To be honest, its a pretty useful practice for common management tasks involving face to face meetings.

As much as I love technology, its amazing how much bringing out a laptop or tablet reduces the quality of person-to-person interaction. A printout of the email relevant to the meeting lets you refer to the key points and make notes while still giving full attention to other participants. Sensitive situations just don't let you make compromises about that.

Is it better for the planet if I buy a tablet which lasts three years and bring that to the meeting instead?

Why would a tablet only last three years?

In any case, you can simply buy a laptop/tablet hybrid nowadays, instead of the laptop you'd buy anyway (exceptions made for people who need desktops or non-hybrid laptops for some reason, but they're an exception).

OS updates either aren't available or refuse to run on it, so it's still usable but not safe to connect to the internet.

The Surface comes with a guarantee of four years of updates (minimum).

I'm not sure what you intend with your post. I assure you I'm not responsible for laptop purchasing decisions in the UK civil service.

I didn't think you were. My point was that if they can quickly fix this issue with a simple law banning government entities from putting disclaimers at the bottom of an email I'd rather that than spending millions on new hardware to prevent printing. Considering most of these people will use Word + Internet Explorer all day money doesn't need to be unnecessarily spent on new hardware.

My idea was simply, when buying new laptops that are needed anyway, to choose hybrids instead of "regular" laptops.