Green guidance will be dumped says Cameron

The Government will have dumped 80,000 pages of environmental guidance by March 2015, prime minister David Cameron has told the Federation of Small Businesses, and said this will make it easier to create jobs.

In a key-note speech which was strong on rhetoric and weak on specifics, Mr Cameron told the Federation he would be announcing plans to make it “vastly easier and cheaper” for businesses to meet environmental obligations.

The leader of the former “greenest government ever” said it would also cut down 100 “overlapping and confusing” new home standards to fewer than 10, saving builders around £60m a year.

“Supporting business is a crucial part of our long term economic plan, creating jobs and security for all,” said Mr Cameron.

“That is why, among so many other things, I have insisted on slashing needless regulation. We will be the first government in modern history to have reduced – rather than increased – domestic business regulation during our time in office.”

His speech mentioned “crazy examples dreamt up in the past by Whitehall bureaucrats”.

He said 80,000 pages of environmental guidance would have gone by the election and claimed these would save business around £100m a year.

In the past, the only substantial money saving this Government has claimed on the environment is the recent statutory guidance on contaminated land in England, which few people expect, in practice, to save very much at all.

Environmental Industries Commission executive director Matthew Farrow said nobody wants regulation for the sake of it and addressing areas of duplication or over-complex guidance is reasonable enough, but the rhetoric used and the scale of what is planned is a major concern to the UK’s £122bn environmental industries and their investors, a sector which grew 4.7% last year.

“At a time when we are repeatedly missing air quality targets and where our housing stock is some of the most energy inefficient, any scaling back of environmental ambition is not acceptable,” he said.

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