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Published by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) on 20 April 2010, this briefing note examines Labour’s record on environmental policy since 1997.
The present government has put in place a large number of targets and policies aimed at tackling climate change, and has enshrined in law targets to reduce emissions by 80% by 2050 relative to 1990 levels. Stringent targets for 2020 and “carbon budgets” for intervening years also exist. In broad terms the high level of activity has so far yielded neither substantive reductions in carbon emissions nor a genuinely coherent set of policies.
Section 2 provides a relatively broad overview of the environmental record, looking at key outcomes on environmental taxes, expenditures and emissions. Section 3 looks in detail at policy developments and outcomes in the three areas of energy, transport and waste management. Section 4 assesses the coherency of current environmental policy and section 5 sets out IFS’s conclusions.