Cameron under fire for green policy failures

Former government adviser Jonathon Porritt said the likelihood of the Government living up to the promise made almost a year ago was “vanishingly remote”.

In a report commissioned by Friends of the Earth, Mr Porritt said Ministers were failing to deliver on key environmental pledges, and policies had been watered down, delayed or abandoned.

In the wake of the report, Friends of the Earth executive director Andy Atkins warned that without “real political courage” the Prime Minister’s green ambitions would be simply hot air.

From proposals to sell off public forests to a review of feed-in tariffs for small-scale renewables and the decision to scrap a £42m marine renewables development fund, the Government has failed to champion green issues, the report claims.

According to the research, little or no progress has been made on three-quarters of 77 environmental or sustainability policies that were analysed.

Mr Porritt said the review of the policies showed that the “bad and the positively ugly indisputably outweighed the good”, and that growth at all costs had won out over efforts to create a green economy and thousands of low-carbon jobs.

He said the Prime Minister had not been personally visible on green issues, the Treasury had been hostile to environmental policies and the Environment Department (Defra) was being “trampled all over” by other Whitehall departments.

The Big Society and the localism agenda were being driven by the ideological priority to shrink the state, he claimed.

Mr Porritt chaired the Sustainable Development Commission, which was set up to hold the government to account on its policies on sustainability, but which was scrapped last year in the “bonfire of the quangos”.

He said: “The Prime Minister’s own credibility is at stake here – as is that of the Liberal Democrats who have clearly failed to use their influence inside the coalition to ensure a better performance on the environment and sustainable development.”