The Government is likely to miss half of its environmental targets and is taking “fundamentally dishonest” steps to hide its shortcomings, says the Policy Exchange.

In Green Dreams: A Decade of Missed Targets, the think-tank claims that 60 per cent of targets since 1997 have either been missed, are unlikely to be achieved or are worded so vaguely that they cannot be meaningfully analysed.

Rural affairs and biodiversity are the least successful, with 87 per cent of bio-diversity targets missed. Waste - where 67 per cent of targets have been or are likely to be met - is the most successful.

The Policy Exchange says that targets are more likely to be met if they are set well in advance, on an escalating scale and are underpinned by a policy commitment, such as the landfill tax escalator.

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Where this has not happened, “a pattern of creative accounting” has emerged to disguise failure, the report claims. “Key green targets have continually been dropped, chopped or changed, undermining business confidence instead of supporting it,” the report says. “Energy has been one of the worst-hit areas, with seven major policy re-alignments in almost as many years.”

The think-tank accuses politicians of disguising old targets on climate change and, in particular, carbon emissions.

“Trying to take some of the UK's carbon emissions off our balance sheet is fundamentally dishonest - and potentially very dangerous in the fight to tackle climate change,” it says.

One of the main problems is that responsibility for hitting targets is shared by different Whitehall departments and local authorities, says the report. “The Local Government Association has warned that ‘we are still not getting coherent, joined-up strategic thinking'.”

www.policyexchange.org.uk

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