Green taxes and government policy - its a ghetto out there

The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee has published a major new report
The 2007 Pre–Budget Report and Comprehensive Spending Review: An environmental analysis

The report can be downloaded in full from here.

In summary the report concludes:-

environmental taxes as a proportion of all taxation peaked at 9.7% in 1999 and have declined ever since, falling to 7.3% in 2006

Overall, environmental issues appear to be ‘ghettoised’; the Treasury must do more to mainstream environmental policy by reflecting it more strongly throughout the entire range of PSAs.

Although the Pre-Budget Report and Comprehensive Spending Review were published a year after the Stern Review, there was little sign in them that the Treasury was responding on the scale and with the urgency Stern recommended. Furthermore, since the Stern Review was published the science on climate change has continued to harden, with global emissions rising faster than projected; thus the Treasury’s lack of urgency stands out as even more remiss. Pre-Budget Report 2008 must establish a coherent set of measures to help deliver the UK’s 2020 domestic and EU targets on emissions and renewable energy, and show explicitly what their planned contribution to this delivery will be.