Despite the government’s anxiety to be seen as green, 2008 is most likely to be remembered for its missed opportunities.
Despite the government’s anxiety to be seen as green, 2008 is most likely to be remembered for its missed opportunities.
September saw the UK implement the bare minimum of the requirements of the EU Batteries Directive, a full two years after it was published. Even now, no-one is quite sure how we’re going to do the hard bit, namely to increase battery collection and recycling from the current three per cent to 25 per cent in under four years. With the London Olympics just around the corner in 2012, we should already have a plan in place to endorse a sustainable battery as the official battery of the ‘sustainable games’.
Harrowing as it has been for many, the collapse of the mortgage market presented another golden opportunity. Given the government’s commitments to accelerate the development of green homes, and the fact that it now owns most of the UK mortgage book, it could have insisted on more favourable terms for mortgages on sustainable houses and flats. It could also have encouraged the lenders it now owns to offer better deals for householders who improve the energy efficiency of their properties – thereby changing the game and getting its own environmental policies back on track.
Here’s a real no-brainer. Rather than reducing VAT to 15 per cent on everything – a move that’s been widely criticised as inadequate to kick-start the economy – the Chancellor could have wiped out VAT altogether on an audited list of green products and energy efficiency devices. That would have been a boost both for the economy and the environment. And the Germans wouldn’t have been able to laugh at us.
Perhaps the biggest wasted opportunity of all, though, is that after ten boom years perhaps only 18,000 homes have renewable energy devices installed, with nothing in the other 26 million.
Far from putting the green agenda on the back burner, the government should be using the opportunities presented by the current recession to drive the sustainable policies that will help get us through the next one.
