Last week was going to be the week that David Cameron finally revealed himself to be leading the greenest government ever. According to advance media stories, the prime minister was to announce ‘a major policy intervention’ and end his silence on green issues in a speech to the Clean Energy Summit meeting in London on Thursday. On top of that, rising star Chloe Smith was to highlight the Treasury’s green actions in this year’s budget in response to questions from parliament’s Environmental Audit Commission. But in the week where the label ‘omnishambles’ started to seem polite, the wheels well and truly fell off Cameron’s green bandwagon.
It began badly with Chloe Smith’s appearance in front of the Environmental Audit Committee on Wednesday. Rather than proudly displaying the Treasury’s green hand, Ms Smith played her cards very close to her chest. In a bizarre performance she constantly referred to ‘budget 12’ and filled her allotted time with verbal ticks and platitudes ranging from ‘you’ll have to ask the lead department’ to describing ‘a piece of work we are very much proceeding with’.
What new green initiatives were in the budget? The budget was more of a consolidation of measures they’d already announced before. How does the Treasury value environmental costs? That’s something we are consulting business about. Greenhouse gas accounting? The government is working on it. Treasury colleagues might have congratulated her afterwards for ducking and dodging the questions so effectively, but in saying nothing, she told us something loud and clear: that the Treasury still thinks that green measures are something you do once you have a strong economy, rather than something you do in order to get a strong economy.
Then, on the morning of Cameron’s big speech and just a week before the London mayoral elections, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace announced their assessment of the London mayoral candidates’ green credentials. Having looked at their manifestos, pledges and published records, Boris Johnson was rated the least environmental, for, among other reasons, his plans to increase road space for motor vehicles and build a new airport; both of which would contribute to reducing London’s air quality further.
As if admitting that he didn’t want to fight on the green battleground any more, the Guardian reported that David Cameron had dramatically downgraded his speech from a ‘major policy announcement’ to ‘opening remarks’ at the Clean Energy Summit. This didn’t temper his spirit though – the prime minister used these remarks to boast about the investments in infrastructure that were not only making wind, solar and bioenergy viable options for the first time but had also helped make his government the greenest government ever. ‘Today, we are one of the best places for green energy, for green electricity, for green investment and crucially green jobs,’ he declared.
Sadly, such news didn’t seem to have reached the UK renewables industry in time. Because just as Mr Cameron was giving his speech, the UK solar industry announced that it had contracted by 25 per cent in the last nine months, with 70 per cent of companies seeing financial losses and 40 per cent expecting future redundancies as a result of the government’s uncertainties on feed in tariffs. There was also news that a planned £170m investment in a research centre and offshore wind farm turbine factory, which would have created an estimated 1,700 jobs, had been cancelled by Korean manufacturer Doosan Power Systems.
Blaming ‘sapping market confidence, putting a question mark over the future development of the offshore wind market’ this news came just a few weeks after GE cancelled plans to build a £100m offshore wind turbine manufacturing plant in the UK as a result of ‘current uncertainty surrounding the government’s renewable energy policy’.
Cameron might brag about the greenest government ever, but the Treasury, Boris Johnson and the renewables industry are apparently not quite so sure.
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Melanie Smallman is national coordinator of SERA, the Labour environment campaign
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