Examination of Witnesses (Questions 345
- 359)
WEDNESDAY 23 FEBRUARY 2005
MR IAN
BATEMAN, MR
DON LACK
AND MR
BILL EDRICH
Chairman: Our next set of witnesses comes
from the Local Government Association. We welcome Mr Ian Bateman,
the Climate Change Officer and you come from Devon County Council;
Mr Don Lack, who is the Director of Leicester's Energy Agency,
unsurprisingly from Leicester City Council; and Mr Bill Edrich,
the Environment Programme Manager from Kirklees Council. Paddy
Tipping and Colin Breed will start our questioning.
Q345 Paddy Tipping: In your evidence
you point out, quite rightly, that there is good local authority
practice. Can you give us some examples of it? What are the shining
examples?
Mr Lack: We will take it in turns
to provide these examples for you. If you look around the local
authorities in the UK you will see that there are examples that
you rightly say are shining. I will speak for my authority, Leicester,
because we are Britain's first Environment City so we feel that
we have been practising quite a lot since 1990. We have a proactive
programme for renewable energy in the buildings that we own ourselves
as well as in the private sector. We promote energy efficiency.
We have adopted the hierarchy of energy efficiency. If we use
energy we use it more effectively and energy efficiency-wise and
then maximise renewals before we use fossil fuels. We use best
technology. We have an energy efficiency advice centre. You were
talking earlier about. It is a touchy-feely centre so people can
feel and touch. They can also buy the answers and the solutions.
Not only do we give advice and awareness but we point towards
solutions. We have the eco house in Leicester, one of the first
eco houses in the UK. It has been there now for some 15 years.
It is very successful. It has been expanded. Again it is a touchy-feely
centre. People live in the house as well so it is a real example.
We also have an infrastructure where we generate energies
energy. We are quite unusual in that we are a local authority
that is a generator, a supplier and a distributor. We have powers
under the Energy Act to supply electricity to any building we
own, so we do. We maximise those powers and use a thing called
Use of System. I am going to slow down now and stop and hand over
to my right.
Q346 Paddy Tipping: Perhaps if I
can carry on with you. You can do it in Leicester, you can do
it in Devon, and I guess you can do it in Surrey?
Mr Edrich: It is actually Kirklees,
Huddersfield and Dewsbury.
Q347 Paddy Tipping: A long way away.
Your councils are doing it; why cannot all the councils do it?
Mr Lack: I think they can.
Q348 Paddy Tipping: Why are they
not then?
Mr Lack: They need to be enabled
and empowered. Some of them are doing it and probably not waving
the flag so you cannot always see that they are doing it. They
need to be empowered through legislation and enabled through resources.
One of the key things that we are trying to get across is with
procurement policies there is a massive opportunity there. If
we have got 400 local authorities why do they each have to individually
procure a service when we could have national procurement and
save vast amounts of time and resource and finance? That is one
example.
Mr Bateman: I think the climate
change issue is an extremely broad issue and we cannot have it
as a single stovepipe activity. What I have learned from my 12
months in post is that it is not a new activity, it is an existing
activity. What I have spent my first year doing is bringing together
all those threads which have come from lots of other disparate
areas of work, bringing in the waste management strategy, bringing
in the local transport issues, bringing in the planning and building
control issues. You can go across most local authorities and you
can see all those strands of work there and it is a matter of
corralling them together to make sure it is in a consistent whole
and that it can represent a climate change policy, for want of
a better word. The majority of local authorities perhaps do not
know it but they are already doing it, they are already part of
this climate care club in some way or another.
Q349 Paddy Tipping: It is about raising
the profile, demonstrating you can do it and lifting consciousness?
Mr Edrich: It is also co-ordination
within the local authority which is of extreme importance. What
you have got here and in the local authorities that I would call
excellent rather than just good is strong co-ordination and drive
by elected members as well.
Q350 Paddy Tipping: Mr Lack, you
told us about the barriers and in your evidence you talk about
barriers in central government. Are you going to expand on that?
What would you like the Government to do to make this more effective?
Mr Lack: We have already heard
about the joined-up thinking approach across all the departments
and we sometimes find that we are in the enviable position of
talking to a number of different departments and we can join them
up through the local output. I think that is a key thing. From
the local authorities' perception we are not supposed to be risk
takers, we are not supposed to be innovators, we are supposed
to be guardians of public funding and yet sometimes the innovation
you might argue is risky. My local authority always says to me
"Who's done it before?" If I can do them an example,
a good case study of somebody who has done it before then they
feel satisfied by that because it has reduced their risk. If I
say, "Well, we are a bit trail-blazing here, this is us going
for it" they are very concerned about that. If you could
introduce a mechanism whereby they could have that risk underwritten
that would help, especially through the financial procedures.
That would be an example. That can be a procedure thing or it
can be an awareness raising opportunity, to enable local authorities
to be able not take the risk by going for innovation—and
in climate change we are going to need some real technology changes,
we need to do things better than we are doing them at the moment.
That is one example.
Mr Edrich: Also you have mentioned
five areas where you say if we could move on it would clear some
of the barriers. Certainly planning is one of those areas and
I am sure that might be raised anyway. Building regulations is
another area. Don has elaborated on the financial and procurement
incentives. I am sure we will touch also on cultural change and
how you change people's perceptions to "this is something
that we need to be doing".
Q351 Mr Breed: My perception is that
it is a lot easier to get things done in metropolitan areas and
big city areas where you have got some critical mass. I recall
the Committee visited Leicester not so very long ago.
Mr Lack: It is a nice place to
visit.
Mr Breed: And it was very, very useful
and very informative. Turning to Mr Bateman, who comes from Devon,
I would say there are some massive problems in terms of trying
to overcome some of the real difficulties of some of the schemes
that you really want to introduce. I come from Cornwall so I know
a bit about what is happening in Devon as such.
Ms Atherton: You should not say that
too loudly!
Q352 Mr Breed: Can you perhaps give
us an idea of how the authority has tried to overcome some of
the resistance that you get from some of the residents to the
things that you really want to do to affect climate change?
Mr Bateman: What we are starting
to do is put together a climate change communications activity
to try and make sure that climate change is relevant to local
people. We are trying to build this thing called Agency for Change
trying to change attitudes. So that is the first step that we
are doing. We have just got a small amount of money put into climate
change communications activity. This is based on local heroes.
We are bringing it down to the local people to try and identify
local people who might be heroes in saving the planet by doing
something. That is the first step we are taking because it is
the communications bit up-front that is the important thing and
you will not get behavourial change without changing attitudes.
If you come from Cornwall you understand the wind farm debate;
we have that debate now going in Devon.
Q353 Mr Breed: You have not got any
wind farms yet, but that is another matter. Just finally, do you
think that there is sufficient Government support for the rural
schemes as such? I think there is quite a lot of support into
the cities for many of the initiatives they do. It is a lot easier
to get recycling and all the sorts of things that Mr Lack was
talking about. Bearing in mind the sparseness of population in
rural areas the costs are incrementally more in order to get the
same sort of effect. How does the LGA try to tackle the two different
areas of rural as opposed to urban when you come to look at the
support they are getting?
Mr Bateman: I do recognise the
problem but I do not have any information at the moment to be
able to answer that. We could come back to you and provide an
answer.
Mr Edrich: We have got two areas
which could provide answers to that type of question. One is certainly
Shropshire which is a two-tier council, and the other is Cornwall.
Both of those councils have gone for Sustainable Beacon status
and I am sure that both of those would be able to provide evidence
to the Committee. I will check that with the LGA but I am sure
they will be able to provide something to you.
Mr Lack: One of the examples we
have got is that within the regions local authorities do network
so within the East Midlands you have the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire
partnership which allows the bigger authorities to enable the
smaller authorities. That is working quite well. In Northamptonshire
17 authorities have joined together to get a lot of their projects
working across the whole of their area and the same effect happens
within Leicestershire with the Leicestershire authorities. They
also utilise the Home Energy Conservation Act Forum to bring those
devices together. I think that is another opportunity within the
regions. They are working well at the region but sometimes—and
it comes back to the question you asked me—one of the barriers
can also be the region itself, how the development agencies work
within the region, how they work off the local authorities and
enable local authorities. There is a lot of opportunity there
and the development with the regional assemblies is obviously
also a powerful opportunity. This can be well co-ordinated with
the government office within the regions. This is something that
has been changing quite a lot recently with quite a bit of shuffling
and that always has a knock-on effect to local authorities, in
holding them back or delaying them. What we need to be saying
is how this can happen at a region. To give an East Midlands example,
we have completed an energy strategy for the East Midlands and
we now have a co-ordinator working in the East Midlands. Of course
funding for that co-ordinator post is relying on where you can
grab the money from each time and who can do it. We have been
fortunate to be DTI funded for the regional work so far. It is
always a challenge, a battle, and that is the problem, where the
local authorities are working quite well is because they have
battled to try and get the resource or find the funding to make
it happen in the region or in their own locality.
Mr Edrich: Or they see particular
problems or areas that they might have to address and do some
work about. If you look at the East of England they have done
some work and are probably one of the leading areas on adaption
issues to do with climate change. That is a whole group of local
authorities working at a regional level trying to solve problems
which they perceive are going to be coming to them as local authorities.
Q354 Joan Ruddock: Obviously you
have spoken about your own authorities. I have yet to meet Mr
Jones, who has been employed by the Mayor of London and who I
think comes from Woking which I understand was able to demonstrate
overall carbon CO2 reductions. Have you in your own
authorities been able to demonstrate actual reductions that are
measurable as opposed to saying we have all these programmes and
all these interesting things we have done. Have you got a baseline
and you can show reductions over a period of years?
Mr Edrich: You have got to understand
there are two elements to that. There are reductions in CO2
in the community and reductions from councils.
Q355 Joan Ruddock: Indeed, the question
I am asking is for your whole authority are you doing that piece
of work?
Mr Edrich: Yes.
Mr Lack: In Leicester we developed
the DREAM model with the Open University and De Montfort University
back in 1990. It measured the whole city—business, domestic,
city council and the energy and carbon emissions, re-visited that
on two occasions (the last full run being in 1999) and that showed
that we had made a 32% carbon reduction in that period and a 6%
energy reduction in that period which was quite significant and
showed we were on the right lines. However, it also showed the
transport sector was soaking up what we had been trying to achieve
in the building sector. It did not show we were going in the wrong
direction. It encouraged us and also showed us the complications
of the modeling. I would like to go a bit further with that, that
one of the effects of the modelling is that in 1990 we had a utility
system where we only had one supplier for electricity and one
supplier for gas. In 1999 we had a utility system where there
were 32 different suppliers and the quality of data has gone down.
So that is one of the biggest effects we have seen. The way we
have dealt with that is that we have started to install an intelligent
energy metering system across the city where we monitor what is
happening not only in our own buildings but what is happening
in businesses, and we are able to monitor in real time, half-hourly
data, and that is a massive potential. I would have liked to have
thought that this is something that would come out of the de-regulatory
energy market and enable people to have access to real information
in real time, not only for commercial and local authorities but
for the public sector, because obviously if you open the bill
and you get well informed data about what you are doing in your
own home you can take action, but if you just see the bottom figure
and it shows you in credit you get a well-being factor straight
away; you feel good about that, you have made this money, you
are saving money and you think you are efficient when in actual
fact you probably are not.
Chairman: David Taylor wanted to follow
that up and Candy wants to come in as well.
Q356 David Taylor: Earlier on we
had no lack of good examples from Leicester in terms of environmental
successes, the Eco House in particular, but would you not accept
that perhaps the twin towers of the New Walk Centre, which are
the council headquarters in Leicester, are not a specially shining
example as you drive up the long drag of Welford Road and, set
against the night sky quite late on most days, whether they are
working late or not, it seems to me there is an immense amount
of light consumption.
Mr Lack: It is an old 60s building
that is a challenge for any local authority. You are quite right,
there are two big towers. On the top of the smallest tower, B
block, is an array of solar panels creating energy from the sun,
so it is a shining example of how you should do it. The whole
of the electricity for both sites—it is a megawatt site—is
supplied by two wind generators in Leicestershire, at a place
called Beacon Energy. So that building is carbon neutral right
from day one for its electricity use.
Q357 David Taylor: That is good,
but I was thinking about the consumption monitoring, following
your point about intelligent metering.
Mr Lack: Half-hourly data; we
are able to monitor exactly what is happening in the building
every half hour—we can actually see what is happening. We
could see, when the summer came and it was very hot, that we had
a three degree temperature increase; that the electricity consumption
raised dramatically because people were bringing in their own
fans from home and putting them on their desks, switching them
on, and that peaked and showed that we are going to incur a £9,000
penalty just for the few days where we peaked. But had we had
solar films on the windows, which we were arguing to put on, as
an energy efficient measure, we could have avoided that.
Q358 David Taylor: All of that is
great, but the point I am trying to make—and I am sorry
to interrupt—is that maybe there has not been sufficient
focus on energy conservation at times when the building would
not normally be operational. I am interested in what you have
to say about intelligent metering. Years ago, in another life,
I designed software which was involved in this area and tracked
some of the things that you are talking about. But actually providing
accurate information—and you notice some of the more recent
difficulties on that—is not necessarily a precursor to that
information being acted on by the component parts of a large building
or a large department or a large organisation. Do you think that
it really can always lead to a reduction in energy usage when
sufficient information is provided, or are people just overwhelmed
with the information and do not feel that they have sufficient
control over their own environment to be able to take the necessary
decision to change? Any of the three of you, not just Mr Lock?
Mr Bateman: I think the important
point in all of this is to try to work out for a county council's
operations what its carbon footprint is, because after all what
we are trying to do is to reduce CO2 equivalent levels.
We have done this for Devon County Council and we recognise that
we produce an estimate of about 76,000 tons of CO2
equivalent per year. But it can only ever be an estimate and it
is a build-up from the bottom, and it is not only the electricity
consumption, it concerns our use of water, the waste we produce,
the business miles that we do, the commuting impact that we have
on the environment, our street lighting and things like that,
our use of gas and electricity, what our vehicles do. So we have
to look at it in the complete round and identify what our carbon
footprint is. Then we have to identify a target. If we are going
to meet the Government's aspirational targets of 60% reduction
by 2050, if we start today that is only a 2% year on year reduction,
and it is getting the mentality that you can make a small reduction,
using current technology, that we could probably go on for 15
years to make reductions.
Q359 David Taylor: Mr Bateman, I
am signed up to the dream, I really am; I am committed and I am
with you and I have been involved in this area for a fair length
of time. But is it not the case that it is quite feasible and
highly desirable to build in the sort of equipment and infrastructure
in new buildings relatively cheaply, to do the intelligent metering
and intelligent monitoring of all utility usage—a fair point
that you make—but to actually adapt existing buildings which
may have quite a long life ahead of them is enormously expensive,
is it not?
Mr Edrich: If I can just come
in there? We actually run an internal loan fund within our council—it
has been running since 1997—and we found that basically
for every piece of work that we do, for every ton of energy that
we save is actually a negative figure. So if we do not carry out
that work we cost the council the actual revenue amounts. For
the lifetime of the products we are getting down to round about
minus £70 per ton for electricity and insulation work to
be put in. So to answer your question directly, there are mechanisms;
there are internal loan funds that you can actually do. Lend the
money to services, they carry out the work, they take half the
savings, they pay back half the savings to the loan fund and you
recoup the money and you lend it out again. That sort of loan
fund can be expanded up to national level; there is no reason
why it should just be at a local level and the Carbon Trust have
looked at it and started to do that. So energy efficiency pays
for itself and pays for itself fast.
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