David Cameron will come under fire on Wednesday for the “increasingly alarming” gap between his rhetoric and his policies on the environment in a report by green pressure groups lambasting all three main political parties for their lack of progress on climate change.

The Conservative leader has made his “vote blue go green” stance on climate change a central plank of the modernising rhetoric he has deployed to attack Labour on the political centre-ground. Mr Cameron’s use of trees and other environmental imagery to rebrand the Tories will again be in evidence at the party conference later this month. The party is, for example, appealing to activists to take part in a “Great Green Blue Bike Ride” in the run-up to the Birmingham event.