What has 14 years of Tory rule done for the UK environment? Let’s look back

Sewage in the rivers and on the beaches, sickening swimmers, halting sporting events and killing off fish. The crisis in the UK’s water – uncovered first by my colleague Sandra Laville four years ago, and described here in her elegiac piece on a journey down the Thames, must be the abiding emblem of the last 14 years of Conservative rule.

Arguably, the water crisis began earlier, with privatisation in 1989, and Labour during its last period in power did too little to prevent it, as water companies even then had sold off reservoirs and were loading up with debt. But it was the gutting of the Environment Agency under the guise of “austerity” after 2010 – detailed here by Hettie O’Brien – that really did the damage. Defanging the watchdog gave water companies the clear signal they could get away with whatever they wanted, and so they did – paying out £72bn in dividends to shareholders, while neglecting their assets to the extent that Thames Water had to warn a week ago they were “a risk to public safety”.

In 2010, I asked Caroline Spelman, then the Conservative secretary of state for the environment, what her department would do less of, after accepting the biggest austerity cuts in Whitehall, of about 30%. “Nothing,” she replied. “We will continue to do all the things we did before.”

So much for that.

More on the environmental legacy of the last 14 years of Conservative rule, as UK voters go to the polls in today’s general election, after this week’s climate must-reads.

Water is just one of the vital areas of environmental policy that have seen huge change over the years since David Cameron came to Downing Street in 2010 vowing to lead “the greenest government ever”. He took just three years to change his tune – by November 2013, to appease his fractious right wing, he wanted to “cut the green crap”.

There have, it must be said, been advances – Theresa May, responding to new science on the need to limit temperature rises to 1.5C, toughened the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions target to a legally binding goal of net zero by 2050. May also put out the first 25-year environment plan, and Michael Gove – widely regarded as a good environment secretary – made the first steps towards switching farming subsidies to “public money for public goods”.

May’s successor, Boris Johnson, made a good impression on world leaders at the broadly successful Cop26 summit in Glasgow in 2021, presided over by Alok Sharma, who won widespread praise for his focus on keeping the 1.5C limit within reach. But Johnson’s promise to “build back greener” after the pandemic went unfulfilled, as the “green homes grant” insulation programme was “botched” and then quickly scrapped.

Liz Truss and now Rishi Sunak, despite vowing to uphold the net zero target, each quickly tore up that promise. Truss, in her seven weeks in power in 2022, had too little time to make much impact on green policy, but Sunak embodied the worst fears of campaigners when last September he made a very public U-turn on the climate. As experts noted at the time, the changes in policy were relatively minor – postponing the ban on sales of new petrol and diesel cars, some changes to boiler rules, new oil and gas licences in the North Sea whose reserves are mostly depleted anyway – but it was the signal Sunak gave, the contention that net zero was expensive and would raise costs for ordinary families, the effective retention of Cameron’s ban on onshore wind in England, the many snubs to international efforts on the climate, that made a real difference.

For the first time, the climate was deliberately turned by the party of government into a “culture war” issue in the UK, a demarcation between left and right politics instead of what was an area of shared ground. Green Tories fell first into despair and then, in many cases, out of the party: Sharma announced he would not stand again, as did May and ministers Chris Grayling, Philip Dunne and Sir Robert Goodwill, while the former net zero tsar Chris Skidmore went one step further and declared he would vote Labour.

Meanwhile, the UK has halved emissions since 1990, as the government has repeatedly claimed – but as the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has itself repeatedly pointed out, these cuts were largely the successes of previous policy, for instance in fostering offshore wind. Current Tory policy will not get us anywhere near net zero – and as the CCC also makes clear, that will end up costing us all, because steeper cuts sooner cost much less in the long term than letting things slide.

The next government will face a much tougher job than Cameron inherited: to get back on track to net zero, attract green jobs and investment and engineer a just transition for the fossil fuel industry, and clean up the dire state of British nature. All as a result of the actions and inaction of the last 14 years.

Read more:

The good news

The bad news

Profiling an inspiring individual, suggested by Down to Earth readers

The 26-year-old Camille Étienne grew up in the leafy French region of Savoy, before moving to Paris to study.

It was there that she became a prominent figure in France’s climate movement, joining young figures like Greta Thunberg in calling for a better future on behalf of her generations and those to come.

Étienne has almost 700,000 followers on social media platforms, was named to Vanity Fair’s “50 French Women who made 2020” and is the author of For an Ecological Uprising: Overcoming Our Collective Helplessness.

Nominated by past climate hero Chloe Cohen

If you’d like to nominate a climate hero, email downtoearth@theguardian.com

Demystifying a climate concept you’ve heard in the headlines

Resistance by the planet’s climatic system to forces pushing it toward a new dynamic state, akin to the inertia exerted by a supertanker against efforts to quickly turn it. This is why today’s CO2 emissions – or their abatement – will be felt for decades and centuries to come.

For more Guardian coverage of climate inertia, click here

One image that sums up the week in environmental news

A vast sinkhole has dramatically appeared in middle of an Illinois soccer pitch that was laid above a limestone mine, just days after amateur teams stopped using the grounds for practice.

The collapse happened at Gordon Moore Park in Alton, Illinois, about 18 miles (30km) north of St Louis, Missouri, on Wednesday. The sinkhole appeared to be 100ft (30m) wide and 30ft (9m) deep.

“No one was on the field at the time and no one was hurt, and that’s the most important thing,” said the town’s mayor, David Goins.

For more of the week’s best environmental pictures, catch up on The Week in Wildlife here