A failure to cut greenhouse gases last year shows the British government has not delivered the “step change” needed to tackle climate change.

There needs to be a significant acceleration in measures such as teaching people how to “eco-drive” and insulating lofts and cavity walls if the UK is to meet its targets to cut emissions, the government’s climate change advisers said.

And ministers must commit to ambitious targets for insulating houses as part of the new “green deal” scheme, which aims to finance the upfront costs of improving the energy efficiency of homes.

In their third report on the progress the UK is making on tackling global warming, the Committee on Climate Change said emissions rose by three per cent last year, mostly due to people using more energy for heating in the cold weather.

Without the cold winter there was no improvement, with emissions effectively staying the same as the previous year.

The UK is only within its targets for cutting climate emissions in the first five-year “carbon budget”, currently under way, because of the recession which reduced emissions by nine per cent in 2009, the committee said.

But to cut greenhouse gases by 50 per cent on 1990 levels by 2025, which the government signed up to when it agreed the level of the fourth carbon budget in the 2020s last month, emissions need to be falling at a rate of three pert cent a year.

Committee chief executive officer David Kennedy said: “We are below the level of the budget in 2010 because there was a very big emissions reduction in 2009. That reduction was due to the recession, not because we’ve started doing things fundament-ally differently.

“If we carry on as we have been doing we won’t meet the future carbon budgets to which we are committed.

“Clearly we’ve got to accelerate the pace of emissions reductions in order to meet carbon budgets.”

The schedule for building powerplants that demonstrate technology which capture and permanently store underground the carbon from burning fossil fuels has slipped, and any more delays would limit its role in cutting emissions from the electricity sector, the report warned.