Progress “painfully slow” on air quality and other environmental issues, inquiry concludes

The UK government is failing to deliver on its 2011 promise to improve the natural environment “within a generation” and must do more to tackle critical issues like air and water quality, a parliamentary inquiry has concluded.

The Public Accounts Committee said in a report1 that the complexity of environmental issues “is not a good enough excuse” for serious delays in tackling them, where progress has been “painfully slow.” The committee noted that the government’s 25 Year Environment Plan, published in 2018, once again claimed to set …