Stephen Timms MP

Green Alliance Annual Meeting

We will shortly publish our DTI Innovation Review. Doing more on environmental innovation and resource productivity will be a priority - stimulating social and institutional innovation, as well as technological. We have a wealth of case studies showing good environmental performance is good business. We need to translate that individual company experience into a critical mass of business action. The sustainability sectoral strategies that we have been working on with the trade associations provide a good framework for identifying these best practice examples and encouraging their wider application.

You will know that we have signed up to the objective proposed by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution that we should get on track to reduce carbon emissions by 60% by 2050, and to have made good progress in that direction by 2020. And through a series of measures - the Renewables Obligation which has been operating now for 18 months, the forthcoming EU-wide emissions trading scheme and the Climate Change Levy - through those measures and others we are putting in place the market measures to establish a coherent framework which people can understand and within which people can make economically rational decisions which will also be the right decision for the environment.

I wanted to throw in a few reflections, drawing on my experience as the Treasury Minister responsible for the detailed work on the CCL in 1999-2001 - period covered by the case study in the booklet.

I see no problem with companies arguing their case and pressing the Government not to increase their costs. Actually it is in all our interests for environmental goals to be achieved as cost effectively as possible. The debate around measures like the Climate Change Levy is a creative debate - we do not have all the answers and there are all sorts of different approaches, different nuances of approaches, which might be adopted, and it is important that we get them right. Lobbying from firms is an important part of that process and I would not want companies to feel constrained or to feel that they were acting improperly in expressing those concerns. We would lose valuable information if they did.

But my question is where is the green movement in all this? Looking through this account of letters to the Financial Times etc, what were the members of the Green Alliance saying? The truth is while this debate was raging, as the booklet correctly records, the green movement was largely silent. I say largely silent - the one exception was World Wildlife Fund which did write to the FT supporting the Climate Change Levy, did encourage its supporters to write in to the Treasury and at a crucial point just before we announced the final details organised an advertisement in the Daily Mail and the FT - supported by other organisations - in support of the levy. Those were very important interventions. But where was everybody else? They were nobody else.

You would think perhaps this should have been the Government plus the environmental movement vs industry. It was not. It was a debate conducted almost exclusively between Government and industry - the green movement largely vacated the field of play.

Now why? I asked that question repeatedly when I was doing the job at the Treasury and the pamphlet provides a clue to the answer. Page 11: "the proposed climate change levy was never a perfect instrument". Now I take it from the fact that the Levy is included as a case study here that there is now general acceptance that it has been a valuable contribution to environmental objectives. But at the time, the rather theological concerns about the Levy meant that environmental organisations largely absented themselves from the debate.

And so it does strike me as a bit rich to come along four years later and complain that industry did a lot of lobbying. Of course they did - and they will next time too. Instead of moaning about the fact that other people have got their acts together, this movement should get its act together and deploy the vast influence which it could have if it did so.

If instead it absents itself from the public debate, or leaves it to the Government to fight the case, then it will have nobody but itself to blame if the outcome is not what it would have wished.

It reminds me in some ways about the debate we are now having about wind energy. We can achieve our goal that 10% of UK should come from renewable energy by 2010 and that we should double that again by 2020. But just putting it in a white paper does not itself do the trick. There needs to be argument, persuasion and campaigning. The work which Greenpeace is doing to campaign around specific wind farm proposals, supported by World Wildlife Fund and Friends of the Earth in the Yes2Wind website, is exactly the kind of work which we need. We need more of that, with organisations committed genuinely to change, even when it involves putting their head above the parapet and picking up the flack that ensues.

So my priority is for this movement to be increasingly vocal in the public debate, highlighting the importance of green issues, of effectively tackling the threat of climate change, and to be pragmatic about practical ways in which change can be achieved, supporting measures even when they do fall short of perfection, when, as in the case of the Climate Change Levy, they do represent a big step in the right direction.

Thank you.