Updated: Public sector bosses fear they will miss green IT goals

Public sector IT managers are deeply sceptical about their ability to deliver on high-profile targets intended to ensure the government's IT estate is carbon neutral by 2012.

That is the stark warning from a new survey of 150 senior public sector IT managers carried out by environmental charity Global Action Plan, which found that more than two-thirds of respondents are either concerned or extremely concerned about their organisation's ability to meet the government's green IT targets.

Last year, the Cabinet Office set out a Green ICT strategy that committed departments to ensure all IT on the government's office estate is carbon neutral by 2012 and all government IT equipment is carbon neutral across its entire lifecycle by 2020.

Speaking to BusinessGreen.com, Global Action Plan director Trewin Restorick said that while the report had been greeted with widespread praise from across the IT industry, many departments were still struggling to implement even basic green best practices.

"Execution on the plan is very patchy and while there are some really good examples of green IT projects, some of the really basic stuff is not happening, " he said. "There are still many IT managers who are not aware of how much energy their department uses, for example."

The survey also found that more than two-thirds of public sector IT managers do not see their department's energy bill, while only 22 per cent of respondents said they had set internal green IT targets. In addition, only 13 per cent had successfully managed to calculate the carbon footprint of their operations.

Restorick said the failure to adopt green IT policies was undermining wider government efforts to reduce carbon emissions across its office estate. "The Sustainable Development Commission said recently that electricity use from the government estate was up three per cent last year, and IT plays a big part in that," he argued.

Neil Crockett, head of public sector in UK & Ireland for networking technology firm Cisco, which commissioned the survey, said that even where green IT projects were being undertaken they tended to focus on established technologies. "We are seeing projects to encourage green printing and turn off PCs – the kind of activities that have been best practice for a while now," he said. "But the more cutting-edge projects, such as server virtualisation, home-working technologies and building energy management remain rare."

A failure to accelerate the rollout of green IT initiatives could also result in a drain of taxpayers' money into the private sector through the government's imminent Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) carbon cap-and-trade scheme, Restorick warned.

Under the CRC, which is to be fully introduced next year, about 5,000 organisations with energy bills of more than £500,000 a year will have to report on their carbon emissions and pay penalty fees if they exceed government-imposed emission caps.

Restorick said that while the scheme was designed to be revenue neutral, it would also transfer money from the best-performing organisations to those that failed to curb their energy use, meaning that the public sector could end up indirectly providing funds for private sector firms.

A spokesman for the Cabinet Office said that the government's green IT targets remained achievable.

"The targets... are demanding, but the issue we are addressing is demanding, " he said. "Good progress has been made since the launch, and government departments have developed action plans to implement the Greening Government ICT strategy. A summary of the action plans will be published later this year together with progress made."