George Osborne waves carrots not sticks in pitch for green mantle

Ben Webster

Being the greenest party is unlikely to be a decisive factor in next year’s general election but that did not stop the Conservatives yesterday making a pitch for the mantle.
George Osborne, the Shadow Chancellor, made a series of environmental commitments that had two things in common: they will not cost the taxpayer a penny to implement, nor will they force individuals to change their behaviour.
The theme of his speech was that carrots were better than sticks when it comes to getting people to embrace a low-carbon lifestyle. This neatly avoids anything that might be unpopular with voters.
Mr Osborne teased his audience by stating that “there is a role for green taxation” and claimed that rewarding people for recycling was an example of a “clever green tax”.

Yet in praising the reward scheme run by the Tory-controlled Windsor & Maidenhead Council, he neglected to mention that the rewards were paid for not from taxes but with in-kind donations of goods and services by local businesses.
Mr Osborne garnered positive headlines yesterday by suggesting that he would make all councils introduce such schemes. Yet the only specific commitment was simply to “give councils detailed information” so that they could decide for themselves whether they wanted to take part.
Mr Osborne’s other main commitment — to cut central government emissions by 10 per cent in 12 months — is also weaker than it sounds if one looks at the detail of the policy.
Individual departments will not have to cut emissions by 10 per cent. They will have to make a contribution to the overall 10 per cent target but the Conservatives are not yet saying how much effort each will have to make.
There is no new money to help departments to introduce any energy-saving measures, such as more efficient heating and better-insulated buildings.
The Conservatives made much of their pledge to cut the budgets of departments that failed to meet their emission reduction targets. It later became clear, however, that the laggards would not face any cut in their main budgets, only a trimming of their funding for energy bills.
Mr Osborne’s most promising green pledge was also the simplest: the Conservatives will expose energy guzzlers in Whitehall by requiring the real-time energy consumption of government buildings to be published online. “That way the public can hold ministers and civil servants to account for their performance.”
That was the nearest that his speech came to proposing any kind of stick to spur us to reach out for the carrots.