David Cameron will be urged this week to increase green taxes, suspend road-building programmes and beware the “darker side of wealth” by a Tory policy commission.

The last and most controversial of the Tory leader’s policy groups, which reveals its findings on Thursday, will say that householders cannot be expected to make their homes greener purely for ethical reasons, and that the Government should intervene in order to give them a financial incentive to change.

The group’s task is to recommend ways of improving quality of life. It will focus on cutting carbon emissions from Britain’s housing, which make up about half of the country’s climate-change gases, with a partial rebate on stamp duty if all cost-effective energy efficiency improvements are made when a home is sold.

The group, chaired by John Gummer, the former Environment Secretary, and Zac Goldsmith, the green campaigner, also wants Mr Cameron to lobby the EU for a change of rules on high-energy domestic appliances like plasma-screen TVs and impose limits on standby connections, which waste electricity.

To the probable astonishment of many of the party’s more traditional supporters, it will call for an end to the “hedonistic treadmill where individuals can never be satisfied”.

They are suggesting that GDP, the traditional indicator of prosperity, should be replaced by a new set of indicators that measure social wellbeing as well as wealth.

Many of the proposals released in advance revolve around tax incentives to modify behaviour. But speaking yesterday, Mr Goldsmith said that taxes would also have to rise.

“There’s an absolute commitment from the party to raise more revenue on the back of pollution and use of scarce resources and to offset that with cuts elsewhere in the economy,” Mr Goldsmith said. “You can’t be serious about climate change or quality-of-life issues in my view unless you address very serious issues to do with short-haul flights and so on. We talk a lot about the carrots today . . . they are going to be balanced by sticks.”

Other proposals unveiled include:

— A discount on council tax payable in respect of all homes that are built to the highest environmental standards.

— Reduced VAT on house repairs and refurbishment, which is currently tilted in favour of demolition.

— Introducing smart metering in 90 per cent of homes within five years, with a legal requirement for all homes to be fitted within ten years.

— Reduced business rates for space that meets efficiency standards in excess of the minimum required by the building regulations.

— Abolishing building regulations and planning permission for building an extension.

Much of the report’s controversy will surround how it proposes to use the tax system to promote green forms of transport, in particular air travel and road building.

One source close to the report said the group had concluded that much of the Government’s road-building programme was stupid.

“The formula used to assess road schemes by the Department for Transport is flawed. Just widening roads is stupid. Nobody is saying ‘no more roads’. We do have to question motorway widening programmes.”

Mr Goldsmith said that the package would have a significant impact.

“We can achieve massive reductions from very little investment, and from the homeowners’ point of view that does pretty quickly lead to savings on your bills. The savings aren’t so big that it’s going to drive people to make these changes unless they are driven by ethical concerns. That’s why we need to have this stamp-duty rebate.

“It has to be a no-brainer for ordinary people . . . Enough of a reduction that it becomes the obvious thing to do for all homeowners.”

— Political beliefs are shaped in part by the way that the human brain works, according to research that suggests that patterns of activity tend to differ between individuals with left-wing and right-wing views (Mark Henderson writes).

Scientists in the US have found that people with a more liberal political outlook and more openness to new experiences show characteristic cognitive responses in a part of the brain called the anterior cingulated cortex, which are noticeably different from those of people who consider themselves to be conservatives.

The results, from a team led by David Amodio, of New York University and published in published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, indicate that it may often be impossible to convince people with different political views to change their opinions, as their beliefs are derived at least partially from the underlying architecture of their brains.

Dr Amodio said: “This research demonstrates how integration across multiple levels of analysis can begin to elucidate how abstract, seemingly ineffable constructs, such as ideology, are reflected in the human brain.”

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