We want radical change. In Nottingham, we have a combined heat and power plant, we purchase green electricity, we’ve cut water consumption, we’ve invested in home insulation. We have the best buses and tram system in the country. And yet we know there is so much more to do. Local Government has shown its appetite for change – over half the councils have now signed the Nottingham Declaration. We have delivered improved schools and organisational improvement. We are the advocates and shapers of our cities & towns, villages & communities. We can meet the challenge of climate change, in partnership with a resolved government.
This was the speech drafted for a conference on climate change hosted by SD-UK, in London. A shorter version was actually given.
I’ve been asked to discuss 3 points
- The practical steps that authorities need to take at local level
- Implementation of sustainable transport and energy infrastructure
- The need for Urban Approaches to Housing and Planning
The practical steps that authorities need to take at local level?
Well, first join in.
Actually, the resolve to do this is getting stronger.
Over half of councils have signed up to the Nottingham Declaration - a rapid increase in the last 18 months.
The East Midlands region’s 46 councils are completely signed up and in June, the North-East were only 3 away.
We enhanced the Declaration to become a framework for a programme for action 12 months ago and there is a structure set out for the action required on both mitigation and on adaptation.
You can find it in the online Nottingham Declaration Action Pack.
There is a tendency to focus on mitigation and it’s understandable.
There are still simple things we can all do that and currently I’d urge councils in particular to focus on the management of their buildings.
We’ve found the introduction of meters has brought a focus to consumption and on energy & water bills.
For instance, we’ve reduced our water consumption by 28% over the last few years.
Smart metering can also prompt action when energy consumption is higher than you might normally expect, particularly out of hours.
Power stabilisers that draw a steady and lower voltage from the mains for our largest buildings also looks set to save us money, paying for itself in 3 years.
Adaptation is less intuitive and tends to be something we react to rather than plan for.
There are exceptions - for instance – and in Nottingham’s case, flood protection.
We’ve had extensive works along the River Trent. We still have concerns.
I’m not qualified to say whether what’s happened elsewhere in the Midlands and South Yorkshire is something more could have been done about.
When I first wrote this speech, I thought heatwave was going to be our next big concern. Time will tell.
But managing heat in our buildings is something we tend to tackle via adding air conditioning, thus creating more heat overall.
The major commercial data organisation, Experian, have found that they can manage heat more effectively, sometimes by simply using fresh air to take heat away.
And some of the office blocks of the Office of Paris’ Mayor are growing plants in window boxes that take heat off a building.
The Mayor of Chicago is encouraging the introduction of green roofs whereby not only does grass and other plants use the sunlight for other purposes, but it offers the prospect to increase biodiversity.
We do need to be very wary of heatwaves. There was a big focus on the thousands of deaths in France in 2003, but it’s estimated that 900 people died in Britain that year.
We need to encourage people to keep the heat out of their buildings in summer. And to get across basic advice like keeping some rooms cool so as to allow your body respite (if you start to suffer from heatstroke - get yourself into a room below 19 degrees to recover). You could lose this section, given the current wet weather
There are lots of things councils can resolve to do - and whilst there are some who deny the science around - a focus on the environment and on tackling climate change can generate a sense of cross-party co-operation. Only last month, Nottingham and North Kesteven were united in calling upon councils to stick with alternate fortnightly waste collections.
In Nottingham, we found a scrutiny exercise very valuable. Councillors taking the time and space to consider a range of matters and to come up with a huge range of suggestions, most of which we could take on board.
There is a twist here - most Councils have a corporate or strategic plan and climate change may not necessarily be one of the priorities. Nottingham is one of them. Tackling the issues that deter city living is more important to us and as it happens reinforces a sustainable development agenda - cities are good for us.
So if climate change isn’t in the ambition statement, where might it belong, where might it be?
There’s a tendency to say performance management - i.e. targets. I think there’s more potential by focussing on the planning framework. Getting the resolutions from scrutiny into service plans.
And more importantly, getting environmental management and audit into the Council’s ways of working. Parts of our organisation has ISO14001 and we’re going for EMAS within 3 years.
Planning for transport ought already to be well established by our unitary and county councils.
Making transport sustainable though is more challenging, although I think Eurostar’s announcement that they will make the186 m.p.h. services between St.Pancras and Paris carbon neutral is very interesting and I hope it’s something others can explore following.
Yes, there’s been London, although London has greater powers than the rest of the country which has made it easier.
The multi-modal studies for dealing with transport issues have invariably come up with solutions that say - expand roads and motorways.
And as with airports, road expansion is seen as shorthand for economic development. We’ve tended to lose the notion (current in the nineties) that road capacity merely encourages people to live further away and / or use their own private transport more often.
The last I knew, Nottingham is the only council to get a major transport scheme that was calculated to put the car user at a disadvantage. Our Turning Point scheme reinforces the expansion of pedestrian-isation in the city centre and restricted access to certain city centre roads to buses, cycles and taxis.
It’s been popular - giving pedestrians more space but took some planning and some revising.
Other aspects of sustainable transport are very popular.
Our link bus services focussed on workplaces, hospitals and park & ride.
Our demand responsive bus services - serving estates between commercial bus routes. Run by the third sector, and able to vary routes to pick people up from outside their house. Popular and bringing a new freedom to older and less mobile people.
But this costs.
We wouldn’t be able to afford this if we weren’t being rewarded for planning to introduce our preferred form of congestion charging - workplace parking levy.
The expansion of our very successful tram - the best in the country - will be financed locally by the levy.
And this does bring challenges. Not so much with the local voters of Nottingham, many of whom don’t have access to the car and suffer the problems the commuting of others from outside the city brings.
One of my communities in particular is highly distressed by the volumes of commuting traffic.
We’ve won 3 local elections with the levy in our manifesto.
Our problems tend to be a nervous Whitehall, lack of sufficient powers - we’re having to do a public inquiry when Ken Livingstone didn’t - and of course the burden business perceive in having to administer a tax.
Implementation of sustainable transport infrastructure is harder than it should be.
But it’s vital cos when we have fuel strikes or the public suffer when fuel prices become treble what we have now (as projected in 10 years time - with the growth of China), people and commerce will ask why something wasn’t done?
And as Stern pointed out, whilst there’s a mismatch between the price of fuel and the cos of the environmental damage of the carbon dioxide it releases, we can’t rely on markets to tackle this.
Maybe carbon credits and trading will help, but we’ve suffered too in trying to maintain our local power station and district heating scheme.
Once receiving gov’t subsidy, people are surprised to find that incinerating waste for energy does not attract a form of gov’t support called ROCS.
On energy infrastructure, Enviro-Energy, a company wholly owned by Nottingham City Council, operates one of the largest district heating and private wire electricity networks in the country, supplying heat to over 4,500 homes. It purchases steam from the neighbouring municipal waste incinerator as its energy source, but struggles financially because of having to buy gas at market rates when the steam supply fails and because waste incineration doesn’t qualify for Government subsidy via Renewable Heat Obligation Certificates.
Public outcry over last year’s higher fuel prices has seen a drive to tackle it by drawing from under the North Sea even faster.
Green campaign groups that support gas fired Combined Heat and Power elsewhere protest about CHP in Nottingham because it’s powered from waste incineration, even though a health impact assessment report by the PCT found minimal evidence of public health risk.
Other councils are struggling to get waste incineration going - Notts in Mansfield - even though the alternative is land-fill - one step below in the pyramid.
Of course it’s true that we need less waste in the first place - and we look to commerce and gov’t achieving more - certainly our domestic waste per person has been stable for some years now. And we’re all doing more on recycling, and having to fund it out of efficiency savings - the comprehensive spending review is clear - we’re not going to get extra real terms funding.
A theme to Nottingham’s approach is agglomeration - a planner’s word which I’ve only just been introduced to. In essence our footprint is smaller if we live nearer where we work, shop, learn and have fun.
In essence, “cities are good for us”.
I was asked to talk about housing and planning.
But that does skip the vexed question of schools and education. The introduction of league tables and Ofsted may have shaken up educational practice and ineffectiveness - but at a cost of social segregation and a failure to inform people over the real criteria by which to judge the effectiveness of a school.
On housing, the key question for us has been supply, firstly of dedicated student accommodation to mitigate and even reverse the conversion of family houses to multi-occupancy living. We were actually succeeding and then immigration of East Europeans to the city has met taken many of the released houses.
Then, supply of family housing, to drive for a better social mix, in the context of providing better schools and tackling crime.
We also need better insulated houses. We need to adopt something like the 40% house target proposed by the Environmental Change Institute. It sets out a range of criteria with targets by which we can measure progress and is the best model I’ve so far seen.
On planning, we have successfully resisted the out-of-town shopping centres that have damaged some of other cities quite badly. Nottingham’s city centre is one of the top 5 shopping centres. Our planning is integrated with our transport planning.
There’s loads more to say but I was asked for practical steps.
Actually saying do what Nottingham does is counter-intuitive to what local gov’t says - which is the council and its people should know what is best to do for our places and communities.
But I would say -
- Care, say you care and show you care;
- plan to make a difference; use the Nottingham Declaration’s framework;
- learn from others; and consider a scrutiny exercise if you’re stuck;
- get environmental considerations into all aspects of service and project planning and verify it with an audit system;
- drive on consuming less and saving money; get into metering and better estate mgmt.;
And I think we need better from Gov’t -
- Whitehall are risk averse and constantly demand more information; we need Whitehall to be alongside us, making things happen;
- Transport planning needs to frown upon expanding road and airport capacity; and make it easier to do bus and tram and cycle schemes; Requirements upon local authorities to find a local contribution when there is no such equivalent for road schemes is bizarre;
- Give greater prominence to its response to the Stern Review.
We are making progress. And because what we need to do impacts on so much of what local government does, we need systematic approaches that gets environmental considerations into our ways of working.
One rider to that is that of not giving tackling climate change a profile, or showing enough that what we want and need is progress, we want radical change.
Nottingham has achieved this in many areas, often some years ago.
[Published 2007-07-02; version of the above delivered 2007-07-05; page last updated 2007-07-07].
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