Brown's electric cars won't wash - not without clean electricity and bold new transport policy, says Green Party

Professor John Whitelegg, the Green Party's spokesperson on sustainable development, said today:

"Tokenism just won't wash. We need commitment to serious policies.

"It was always disingenuous to put a greenish tinge on the Budget. But with the climate crisis deepening, anything less than a solid commitment to a very low-carbon future is downright irresponsible."

"Britain needs massive investment in the whole emissions-reduction package - from green transport policies to green energy. That's the way to tackle the recession and the climate crisis in one go.

The Greens say Gordon Brown's plans for electric cars are flawed for a variety of reasons:

• Electric cars are only as clean as the energy that powers them. In a Green economy electric cars will be recharged with wind, solar and tidal energy, rather than coal and nuclear power. To make sure of this, Gordon Brown must commit the government to stopping all further coal-fired power stations and investing massively in renewables.

• Brown needs to be bolder on the recharging network itself. Denmark (with around one-tenth of the UK's population) is already committed to 20,000 recharge points for a nationwide system of electric cars, with Israel, Portugal and Japan close behind. Britain is still at the tentative stage of a pilot programme, with Brown saying a few cities will have trials by the end of 2010 (1).

• A focus on electric vehicles doesn't take into account our need to reduce traffic for reasons other than emissions. Low-carbon traffic congestion will still be traffic congestion and will still cost UK businesses billions every year.

• For Brown's and Darling's plans to be credible, ongoing road-building and road-widening projects must be scrapped as part of a serious effort at traffic reduction. Without this, short-term transport emissions will seriously undermine attempts to meet the necessary emissions targets. And the money saved from road-building could be put into low-emissions transport infrastructure.

• Similarly, they need to abandon projects like the third runway at Heathrow. The gains from a green industrial push will be negated if the government persists in the greatest expansion of aviation in a generation.