Colbert, financial controller to Louis XIV, famously remarked that “the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.” The Colbert prize is an occasional award, going to the government department that runs the tax scheme with the highest feather-to-hissing ratio.
The department of energy and climate change (DECC) wins the 2008 Colbert prize for its clever system of renewable obligation certificates (ROCs). Last year it used ROCs to pluck £470m from the public, and did it with no hissing at all. Furthermore—a point that a 17th-century aristocrat like Colbert would no doubt have particularly enjoyed—the plucking is regressive, taking proportionally more feathers from poor geese than from rich ones.
All this is a consequence of the British government’s decision to place the responsibility for delivering (and financing) environmentally-friendly power in the hands of the generation utilities.
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