On one level the change of tone is genuinely very welcome. I would rather have a government that says environmental issues are important than the situation we had for much of Cameron’s government of an active climate change denier being in charge of policy making. I also happen to genuinely believe that there are a lot of very good environmentally minded conservatives out there and there is nothing whatsoever to stop a business-friendly government from going Green. Getting the Conservative Party to believe in conserving things shouldn’t be as hard as it has often been in the past.
On the rather more important downside, the thing about environmental policies is that it is usually more important to do something than to talk about maybe doing something at some time in the future if you still feel like it and it is not too much trouble for anyone.
Many people have pointed out this week that if you really wanted to do something for the environment then you might start by abandoning fracking, pulling out of the ludicrously expensive and clumsy Hinkley Point project, taxing fossil fuels more heavily in order to subsidise public transport and passing a law requiring plastic bottles to be returnable. Don’t hold your breath. Remember this is about brand detoxification not about the environment.
Even on areas of policy where much could be achieved quickly at very low cost little of substance is being done. Take housing policy for instance. The Conservatives have gone all out to encourage the building of hundreds of thousands of new homes – many of them large executive estates on green fields across the country that do little to meet need and a lot to pay back major donors from the construction industry. What they have not done is thought through how much of an opportunity large numbers of new homes provide when it comes to environmental policy.
Every house built is a chance to rethink the way our homes impact on the environment. It would be incredibly easy and very cheap for government to pass legislation to take full advantage of that opportunity. For example, what is the point in building a new home without an electric car charging point included in it. As the only Green District Councillor in Craven I tried to insert this requirement into our local plan but the most I could get out of our Conservative council was a commitment to include something along these lines in detailed guidance. Make the inclusion of a charging point a national requirement for all new buildings approved and you achieve a step change in the number of homes owners who can switch away from fossil fuel without significant difficulty. It puts people off from buying an electric car if they have to knock a hole in their outside wall, hire a contractor and pay quite a bit of money to plug their new electric car into their home. It encourages them to buy one if the equipment is there as standard in their new home. The cost of doing this whilst building is a few pounds.
But why stop there? Modern technology is making it easy and cheap to generate electricity in your own home. Indeed many existing home owners are paying a lot of money to put solar panels on their roof or install heat exchange systems. It is a lot easier to do this whilst you are constructing a new home. Any Conservative Government that was genuinely committed to the environment would pass legislation requiring each new housing estate to generate more power than it will use. You don’t have to tell anyone how to do this – and with the pace and flexibility of change it would be wrong for government to do so. You could incredibly easily require that it is done. Much the same kind of step change could be achieved around food waste processing facilities on large new housing estates. These are not radical far left policies. They are simple easy measures that ought to be possible for any government with imagination and a real interest in change to adopt.
There have been, of course, some improvements to the environmental standards that builders have to achieve but they fall well short of the visionary step change that could be achieved by making a clear commitment that everything new that we build has to be planned around reducing and turning back environmental impact.
But there is no point in passing good laws if you don’t check whether the regulations are implemented. Instead of ensuring that high standards are set and monitored the modern Conservative Party has spent four decades trying to reduce regulation and avoid close monitoring. To the point where the Grenfell Tower contractors were able to hire their own fire safety monitors and the constructors of the panels were allowed to do the same with their inspectors. The local fire service identified that the building was a high risk but could not issue any instructions to do anything about this because of an ideological belief that all this health and safety checking was a burden on enterprise.
Achieving anything significant on the environment requires government to be prepared to act. It requires law, regulation, inspection, penalties for non-compliance and a determination to see desired actions implemented. Where are the realistic signs that May’s government is seriously contemplating that?
So the real test of Theresa May’s commitment to environmental policies is a simple one. Has she actually required anyone to do anything significant? The answer so far is a resounding no.
What May said this week amounts to little more than “Wouldn’t it be nice if someone did something”.
I don’t know about you but I don’t find that an impressive position for a Prime Minister to adopt. I thought she was supposed to be in charge of making policy and leading the country forward.