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Twelve months ago, Britain promised to green the corridors of power.
The pledge to make Whitehall environment friendly was a key point in the
country’s first White Paper on the environment, published last September.
This week Michael Heseltine, the Secretary of State for the Environment,
issued a progress report. Behind the gloss of sweeping government activity
lie gaping deficiencies.

Heseltine, despite being a gardener and bird-watcher, has had little
time for green issues since being recycled as environment secretary last
year. The poll tax and inner cities have kept him busy elsewhere. As a result,
his record on environmental issues is patchy and the momentum built up by
the White Paper has been allowed to run down.

For example, earlier in the summer, widespread problems were revealed
in an analysis commissioned by the government on Britain’s implementation
of a European Community directive on environmental projects. It found that
the professionals who are supposed to understand the system do not know
how it works. Regulations are being applied incorrectly.

And last week, MPs on the House of Commons Select Committee on the Environment
highlighted glaring deficiencies in the way waste is handled. There is a
dearth of basic statistics. Policy is operating largely on a wing and a
prayer.

Worst of all is the sorry saga of John Major’s glib creation of a central
agency along the lines of the Environmental Protection Agency in the US.
A year ago a British ‘EPA’ was not an environmental imperative. But in July
the Prime Minister found himself without any initiatives to announce in
his first major green speech. Enter the EPA, British-style.

Since then all hell has broken loose. Facing a shotgun marriage with
Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution, the National Rivers Authority has
kicked up a fuss. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and
Food has fought a civil war with the Department of the Environment over
who picks up the pieces after the NRA’s demise. Heseltine’s department has
been left looking silly.

Making environmental policy on the hoof impresses no one. If Heseltine
wants the government’s environment credentials to be taken seriously at
the forthcoming general election he will have to demonstrate this week that
the reorganisation of the environmental regulators has been put firmly back
on course.

In the light of its own failures, it is hard for the DoE to convert
the rest of the government. The publication on Monday of the department’s
guide to policy appraisal – intended to educate middle-ranking civil servants
everywhere in thinking green – is well meaning but will be ineffectual.
Sceptics in other departments only have to point to the DoE’s own shortcomings.

It would be too much to expect the DoE to turn the machinery of government
green in a single year. But little noticeable progress has been made. Given
the department’s own failings, this is not so surprising. The way forward,
as the Secretary of State surely knows, is to start by cultivating his own
garden.