Green MP Caroline Lucas has slammed the Tory party’s environmental policies as fluffy and inadequate.

Ms Lucas made those comments at the Greens Party Spring Conference speech in Bournemouth on the weekend where she panned the Tories’ 25-year green plan to phase out avoidable plastics in 25 years as unnecessarily slow and disappointing.

She also warned Brexit will not bring about any innovative benefits to the country’s environmental policies.

She said:”Brexit is an extremely serious threat to the UK’s environmental policies - especially while the current cabinet of deregulators is in charge.

“The government’s ideological pursuit of an extreme Brexit threatens both the environmental legislation we share with Europe, and also the enforcement mechanisms that are central to its implementation.”

The government’s green plan includes barring small businesses from supplying free plastic bags, encouraging plastic-free supermarket aisles, and making it mandatory for developers and local authorities to put in biodiversity as a criteria when building new properties.

Around the same time when the government announced their environment policies, supermarkets have taken a much quicker move to ban plastics.

In January, Iceland announced they would go ‘plastic-free’ for their own brand labels and will complete this move by the end of 2023.

Others such as Asda has also announced they would end single-use plastics by the end of 2018.

Ms Lucas also used her speech to push the Conservative government to pick up their pace to ditch diesel-only and petrol cars by 2030.

She added the UK is falling behind other countries in the world such as Norway where almost one-third of cars sold in the country in 2016 were electric.

Ms Lucas said: “Britain is lagging behind many other countries on air pollution. Our phase out date of 2040 is utterly unambitious - especially when so many other nations are pledging to have car free cities in the next decade.

“That’s why we need to bring forward the phase out to 2030 at the latest - and also invest more in alternatives to driving, especially our much-neglected bus network.”

Steve Bell, deputy leader of the Brighton and Hove Conservatives, said schemes to reduce plastic and diesel-cars were not in place in the previous government.

He said: “Ms Lucas may say she’s not happy with the policies and that they are slow, but the Conservative government has really pushed for better green policies to be in place. I want to note that these schemes did not exist in the last administration.

“Theresa May has only been in office for two years and she has achieved so much in a short period of time. Examples include reducing pesticides in food and developed strategies to tackle littering.

“It’s easy to criticise but bringing in and implementing new policies take time. The Conservatives are working really hard to improve the country’s environment.

“Last November we put forward a motion to end the use of single use plastic in Brighton and this will be discussed at a committee meeting this month.”