The Conservative party’s rhetoric on the environment is a “fluffy communications strategy” when change on plastics could happen in half the time pledged, the co-leader of the Greens has said ahead of her party conference speech.

Caroline Lucas will use her speech on Saturday in Bournemouth to call for petrol and diesel-only new cars to be phased out by 2030 and a deposit return scheme on drinks containers to be launched by the end of the year.

“The government’s 25-year environment plan – finally published a few months ago – is desperately disappointing,” she will say. “A vague promise to ban ‘avoidable’ plastics in a quarter of a century is woefully inadequate and easy to do, with the politicians who wrote it likely to have retired or expired by the time it would come into force.”

Since the general election in June, the Tories have made the environment a key campaigning theme and the party’s main Twitter account has returned to the subject of environmental legislation time and again. MPs often tweeted in unison about the BBC documentary series Blue Planet II.

Michael Gove has introduced a raft of measures since becoming environment secretary, including banning microbeads in beauty products and pledging to eliminate plastic waste by 2042, starting with all single-use plastic in central government offices. He has also encouraged supermarkets to introduce plastic-free aisles.

Speaking to the Guardian ahead of her speech, Lucas said she thought the Conservatives’ electoral strategy on the environment could be dangerous.



“It is dangerous to have a nice, fluffy communications strategy which lulls people into the sense you can trust this government on the environment, when time and time again they’ve shown you simply can’t,” she said.

Lucas said the 25-year timetable on plastics was far too slow, with the supermarket Iceland pledging to go plastic-free on its own-brand products in five years.

The MP for Brighton Pavilion said the government had to show it was prepared to go beyond just incentivising corporations to take environmental action on issues like plastics.

“Michael Gove waxes very lyrical about Blue Planet and how this has touched his heart. Well, it’s good it has touched his heart but we need it to touch his head too,” she said. “That means urgent action, and if you wait for the industries to move themselves, we’re going to be waiting a long time.

“There is a role for government to be setting frameworks, and that’s the challenge for Conservatives in general and Gove in particular.”

Lucas said she was also highly sceptical that Brexit would be an opportunity to strengthen environmental protections. “On farming, you hear Gove saying Brexit is an opportunity to put more money into public good, like environmental protection,” she said.

“And yet even under the current system of the common agricultural policy, you can already transfer more money than this government in England has chosen to do. Scotland has gone further. We haven’t even gone up to the maximum.

“So the idea Brexit is going to be this great opportunity to have a flourishing environment policy, when even under the existing rules the government isn’t taking up opportunities that are there and has also been blocking action at EU level – that’s why I say it is dangerous.”

In her speech, Lucas will call for the government to speed up its environmental strategy. She will call for a “comprehensive” deposit return scheme for all drinks containers by the end of the year, and say it is “unacceptable to expect the public to wait nearly a quarter of a century for a phase-out of petrol and diesel when thousands of people die prematurely because of air pollution”.

Lucas will add: “We know that places across the world are shifting to electric vehicles faster than us, and it’s time the British government took a lead by phasing out petrol and diesel by 2030 and replaced them with better public transport and infrastructure for electric vehicles.”