Examination of Witnesses (Questions 92-99)
CLLR MICHAEL
HAINES, MR
MIKE PEVERILL
AND MR
RICHARD HURFORD
12 JULY 2006
Q92 Chairman: Good afternoon and welcome
to the meeting. We are very grateful to you for coming in. These
are issues which are of very direct concern to us and likely to
be of continuing concern to the Government as well. As you are
going to re-launch The Nottingham Declaration shortly,
would you like to say how you feel that has gone in the year since
it was originally launched, what you think the impact has been
and whether you feel perhaps some momentum has gone out of it?
Mr Peverill: I am Mike Peverill
and I am the Sustainable Development Policy Officer at Nottingham
City Council. I have been involved in launching the original declaration,
revising it and re-launching it again last year. About 150 councils
around the UK have now signed The Nottingham Declaration
or its equivalent. There is a Wales Declaration and versions
of it in Cornwall and Devon, and many councils choose to use their
own local name for it. So we know that around a third of English
and Welsh councils have now made a high level public declaration
to tackle climate change in their own area, which I think is a
significant achievement. What we do not know is what the individual
and collective progress or impact of that has been in terms of
the quantity of, for instance, carbon dioxide saved or the number
of adaptations, measures put in place by different councils, but
we collectively, Nottingham City Council together with its six
or seven key partners on this, have formed the Nottingham Declaration
Development Group and we are launching a new package of support
measures next week and are committed to continuously improve the
supports available to councils over a period of time so that by
the end of the year and the beginning of the new financial year
there will be improved monitoring and support mechanisms in place.
So we do hope that we will be able to quantify more accurately
what has happened as a result of that.
Q93 Chairman: Are you still hoping
that more local authorities are going to sign up? Do you have
a target in your mind?
Mr Peverill: We do. We are currently
embarked upon something called the Target 200 Campaign, which
seeks to double the number of publicly committed councils between
December last year, when we hit the 100 mark, and this coming
December. The target after that is to re-double again to 400 within
the following two years.
Q94 Chairman: Are you reasonably
happy with the progress so far?
Mr Peverill: Very happy, yes.
Q95 Colin Challen: How do you see
the role of the LGA in helping the country reduce carbon emissions?
Mr Peverill: The LGA has been
a very useful partner in the process since about a year ago, when
we began to revise The Nottingham Declaration and prepare
a new version. Obviously their role in trying to get a more collective
approach to climate change is instrumental.
Q96 Colin Challen: Your website does
not seem to have it as a central feature. You use the word "partner"
but is the LGA not a little bit peripheral in doing this?
Cllr Haines: Could I ask which
website? Do you mean the LGA website or The Nottingham Declaration?
Q97 Colin Challen: The LGA website.
Cllr Haines: The LGA website provide
links which would allow people to go to The Nottingham Declaration
website, which clearly would give more specific information on
that type of thing. If we have moved on from The Nottingham
Declaration could I add one point myself? It has got the impetus
now. What we have seen is that it has been recognised by local
authorities as being the declaration to make, as opposed
to making their own, and the increase in numbers is as a result
of that because now it being seen as the standard and others are
coming on, which is why I hope the target for 2008 is a realistic
one.
Q98 Colin Challen: I certainly look
forward to chairing that meeting next week at the launch here
in the Boothroyd Room. Just a little plug there for the All Party
Climate Change Group! Just concentrating on the LGA, the Committee
visited Woking a couple of weeks ago and obviously there is a
brilliant set of examples of different approaches to tackling
climate change, but I think we felt that there really was not
much evidence that the LGA was doing much itself to disseminate
the information. Does the LGA see it as the role of some designated
authority to do that and that perhaps it itself has not got the
capacity to do it, or even the will to do it?
Cllr Haines: The LGA has been
disseminating information. The Greening Communities Campaign,
which we launched in the autumn, certainly gave these sorts of
details as well as a whole range of environmental issues, not
just climate change. So yes, we are disseminating, but I take
your point about there needing to be more in terms of reaching
out there. Clearly there are lots of examples that people are
well aware of. There needs to be more opportunity within each
authority for that to be enacted. What the LGA has always been
advocating in recent times is more money—£28 million
is the figure which has always been quoted, £70,000 per authority—for
people to actually be in place to enable that to be then introduced
into the authorities, because at the moment we have not got people
whose jobs are specifically that in many authorities. I know we
have in some. I am from Teinbridge in south Devon, but Devon county
has got a climate change officer appointed in the last year and
clearly his job is to start doing that. Small authorities in particular
need more support so that they can do that, and that is one of
the things the LGA has been asking for because yes, we can send
the information out there, but if there is no one at the other
end who is specifically going to receive it and start it moving
in the authority then clearly that is where the bottleneck is.
Q99 Colin Challen: Do you think that
all authorities should be under some kind of obligation to have
a climate change strategy with clear targets and time lines?
Cllr Haines: I think, yes, it
is coming, is it not? Clearly The Nottingham Declaration
is where they have signed to do that themselves and when we get
on to the 30 core outcomes then I am sure it will be one of those,
in which case there will be a requirement.
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