of our public finances simply doesn’t allow it. However, without the opportunity to leverage the scale of private sector funds now required, anything less will be seen as a very damp squib indeed. So whilst Chris Huhne continues to talk it up, all the smart money is on the Treasury talking it out.


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Sounds great – but how many of these fine ideas (captured in no less than 65 recommendations!) are genuinely deliverable? For the construction industry, the reality on the ground looks very different. Capital budgets have been ruthlessly hacked back (by as much as 45% according to some commentators), despite lots of warm words from the Coalition Government that they would be protected. Not only has the Building Schools for the Future programme been swept away but the number of schemes for refurbishments let alone new schools has been pruned drastically.


Capital costs per metre2


are shrinking by the month, along with any residual sustainability ambitions. It’s the same with the NHS, with both Higher Education and FE, with the Prison Service and so on.


Against that kind of backdrop, the idea of this being the “Greenest Government Ever” is beginning to look patently implausible.


Which means there’s a lot riding on other policy interventions such as the Carbon Reduction Commitment (which is now in effect a carbon tax – and this Government’s very first stealth tax! - kicking in at £12 a tonne of CO2


from


2012 onwards) and the proposed Green Investment Bank.


But even this flagship policy is already at risk. The Treasury remains implacably opposed to creating a new financial institution with its own balance sheet, arguing that the state


|60| ENVIRONMENT INDUSTRY MAGAZINE


This kind of contradictory positioning is absolutely par for the course. This is not a government which is comfortable with the concept of sustainable development. Indeed I would argue that only Chris Huhne and Oliver Letwin really ‘get’ SD, amongst senior Ministers, and the rest are struggling even to see the importance of completely conventional environmental policy. DEFRA is a complete mess, with thousands of civil servants to be made redundant across all its agencies; DECC is doing well, despite being targeted by Treasury at every step of the way, but DCLG has become probably the most dysfunctional Whitehall Department of all.


Image below © Eco Roofing Services


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