Government slammed as Whitehall falls short on green targets

The credibility of government calls for businesses to cut their carbon emissions received a major blow today after it emerged Whitehall is still not on course to meet its own environmental targets.

A damning new report from the Sustainable Development Commission found that government departments are in danger of falling a long way short of their target to reduce carbon emissions from offices by 12.5 per cent on 2000 levels by 2010. The study of Whitehall offices found that while emissions from offices had fallen by four per cent on 2000 levels in 2006-2007 two thirds of departments were still not on track for meeting the 2010 target.

Rebecca Willis, vice chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, said that the slow progress being made across Whitehall was undermining its attempts to encourage businesses and other organisations to cut their carbon footprint. "There is a credibility problem," she said. "We expect government to lead the way and not rather grudgingly trudge along behind."

She added that in many cases businesses were making more rapid progress in their attempts to curb emissions. "We found only one in four departments had an environmental management system in place, but we now expect such systems to be in place automatically at the biggest companies," she said. "They are now set up to measure environmental performance and make improvements, partly because their costs savings involved, but in many cases the government is not in the same position."

The report also found that mandatory rules to ensure government departments consider environmental sustainability when making purchasing decisions were " widely going unobserved", and revealed little progress in attempts to reduce water consumption or deploy combined heat and power systems.

In the case of emissions from road travel the report found that the government's performance is getting worse with emissions rising 1.5 per cent during 2006-2007.

Following hot-on-the-heels of yesterday's National Audit Office report criticising government metrics for assessing overall UK emissions, the report became the second study in as many days to condemn the government's emissions book-keeping, claiming that "the poor quality of data provided by departments in many cases made it difficult to arrive at a true picture".

The only silver lining came in the fields of recycling, where the government fell fractionally short of the 2010 target of ensuring 40 per cent of waste is recycled, and renewable energy where the government significantly exceeded its target by procuring 28.3 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources.

Willis welcomed the progress in these areas, but noted that they represented the easiest fields in which to cut an organisation's environmental impact. " With renewable energy it is fairly simple to switch to a green tariff," she said. "In many ways that is even easier than getting people to turn off their PCs at the end of the day."

In response to the report the Cabinet Office announced it is to appoint a new chief sustainability officer and set up a new Centre of Expertise designed to help civil servants ensure the government's environmental targets are met.

A spokeswoman for the Cabinet Office said that the first task of the new Centre of Expertise for Sustainable Procurement will be to set up a delivery plan to ensure the government gets back on track to meet its targets. It will also work with suppliers to help drive sustainability through government supply chains and provide civil servants with training on how to improve environmental performance and undertake sustainable procurement.

The Cabinet Office also said that it "accepts in principle all the recommendations" made by the Sustainable Development Commission and outlined a range of measures designed to enhance the government's performance, including a commitment that from April this year all departmental heads will have their performance measured against environmental criteria.

It also flagged a raft of new green strategies to be introduced over the next few months, such as plans for a major Green Government IT programme, a new target to phase out all use of bottled water and a commitment that all cars used by ministers and permanent secretaries, except a small number exempt for operational and security reasons, will have carbon emissions below 130g per km by the summer.