Greenest Government ever?

I get a bit of a sinking feeling when a Government promises to be the "greenest ever".  This is largely because as environmental problems are better understood, I have a sneaky suspicion that new Governments will get greener for much the same reason as they will use mobile phones more.

But today's news that the Carbon Trust is to have its funding cut by 40% - which follows the news that the Energy Saving Trust is to be cut by 50% - made me stop and think if this rule holds.  The Energy Saving Trust - a Government funded body that helps people save energy and reduce carbon emissions - shows past Governments could be far more ambitious than they are now.

But I don't mean the Government of Gordon Brown, nor that of Tony Blair.  I mean the Government of John Major, way back in 1992.  Here is the history....

The Energy Saving Trust was announced after the Rio Earth summit of 1992.  The plan was for it to be funded by a levy on energy bills, so it could deliver a whopping 25% of the Government's planned cuts in carbon emissions.

Around that time, I was working for a backbench Labour MP, Bob Ainsworth.  He was then a member of the Environment Select Committee, though went on to serve in the Labour Government, ending up as Secretary of State for Defence.  As any good opposition MP should, we spent a lot of time going over the Government's climate change plans, especially when funding for the EST looked threatened.  A row with the gas regulator had blown up (electricity and gas regulators were separate back then) with OFGAS refusing to put a levy on bills.  A knock on effect was that this led to the electricity regulator also scaling back their funding.  As Bob said in the debate

[The EST] was set up in 1992, with the task of delivering 25 per cent. of the Rio target. Lord Moore was put in charge of it and sent away to devise a plan. He came back claiming that, to achieve its target, the trust would need £1.5 billion to spend by 2000. That money was to be supplied predominantly by the electricity and gas industries in equal parts. When Lord Moore was reminded by the then Chairman of the Environment Select Committee that the electricity companies anticipated putting in only £100 million, he said: "My job is to try to be objective on this. I am saying that . . . to achieve the 2.5 million tons of carbon emission reductions, that [£1.5 billion] is what I believe we will need."

Now, Lord Moore was not some radical green trying to get as much money spent on hippy-dippy energy saving stuff as he could - he was an ex-Tory Minister himself.  He was absolutely clear that the carbon savings the EST could make would be proportional to the money they were given.  If that was only 10% of the funding he needed, he could not deliver 25% of the cuts required, but 2.5%.

In real terms, the £250 million a year budget that was planned in 1992 would be worth almost £400 million today.  In reality, the Energy Saving Trust budget peaked at about £70 million in 2009-10, and has since been slashed in half.

This is all too easy to forget.  Now we moan about a £35 million cut, as if restoring it would make everything fine.  The truth is that even without the cuts, the visionary ambition of the Energy Saving Trust that John Major's Government came up with would still have been in tatters.