Replace GDP with a genuine progress indicator that accounts for ecological cost
GDP goes up when we cut down a forest. It goes up when we treat the respiratory diseases caused by the pollution from cutting it down. It goes up when we pay lawyers to argue about who is liable. At no point does GDP register that we have lost a forest.
This is not a fringe observation. It was made by Robert Kennedy in 1968 and economists have been saying it ever since. GDP measures economic activity, not progress. A country could be destroying its soil, poisoning its rivers, and cooking its atmosphere, and as long as money changes hands in the process, GDP says things are going well.
Adopt a genuine progress indicator like the GPI or the Doughnut Economics framework alongside GDP. Factor in natural capital depletion, unpaid care work, income distribution, and long-term environmental liabilities. Use it to assess every budget and every major investment decision. We will not stop wrecking the things that keep us alive until we start counting them as valuable.
Pay farmers for ecological outcomes, not just for having land
The basic payment scheme that replaced EU subsidies paid farmers essentially for owning land. The more land you had, the more you got. A hedge fund that bought 10,000 acres of Lincolnshire received more public money than a hill farmer in Wales who had been maintaining the landscape for four generations. That system was insane.
ELMS (Environmental Land Management Schemes) was supposed to fix this by paying for "public goods" like clean water, biodiversity, and carbon storage. The principle is right. The implementation has been a mess. Payments are late, the application process is bewildering, and many small farmers have given up and gone back to intensive production because at least that pays the bills.
Simplify ELMS. Pay per outcome, not per hectare. A farmer who restores a wetland and sees water voles return should be paid well for that. A farmer who plants wildflower margins and sees pollinators recover should be paid well for that. And pay them on time, because unlike hedge funds, they cannot absorb a six-month delay.
A legal right to clean rivers, enforceable by citizens
In 2023, water companies in England discharged sewage into rivers and seas for over 3.6 million hours. The Environment Agency, which is supposed to prevent this, has had its budget cut by 60% since 2010 and now conducts fewer inspections than at any point since it was created.
When the regulator cannot or will not act, citizens must be able to. Give individuals and community groups the legal standing to bring enforcement action against polluters directly, without needing to go through the Environment Agency. This exists in the United States through the Clean Water Act and it works. Citizens who live near rivers have more motivation to protect them than a regulator operating from an office in Bristol.
Pair this with mandatory real-time sewage discharge monitoring, published publicly, so that every river user knows exactly what is going into their water and who is responsible. Transparency changes behaviour faster than regulation.
Insulate every home in Britain by 2035 as the single biggest climate and poverty measure
The UK has some of the least energy-efficient housing stock in western Europe. Around 19 million homes have an EPC rating below C. These homes leak heat, cost more to run, and push people into fuel poverty. Improving them is simultaneously a climate policy, a poverty policy, a health policy, and a jobs policy.
The numbers are well established. Insulating a home to EPC C saves an average of £500 a year on energy bills. It reduces carbon emissions. It reduces NHS spending on cold-related illness, which costs roughly £1.4 billion per year. And the work itself is labour-intensive and local, meaning it creates skilled jobs in every constituency.
Fund a ten-year national insulation programme. Free for households in fuel poverty. Heavily subsidised for everyone else. Train 200,000 retrofit workers through a proper apprenticeship scheme. This is the closest thing to a policy that pays for itself that you will ever find. The only reason we have not done it already is a lack of political will, not a lack of evidence.
Community energy cooperatives with guaranteed grid access and fair export tariffs
Germany has over 800 energy cooperatives. Local communities own solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage. The profits stay local. Energy bills are lower. And public support for renewables is far higher than in countries where turbines are imposed by distant corporations.
In Britain, community energy projects exist but they are tiny, underfunded, and face a planning system designed for large developers. A village that wants to put solar panels on a field faces the same bureaucracy as a multinational building a 500-megawatt wind farm.
Create a simplified planning pathway for community energy projects under 5 megawatts. Guarantee grid connection within 6 months (the current wait is often years). Set a fair export tariff so that communities selling power back to the grid get a reasonable price, not the pittance the big suppliers currently offer.
People support renewable energy when they benefit from it directly. Community ownership turns opponents into stakeholders.
End peat extraction for gardening compost by 2027 and fund the transition for UK growers
UK peatlands store around 3 billion tonnes of carbon. That is more than all the forests in Britain, France, and Germany combined. Healthy peatlands slowly accumulate carbon. Drained peatlands release it, continuously, for decades.
The government committed in 2021 to banning peat compost in retail sales by 2024. That deadline quietly slipped. It then slipped again. The current position is a partial restriction on bagged compost for amateur gardeners, with a long list of exemptions for professional horticulture that means roughly two thirds of peat extraction continues untouched.
Set a hard deadline. No peat in any compost, professional or retail, from January 2027. Fund a £50 million transition programme for UK nurseries and growers to move to peat-free alternatives, which are already widely used in the Netherlands and Germany without apparent disaster.
I grew up on the edge of a raised bog. It was drained in the 1960s to plant conifers that have since been felled at a loss. The bog has not recovered. It will not recover in my lifetime. These are not renewable resources in any meaningful sense. We are mining the ecological past for bedding compost.
What do you think?
Vote on individual policies, adapt them, or write your own alternative. Good ideas should be tested.