Whitehall has displayed a "lack of commitment" to ministerial pledges on green issues, an influential committee of MPs has claimed.

In a report published on Thursday, the environmental audit committee concluded that government departments devoted few resources to the Sustainable Development Agenda.

The committee also found that staff dedicated to the area tended to come from low civil service grades.

The public service agreements driving the work of government departments contained little reference to environmentally-related targets, with the exception of the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said the report.

The MPs had no access to departments' sustainable development reports and could not make any assessment of the progress made since the 2002 spending review.

Three years after a government committment, ministries failed to provide the results of their assessments about the environmental impact of policy decisions.

The chairman of the committee, Peter Ainsworth claimed work in the area of sustainable development "occupies a limbo existence which has little impact on departments' real priorities".

"Central government departments have a crucial role to play if the UK is to move towards a sustainable future," he said.

"They are major employers and estate managers, but also exert huge influence through the policies they are responsible for developing and implementing.

"Yet we found that departments have few staff devoted to this agenda, have little in the way of environmental objectives and targets, and are still unable to report adequately on operational aspects of their performance.

"In our view, this demonstrates a lack of commitment by senior management and a failure to exploit the potential within many departments to mainstream sustainable development more radically.

"There is an impressive range of policy documents and guidance relating to sustainable. But much of the work undertaken on this agenda occupies a limbo existance which has little impact on departments' real priorities.

"The government needs to examine critically the impact which its sustainable development strategy has had on departments in the light of our findings."