeshott, was not bound by the redactive reams of red tape in which official inquiries are inevitably wrapped. Her disclosures may have betrayed a confidence but they served a greater good.

In Sheffield, there was no such fast-tracking. It is 13 years since the council signed an overpriced £2bn highway maintenance deal with a private contractor but it was not until Tuesday this week that we learned the truth about its contents.

Sheffield had long boasted of being the greenest city in Britain, with more trees per person than anywhere else. Yet we now know that officials set a target of cutting down fully half of those on the roadside and replacing them with saplings.

For a decade, councillors and their officers denied emphatically that this was the case. Worse, they criminalised residents who called them out and stood in the way of the bulldozers. Though their deceit has now been exposed not one of them, elected or otherwise, has resigned or been disciplined.

But with another unpopular and ill-planned policy now on the city’s agenda, the council’s reprehensible behaviour may yet come back to haunt it.

The local Tory MP Miriam Cates warned on Tuesday that the design of Sheffield’s “clean air zone” was doing serious financial harm to local businesses who were now being charged for taking their vehicles on the city’s ring road.

There was no legal requirement for this, she pointed out, and scant evidence that current pollution levels met the threshold for a clean air zone in the first place. Even if they did, the consequence of forcing people into private cars and onto residential roads was the exact opposite of what the scheme was meant to achieve.

Now, let’s turn the clock back six years and remind ourselves what the council did at the height of the roadside trees travesty, when it thought residents might be costing it money by exercising their democratic right to protest. It delivered letters to them by hand threatening court action to demand reimbursement. “The sums could be significant,” the letters warned menacingly.

Well, the boot’s on the other foot now. This time it’s taxpayers who are losing money – real money, not hypothetical digits on a spreadsheet – and the council shouldn’t be surprised if some of them adopt the same tactics. The threat of being sued would soon stop the City Hall steamroller in its tracks

Cynicism about initiatives like clean air zones is not confined to Sheffield. Neighbouring Barnsley was named this week as the most green-sceptic town in Britain, with one in five residents believing that politicians were spending too much time on environmental issues. Partly this is a question of priorities – climate change seems less important if you can’t afford to pay the bills – but also it’s because so many schemes amount to nothing more than exercises in box-ticking. That’s a view reinforced by the cavalier way in which they are often implemented.

Matt Hancock and Sheffield City Council are not the only parties guilty of this but they are demonstrably the most egregious and the least willing to admit their mistakes.

You reap what you sow, and in this case it is the seeds of contempt.