BBC On The Record - Broadcast: 04.03.01

Film: Paul Wilenius reports on the government's record on the environment and its plans to do more to combat the dangers of climate change.



PAUL WILENIUS: A new day at Kew Gardens. A symbol of Britain's love affair with greenery for more than two hundred years. When Tony Blair pledged to put the environment at the heart of government, it was hoped this would herald the dawning of a new cleaner age. But early successes have not grown into the radical policies green campaigners expected. Tony Blair will try to reclaim the green agenda this week with a keynote speech on the eve of the Budget. Despite his promises, critics say that the environment is still not at the heart of government's policies. Now he's anxious to reassure voters before the election that he really will deliver greener policies, if he wins a second term. Even before the Royal Botanic Gardens are opened, visitors are queuing to get in. Kew Gardens customers are buying entry to an oasis of tranquility amidst a world increasingly threatened by man made dangers. Voters' concerns about global warming, pollution, freak weather and quality of life are growing. So the Prime Minister's turned his attention to the issue again. MICHAEL MEACHER MP: It is tremendously important that the Prime Minister is now taking the leadership in developing these strategies and he's making clear if we do have an election coming I think the kind of programme which you can expect from a second Labour government and there's no doubt that environment is going to be way up, high profile, one of the lead issues within a second Labour government. CHARLES KENNEDY MP: I think the Prime Minister and the government generally have failed miserably where the environment is concerned. He's making this great speech - well that's a good thing - it's about the second or third speech he's made since he's been the leader of the Labour Party, never mind the Prime Minister of the country. I don't think that there is a gut instinct there, where Labour is concerned for environmental concerns. WILENIUS: Not Kyoto but Kew. But meeting the targets set in faraway Japan on cutting greenhouse gases, is regarded as a government success. But those waiting for more may be disappointed, as the dash for gas power generation accounted for most of that figure and further progress needs more radical policies. The Climate Change Levy on big energy users had to be watered down - Ministers admit more needs to be done. MEACHER: Whether we like it or not we have fundamentally to change the way in which we run our economy, run our society. All of us: business, individuals in domestic households, central local government. All of us have got to change the way in which things are done, our mobility, the way in which we use energy, the kind of fuels that we use. That's absolutely necessary otherwise we're going to suffer on an intensified scale, the kind of severe flooding which has actually been worse abroad and we may see worse in this country if we don't take note. That's one key driver. CHRIS HEWETT: I think there is a school of thought in new Labour which has argued that there are certain priority issues which the government must address and that some issues the public will never vote on and environment is one of those issues. I think what the party have learnt in government is that actually the interests of the electorate are much broader and if you want to achieve social change across the board then you do have to have widen, you have to widen that agenda and environment is one of those issues, that if you don't do something early on, then the problems will come up and bite you a few a few years down the line. WILENIUS: Environmentalists feel the sort of care lavished on the trees at Kew, should also be given to Labour's green policies. And they hope people will see a step change in attitude, aimed at tackling the root causes of global threats, in both Blair's speech and the Budget this week. Action on solar power, renewable energy and greener engines are forecast. KENNEDY: People are going to be rightly cynical if Gordon Brown in a few days time presents his budget as some kind of jolly Green Giant budget, because they've seen the track record over the past four years. They know it has not been a significant priority for the government and whatever incentives are offered to people at this juncture I think will be treated with the cynicism that they probably deserve. WILENIUS: A new generation learn about the dangers facing the world, yet the doom-mongers don't expect all these plants to end up in Britain. UNNAMED MAN: This is called opuntia or prickly pear. WILENIUS: Motorists were stung by sharp fuel price rises when Labour first came to office, to try to teach car owners not to pollute. But this policy of yearly escalating prices was scrapped last autumn. JOHN HORAM MP: They increased the escalator so much at the beginning of their period of office. It's probably partly environmental, though maybe that was a bit of a cover for just Gordon Brown getting in more revenue. What no one really knows - but it's quite clear that when they ran in to trouble, they backed off at an alarming speed and if you recall, they never mentioned the environment when there was all the protest last October. They never mentioned the environment, it was all about needing the money to pay for schools and nurses and so forth and so that was really bad. I think that gave a very bad signal to the environmentalists. WILENIUS: Teaching people to be green is hard work. Cash incentives will be a feature of the Budget this week. There'll be more cuts in taxes for environmentally friendly cars, those using smaller engines and cleaner fuels. And there'll also be moves to get more children on school buses, to cut car journeys. But there are fears this will only be cosmetic as fuel costs are still falling. The Greens say this is counter productive. MIKE WOODIN: I think on this particular issue the government have done immense harm because they appeared to be supporting a green agenda on transport but in reality of course it was Treasury driven, it was just a financial measure and we can tell that because they weren't simultaneously investing in the alternatives to car use. So on the one hand they were penalising motorists but on the other hand they were not providing the alternatives to coax people out of their cars. Now that they've done a U-turn on that and they've seen that it might ..it's unpopular and they back tracked they have completely discredited in the eyes of a majority of the electorate those green arguments. JOHN HORAM MP: We have got a report coming out next week and we've taken a lot of evidence over the last couple of months since the big change - the dropping of the fuel duty escalator and I think what our evidence clearly shows is that that was a major change in policy which they did not appraise for its environmental effects at all. Which is fundamentally wrong and going against what they say themselves they should do, ie government policy but they tried to mitigate the problems by putting it with for example a new green fuel challenge and also lowering the vehicle excise duty on smaller cars in order to encourage you know less carbon emissions and so forth. So it's a big cosmetic in truth. It was look, as though they'd decided to make - take a step as a result of clear protest last October and cover it up a bit by some other measures, which look quite green but weren't really very green. WILENIUS: Labour brought in measures to open up the countryside to walkers and to tax those who despoil it. But Ministers are under pressure on genetically modified food and new plans to build more roads and homes across green areas of the countryside. HEWETT: The government did not anticipate an interest from consumers in those issues and so they didn't have an environmental argument prepared and were therefore forced by vested interests to back in a sense what the industry wanted. I think that will change now, already is changing. A great more consultation is going on in terms of GM foods and I think the government is going to have to take on board, much more seriously, the concerns of consumers. WILENIUS; The row over GM foods caught the public's attention. They worried that the government was not protecting the environment. The government says issues like this distracted the electorate from the new Right to Roam, new National Parks and new green taxes on landfill and quarrying. But Ministers now face a backlash over plans for one-hundred new road schemes and a million new homes. KENNEDY: I think that there is a reaction - a genuine reaction taking place in a lot of rural Britain about the degree of concreting over, that is perceived to be taking place and that is something at the end of the day that Mr John Prescott, in particular, has got to stand in the dock on and I think that the jury is not going to find him innocent. WILENIUS: The Palm House at Kew takes a lot of energy to maintain its warm and moist atmosphere. Now the government feels the great British public is more interested in sustainable and renewable ways of producing that energy. So Tony Blair will this week give more support for renewables like wind and wave power and the solar power industry will get a big push. The government believes it could become a multi-million pound business given the right incentives. MEACHER; I mean renewables is absolutely key at the present time. It's absolutely at the centre of the switch away from fossil fuels, oil and coal in particular, to the renewable sources of energy, which are wind, tidal power, bio-mass energy crops and above all of course, solar and the hydrogen fuel cell for cars. That's the way we're going. Now we do need, we are putting more resources in to this. We have imposed on the electricity suppliers that they should get at least ten per cent of their sources for fuel burning from renewable sources, by 2010, we're well on the way to achieving that. We intend to meet that target. WOODIN: Well the government's record on renewable energy can be summed up simply by quoting Department of Trade and Industry figures which show that in the year 2000, just one-quarter of one per cent of Britain's energy requirement, came from renewable sources. So I mean I'll be absolutely delighted if they meet their ten per cent target but on their record so far, I doubt they're going to make it. WILENIUS: The government says it's not just hot air. It's set to unveil a big programme to boost the sales of energy producing solar panels. MEACHER: With regard to solar photo votayics, we certainly will shortly be publishing a programme, which indicates that we are in line with the world leaders. Germany has a hundred thousand roof programme by 2007, Japan I think, seventy-thousand by 2005. When we announce it is going to be in that sort of range, this is a major commitment that we're making of enormous importance. WILENIUS: There are dangers for Tony Blair, especially in the long term if he is not seen as a green Prime Minister. His government could lose votes if it fails to respond fully to the environmental problems facing Britain. And his advisors are telling him privately that green issues are close to the hearts of the affluent middle class voters he needs at the next election. The main priorities for those voters are still the economy, health and education. But they are looking much more closely at green issues and if the government's record is not convincing, they could start drifting away towards other smaller parties, or they could lose interest altogether. And Labour also needs to lift its image on the environment, to attract and keep younger voters. Otherwise it could suffer at the ballot box, eventually. HORAM: I think the government hasn't taken the environment as seriously as it should have done, or said it was going to do, partly at least, because it didn't believe there were votes in it. Now, that may be true in a short-term sense that obviously things like crime and law and order are more important immediately at the next General Election. But in a more fundamental sense I think that a lot of middle class people, middle England people if you like, in the South of England and the middle and in other parts of the country, who are very concerned about their environment and see more road building and more house building and more dispilation of the environment as a threat to their quality of life and I think they ignore that feeling at their peril. KENNEDY: I think the concern in Labour high command about the environmental agenda and about green issues generally, is that there are a lot of disillusioned Labour voters, or previous Labour voters out there. We know that. The opinion polls are telling us it. The commentators are saying it. For heaven's sake, the Labour Party is saying it, quite loud and quite open, and one of those groups of people that must feel quite disappointed by Labour in office, are those who thought, at last we've got a government that's actually going to take the environment and green issues seriously and they haven't and they know it, and that's what they're trying to address and that's why we will be putting the focus very heavily on these issues during the campaign itself. WILENIUS; In Kew Gardens it's a constant battle to preserve the environment. Labour too wants to tidy up its green policies. But electoral imperatives aside, there are some in the government who genuinely worry about the future of the earth. MEACHER: Rising water levels, the risks to our shore-line particularly in East England. These are... the fact that if the temperature does rise we could see many areas of the country...of the world, including this country, suffering an increase in malaria infestation. It's already happened in New York, it could happen here, as well as other diseases. It is very, very, very serious. This is absolutely deadly serious. It is the number one issue. Not just environmentally, but for our whole world and for the survival of the human race. WILENIUS: This dire warning of some future apocalypse shows a significant change in the government's attitude towards the environment. But if Ministers cannot produce effective policies soon to lift the dark threats to the future of our world, then its own long-term survival, as well as the planet's, could well be in doubt.
NB. This transcript was typed from a transcription unit recording and not copied from an original script. Because of the possibility of mis-hearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, the BBC cannot vouch for its accuracy.