Green wood is not meant to burn well. But it appears that the Government is stoking its ‘bonfire of the quangos’ with over 15 environmental bodies, and considering the abolition of many more, blowing another hole in its claim to be ‘the greenest government ever’. At the same time, the confirmed abolition of the Regional Development Agencies will lead to £40m being cut from low-carbon investment programmes.

In Cabinet Office papers leaked to the Telegraph yesterday, it was revealed that 177 non-departmental public bodies (‘quangos’) are set to be abolished, with a further 94 currently under review. Examination of the list reveals that environmental regulatory and advisory bodies constitute a significant proportion of those being culled – despite only saving an estimated £6.75m in public spending, and with many of the bodies operating at no cost to the public purse.

Amongst the bodies for the chop include the Renewables Advisory Board – an expert panel drawn from industry that advises on renewable energy policy; the Commission for Integrated Transport, which researches how to reduce transport emissions and congestion; and the Regional Development Agencies, responsible for £40m of low-carbon research & development over the past financial year, according to recent analysis by the Committee on Climate Change.

Incredibly, bodies as central to the Government climate programme as the Carbon Trust and the Forestry Commission are not yet off the ‘endangered list’ of “Bodies still under review”.

The privatisation of the Forestry Commission has been mooted before, but what this would mean in terms of retaining a national forest stock is unknown. It is possible that the Carbon Trust is being eyed up for assimilation into the proposed Green Investment Bank – as suggested by the Green Investment Bank Commission earlier this year – but simply moving funds around, rather than earmarking new money, will be insufficient to stimulate private sector green investment.

Nor is this the last of it. As the Telegraph reports, “Other bodies that are likely to survive but face significant budget cuts are the Environment Agency, the Energy Savings Trust and the Fuel Poverty Advisory Group.” The revelations follow hot on the heels of the announced abolition of the Sustainable Development Commission, and recent concerns that the promised £60m Ports Fund – for developing ports into manufacturing hubs for wind turbines – is under threat.

The cull of public bodies follows a worryingly ideological pattern. It is no secret that the hard-right Taxpayers’ Alliance has been lobbying for years to squash environmental regulation and spending. As I highlighted in July, Caroline Spelman’s decision to abolish the Sustainable Development Commission had been presaged with repeated lobbying by the Taxpayers’ Alliance, who called it “…a Government-sponsored campaign for an increase in green and environmentally aware policy”. The TPA’s Policy Director Matthew Sinclair boasted on Twitter that it was a ‘#tpapolicywin’. In a blog piece posted yesterday, the TPA revealed its desire to see even more green government bodies swept away, stating: “Whilst the news is initially encouraging… the Telegraph also lists a number of bodies still under review. It names the Carbon Trust, The Advisory Council on Public Records and the Energy Savings Trust among others whose future is yet undecided. This shows that there are still lots more quangos that can be added to this growing bonfire.”

Others on the right are clearly rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of rolling back bodies that attempt – heaven forbid – to tackle global warming. Andrew Porter, the Telegraph’s political editor, wrote yesterday: “The abolition of the British Council would be welcomed by many… Critics have accused it of being hijacked and used to promote such causes as climate change.” Imagine!

The irony of such small-statist antagonism towards green quangos is how little they cost the taxpayer, despite their value in providing expert advice to government. By the admission of the Taxpayers’ Alliance themselves, the Renewables Advisory Board cost precisely £0 in 2008-9. The same was true of the Advisory Committee on Carbon Abatement Technologies, and many other similar bodies earmarked for abolition. Interestingly, six quangos that deal with nuclear liabilities appear to have escaped the guillotine, despite eating up over £800m of public funds – and despite the Coalition pledge to remove public subsidy for nuclear.

Nick Clegg claims he did not enter politics to cut public spending, and I am not interested in politics because of some bizarre wish to defend unelected civil servants. But taking an axe to dozens of environmental regulators and funds threatens to choke off the green economy just as it is coming to life. It is quite some irony that, on the same day as the Energy Secretary sings the praises of the nascent British offshore wind industry, the Renewables Advisory Board is abolished and £40m cut from low-carbon funding. If only it were a laughing matter.

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First off, let’s look at what we actually spend on the environment in the first place. The Guardian have made this job rather easier by presenting government expenditure graphically, in the bubble diagram above. You’ll need to download the PDF to see it in detail, but try and guess which bits represent environment spend. Go on. Is it the big blue blob, bottom right? Nope, that’s the NHS. The angry red zit at the top? Nah, that’s what we spent bailing out the banks. Once you’ve got out the magnifying glass, you’ll find two tiny pin-heads nestled on the right of the diagram, representing the budgets of DECC (the Department of Energy and Climate Change) and DEFRA (the Department of the Environment, Food & Rural Affairs).  Add in spending on the environment by the devolved administrations and the Department of International Development (DFID), and you arrive at the princely sum of £6.023bn. Not a small amount in itself, but tiny compared to the other outlays of the modern British state.

Which makes some of the rumours doing the rounds about potential spending cuts all the more worrying. For all his attempts to shed the Conservatives’ 1980s image, David Cameron’s recent speech to Party Conference read like a case-study in small-state conservatism, blaming “big government” for the recession and promising “painful” spending cuts. His Shadow Cabinet remains circumspect and tight-lipped about details, but Tory pundits and thinktanks are starting to vocalise the areas that might get axed under a Conservative government. And the environment doesn’t escape scot free.

The Taxpayers’ Alliance, a rightwing thinktank with links to the Conservative Party, has recently called for the abolition of the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC), the Government’s independent watchdog on sustainable development. In their report, ‘How to save £50bn’, the Taxpayers’ Alliance castigate the SDC as being “a Government-sponsored campaign for an increase in green and environmentally aware policy. It is not an expert advisor but a political campaign, and whatever its merits may be, such campaigns should not be paid for through public funds.” After talking to some seasoned environmental campaigners about the likelihood of the SDC being abolished, I’m of the opinion that it may well get the chop under a Tory government. The recent departure of Jonathan Porritt as SDC Director leaves it without its most powerful champion, and I fear that its recent work Prosperity Without Growth, much feted by the environmental movement, has not been similarly appreciated by the growth-focussed Tories.

After all, quangos – ‘quasi non-governmental organisations’, or Non-Departmental Public Bodies, to give them their official title – are not well-liked on the right. Never mind that it was Thatcherite reforms of the civil service that gave rise to quangos in the first place; they are now seen as easy targets by anti-state campaigners, unloved by the public and unknown to anyone who’s not a policy wonk. The right-wing columnist Dennis Sewell, writing in the Spectator recently, called for Cameron to light a bonfire of the quangos when he comes to power – not just to save cash but also to eliminate a ‘fifth column’ of Labour-appointed cronies who, he claims, could hinder a Tory government enacting its policies. Sewell doesn’t spare the environmental bodies, bemoaning: “If we have an Environment Agency, why do we also need an Energy Savings Trust, environmental campaigns, Environwise [sic] and an Air Quality Standards?”. Too bad that they all do different things.

And what about sales of government assets? Over the weekend, Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox suggested in a BBC interview that the MoD could cut its budgets by selling off assets like the Met Office.  The Met, besides delivering weather forecasts, is well-known to climate campaigners as the home of the Hadley Centre. What might privatisation mean for the delivery of the UK’s climate projections? Curious, I took a look at the Met Office’s website, to find out what its current organisational arrangement is. It seems that the previous Tory administration already part-privatised it: “In 1996 the Met Office became a Trading Fund within the Ministry of Defence. As a Trading Fund we are required to operate on a commercial basis…” I’m reminded of former Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s complaint about privatisation in the Eighties: “First the Georgian silver goes… then the Canalettos go…”

But how much do we actually spend on environmental quangos? I dug up all the figures I could find – from websites, Annual Reports and statistics from the Taxpayers’ Alliance themselves. The results are in this Excel spreadsheet.  They show that spending on environmental quangos comes to a little over £1bn (all of which comes out of the funds allocated to DEFRA and DECC discussed above). This is a tiny percentage of all spending on quangos, which the Taxpayers’ Alliance claims to be some £64bn – in itself a small fraction of overall public spending.

This isn’t to say there’s no waste in government bureaucracy. The environmental movement has been calling for more ‘joined-up government’ for decades. That’s why the Sustainable Development Commission, for example, was set up in the first place – to provide better coordination to policies, and prevent one department undoing the good work of another. Certain proposals for streamlining government might improve delivery:  if the Energy Savings Trust were merged with the Carbon Trust, for example, few environmentalists would shed a tear.

But I object to the current mantra of cuts, cuts, cuts – on two counts. Firstly, it’s clear that we don’t spend nearly enough on tackling climate change. Public R&D into renewables is only just starting to recover after two decades of being run down thanks to privatisation of the utilities; and the UK needs to spend some £100bn over the next decade in order to meet its 2020 emissions targets. Balancing the public debt needs to happen, but tackling climate change is far more urgent – and will in itself help the public finances recover, by providing green jobs and hence boosting income tax receipts.

Secondly, if we have to talk about cuts, let’s talk about carbon cuts. The public sector uses an enormous amount of energy – some 8% of total UK emissions, according to the Committee on Climate Change. Rather than cut frontline services or regulatory capacity, the government should sign up the whole public sector to a stringent energy efficiency regime. That would help cut the public debt – and more importantly, it would cut emissions, too.

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