Ministers secretly take axe to green reforms

MINISTERS have secretly scrapped wide-ranging reforms instituted to "green" the governing of Britain, an Independent on Sunday inquiry has established. They have shut down three special Cabinet committees designed to ensure the Government's commitment to green issues, and comprehensively broken promises to examine the environmental effects of their policies and to report on their performance. They are also certain to fall far short of undertakings to reduce the use of energy in official buildings.

The revelations will embarrass the Environment Secretary, John Gummer, who last week published statistics showing that the Government was failing to halt environmental decline over a wide range of issues.

The Whitehall reforms were announced in the Britain's first-ever White Paper on the Environment in 1990, "to reflect the growing importance of environmental issues and the Government's determination to tackle them effectively". They would, it added, "integrate environmental concerns more effectively into all policy areas".

The White Paper was the brainchild of Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten, the then Environment Secretary, who compared it to the Beveridge Report which laid the foundations of the Welfare State and boasted that it "would set out our agenda for the rest of the century".

When critics said that it contained almost no new policies, he would point to the Whitehall reforms. He let it be known that he believed they had changed forever the way policies were made in Britain.

But now most of the reforms have been abandoned, and the few that remain have been emasculated.

n Ministers have scrapped a special Cabinet Committee set up to "maintain the momentum" on saving energy. Last week Mr Gummer was forced to publish figures which show that Government attempts to persuade drivers and homeowners to use less fuel had failed.

n Government departments will comprehensively break a promise in the White Paper to reduce the amount of energy they burn by 15 per cent by this month. At the last count they had achieved savings of only 0.3 per cent in their civilian buildings.

n Two more Cabinet committees set up to "co-ordinate environmental issues and develop new initiatives" have been scrapped. One, chaired by the Environment Secretary, met only twice. The other, chaired by the Prime Minister, met just once.

n A further committee of so-called "green ministers" from each department still survives, but is little more than a cipher. It has met only six times since it was set up in 1990, and sources say that many ministers do not bother to turn up, sending civil servants in their place. Earlier this year, junior environment minister James Clappison refused to tell Parliament which ministers actually attended the meetings or to publish their minutes.

n A comprehensive series of questions to every government department by shadow Environment minister Joan Ruddock over the past four months has failed to find a single case where ministers have subjected their policies to formal environmental appraisal - even though these assessments were repeatedly promised throughout Whitehall in the White Paper and follow-up reports.

n The Environment Department is unable to name a single ministry that has given an account of its environmental performance in its departmental reports, even though this too was repeatedly promised.

Last night Ms Ruddock said: "This gives the lie to the Government's professed commitment to the environment. Its absolute failure to follow through on the promises and to maintain the structures it has itself set up is yet another case of it saying one thing and doing another."

Earlier this month, Labour leader Tony Blair, in his first major green speech, undertook to set up an environmental audit committee to ensure the application of green policies across Whitehall.