Today, 29 organisations have joined forces to provide an analysis of the UK Government’s natural environment commitments.
We have called this report Nature Check and you can read it here.
Our starting point is that we want this and every government that follows to aspire to be and then be the greenest ever. Each government should want, as this one has said it does, to pass on the environment in a better state to the next generation.
So, we hope that the Government sees as us 25 critical friends who are keen for them to realise the Prime Minister’s ambition to be the greenest ever but who are prepared to point out where they could do better.
Our assessment is that the Government is currently failing.
We have looked at 16 major commitments made by the coalition on the natural environment. We feel that just two have been delivered. The others have either stalled of have been poorly executed.
I think that there is real tension at the heart of government over the Coalition’s approach to economic growth. The Environment Secretary of State Caroline Spelman rightly says that going green is both a moral and an economic imperative. At the same time the Chancellor bemoans "a decade of environmental laws and regulations”.
One of the things that all those in favour of sustainable development have argued for over the years is coherency and consistency when it comes to the environment. We didn’t have it with the last government – expansion plans for Heathrow proved that – and we have yet to have it with the current one.
Let me give you an example of how this tension plays out in the policy arena. In June, the Government unveiled its groundbreaking report – the National Ecosystem Assessment. This clearly showed that the natural world was critically important to human well-being and economic prosperity but that it is consistently undervalued in decision-making.
Two months later, out pops the National Planning Policy Framework with its now infamous presumption in favour of development – oops, sorry – sustainable development – which essentially provides the green (!) light to developers to go ahead and build, build, build. There is, of course, still time to fix it, but at times it feels like we have two different sorts of government – not drawn by party boundaries but drawn by government departments.
Perhaps, what is most worrying is the steady erosion of some of the environmental institutions that we need to help protect and manage the environment. Cuts to Defra and its environmental agencies have been compounded by Environment Agency and Natural England having their freedom to act as public champions of the environment severely constrained.
This is bad news for government. Any government needs to open itself up to scrutiny and challenge and if the agencies cannot do it, well, that’s what NGOs are for.
The report has lots of recommendations, but we’ve highlighted the top three:- Leadership and cross-government support for the natural environment- Putting the environment at the heart of the coalition’s growth agenda- Restoring the role of the statutory agencies as independent champions of the environment
I hope that ministers listen. And if they do, they can expect a better report card next year.