Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
CLLR MICHAEL
HAINES, MR
MIKE PEVERILL
AND MR
RICHARD HURFORD
12 JULY 2006
Q100 Colin Challen: You would not
necessarily welcome Government intervention? The Nottingham
Declaration is still a declaration. It is a voluntary instrument,
if you like.
Cllr Haines: Yes, it is, but if
we get national outcomes introduced then it is for local authorities
to determine how they can reach them themselves using their own
local methodology. So that is how it can be achieved.
Q101 Colin Challen: Do you think
that the issue of climate change has adequately percolated down
to all local authorities, or is it still those where you might
have key councillors or officers who are pushing the agenda?
Mr Hurford: I am Richard Hurford
from the London Borough of Lewisham. I look after energy and resources
issues. There has been a lot of talk about the "Wilful Individuals"
and I think all three of us are probably representative of the
Wilful Individuals around the country. There are probably about
40 such officers and people who have been instrumental in pushing
forward energy issues and climate change and sustainable energy
issues within their own authorities. You asked earlier would it
be better to have Government intervention. My view is that that
would be useful if money was attached to it. As Michael has just
mentioned, the LGA has been pushing to make it a statutory function
because at the moment climate change is not a new issue, but it
is a relatively new issue for local authorities to be looking
at and so it has not the importance of housing, education, social
services, planning or building control, and until you either have
statutory targets or a statutory function you are not going to
get that full buy-in from every local authority. Regardless of
how much the LGA is a successful catalyst, you do need some type
of statutory function and normally you would have some funding
attached to that.
Q102 Colin Challen: Between authorities,
urban and rural authorities, the ones in the North or the South,
do you think there are different, shall we say, capacities or
other demographic issues which makes it easier for some to go
further faster than others? Woking seemed to me to be an authority
which was perhaps of the right size, the right kind of urban mix,
fairly suburban. Perhaps it is easy for them, they are richer
and they have a higher tax base, presumably, than a hard-pressed
urban authority?
Cllr Haines: I am not aware of
any research which would actually support that or not. I would
be inclined to agree with your statement, but I cannot back it
up, as I am aware, with any data, I am afraid.
Q103 Colin Challen: Is a survey likely
to happen, doð ñyou think, following on The
Nottingham Declaration process?
Mr Peverill: A number of surveys
have taken place, which have been undertaken by different organisations,
and we would hope that that would continue to keep getting that
sense of what is the state of play at a particular point in time.
One of the things we hope, as the Declaration Development Group,
to introduce for the signatories is an annual event to report
on their achievements. That would in some ways be even better
because you could elicit a greater quantity of better information.
Q104 Colin Challen: Could I ask you
about these "Wilful Individuals"? It sounds a bit like
a criminal fraternity we are talking about! Are they forming themselves
into any kind of association so that they can share good practice
between themselves and try and develop a professional approach
such as that which you have in many other areas of local government?
Cllr Haines: Yes, they are. I
am sure these gentlemen know of others in their localities, and
indeed nationally, where groups of people of like mind have certainly
exchanged views in the past. I attended the Nottingham conference
back in December and knew a number of people there, so yes, inevitably
that is the case. You talk about "Wilful Individuals"
but there is a spectrum. I would not put myself on the extreme
"Wilful Individual" range, but there are those who are
completely not engaged at all and obviously most people are somewhere
along that and it is a case of tying to shift people more into
the more active "Wilful Individuals".
Colin Challen: Thank you.
Q105 Mr Stuart: Two questions, if
I may, Chairman. Is there a danger that inaction on the part of
the local authorities will be reinforced by the idea that the
Government has to come along and not only tell authorities what
to do but to provide them with the money to do it? The Woking
example showed that long before, perhaps, Government had taken
it to heart as much as it has now it was possible to self-fund
and become a leaner, meaner and cost-saving authority whilst also
green in its impact. That is point one. My second question is
just on The Nottingham Declaration. To what extent have
you been able to monitor the actual delivery of the local authorities
of their commitment and whether they really are taking action,
because there are countries which signed up to Kyoto whose progress
against the targets they have accepted has been less than ideal
and I am sure nobody wants to have political declarations which
are unmatched by actions.
Mr Peverill: I think I commented
earlier that the monitoring of progress so far has not produced
a huge amount of detail in evidence and we are very conscious
of the need to improve upon that. The action pack we are about
to launch actually does provide the means to monitor progress
through a series of milestone measures, which look at things like
developing an inventory, creating an action plan, getting senior
management buy-in, and all those kinds of things. So in the near
future we will be able to monitor all that kind of information
much better and, we hope, things like practical outcomes such
as reduced carbon emissions.
Cllr Haines: Could I just follow
on from that point and then come back to the first one? My own
authority signed up to The Nottingham Declaration last
December and we are now engaged with the Carbon Trust, together
with Devon County Council to actually find out our carbon footprint
as an authority and obviously go on from there. That sort of information
will be available in due course and I understand that you will
be looking at things thereafter, so that sort of information should
be available to you.
Mr Hurford: To follow on from
that, Lewisham has also signed The Nottingham Declaration
in the last year and a process is being put in place to ensure
that there is annual monitoring and we do feed back through the
scrutiny process on the progress which has been made.
Mr Peverill: I think in the spirit
of the Declaration being a public commitment, it is my view certainly
that we should encourage all signatory councils to make this information
public, to publish a web page on their own website about the progress
which they have achieved so that the information is easily available.
Cllr Haines: Returning to the
first question, which was about whether the authorities will actually
have to be made to do it, whereas some have actually gone ahead
and done it, I think we are back to some extent to the "Wilful
Individuals" and what we have got is that those places where
it has been done will allow those who have got to catch up a much
quicker learning curve to catch up. So yes, okay, there will need
to be that national outcome which will drive the other authorities
to do it, but then they have got all these examples to learn from
so they should catch up quicker than would otherwise have been
the case without the "Wilful Individuals".
Q106 Mr Stuart: Is it absolutely
necessary that money comes with this? Is it not possible from
the Woking example to push responsibilities of local government
on this major issue, that you could accept the statutory obligation
without any cash attached to that?
Mr Hurford: I do think it is worth
mentioning that Woking was one of seven authorities with beacon
status for sustainable energy. Lewisham was one of the others.
I have been to Woking and Allan Jones and Ray Morgan—Ray
Morgan is now Chief Executive of Woking but he was the Director
of Finance who oversaw the whole process—and I think it
is a fairly unusual example and other authorities have not been
finding it easy to mimic the exact circumstances which Woking
has managed to put in place. In London we are working with Allan
Jones and the Climate Change Agency to unpick how, either as the
whole of London or as individual London authorities, we can mimic
what has put in place in Woking, but it has been difficult. It
is when you get to the funding issue that—I will not say
it becomes harder, but it is making the financial justification.
For instance, if you put half a million pounds' worth of solar
PV onto an old people's home (which they have done in Woking and
it is very impressive, and I wish we had done the same ourselves)
looking at the financial justification it is a long pay-back.
They have developed the pot of money which they then used to spend
on PV, but it is quite how you develop that pot of money and quite
how you then develop an ESCO, which is the recommended approach.
As I say, we are still in discussions with Allan Jones and we
have also spoken to Ray Morgan about how we can do that, but I
do not think people are quite clear yet. We can see how the technology
works, but it is the funding and how you put the funding mechanisms
in place to replicate Woking which is where I think most authorities
have a problem.
Q107 Mr Hurd: I just want to ask
about the incentives for the "wilful" few. What is driving
people to do this? Is this public good or is there a sense that
there is money to be saved on energy in the long-term, or is it
just because people think there might be some good PR attached
to it? What is driving this? There is no money from the Government
for it, is there?
Mr Peverill: No, indeed not. I
think it is a whole combination of things. Certainly the fact
that climate change has never really been out of the media for
the last 18 months or so is a very high profile issue, I would
say largely in part thanks to the Government's international leadership
on it. There is a sense that local government also needs to be
reflecting that at the local level. We need to be seen to be community
leaders and doing the right kinds of things. This is a fairly
simple way of expressing that degree of leadership commitment.
As has been said, it develops a bit of momentum. A significant
number of councils have come on board. So it has a kind of brand,
if you like, which people are keen to be associated with. I think
there is increasing recognition that through a careful look at
the various issues involved there is the possibility of saving
significant amounts of money if you invest and manage things in
the right way.
Q108 Mark Pritchard: At what point
does the local authority's leadership end and consumer demand
for such changes at local authority level actually begin, or even
vice versa, because the Woking example is an interesting one which
seems to have been led by certain councillors and certain officers
from the top? It is important, clearly, that clients, consumers,
local taxpayers are engaged and there is an argument that they
are not particularly engaged and the council is doing this over
here—I do not know if it is the same in Lewisham—and
the tax payer over here is lagging behind in education and knowledge,
perhaps. I just wondered, how do you actually square that circle,
because if we are going to have a coalition of the willing (to
continue the willing point) then clearly these two factors need
to come together, these two parts of that coalition?
Mr Hurford: My guess is that the
"wilful individuals" are people who have been interested
in potentially energy and environmental issues for some years
and have perhaps believed the information about climate change
some time ago and therefore have wanted to bring it to the fore.
Recently, particularly in the last two years, climate change issues
have become so topical and so much in the media that the public
are now very aware and there is starting to be some pressure from
the ground up, from the public, and that has certainly, I think,
fed through to councillors because in my own authority, indeed
in the last two or three years, we have seen a much stronger pressure
from councillors for change on climate change issues and to bring
the strategies forward. Obviously the council is working closely
with the public, so it is the media raising the stakes really
and putting it to the public, and the public pressure then perhaps
getting the councillors to take action and bring about further
change.
Cllr Haines: Could I just pick
up that point about the public's perception. At the time of the
Rio Summit in 1992 there was a big rise in public interest in
it. I actually was teaching A-level environmental science at the
time, so I knew that my numbers of students actually went up.
Then it sort of tailed off in the 1990s and what we are seeing
now is clearly a resurgence of public interest and this time obviously
something is going to have to be done about it because the evidence
now is such that people have to recognise that, whereas back in
the 1990s it was, "Well, it's not really proven, is it?"
so the public carried on. So I think the message has to be got
across to the public at large, as you were talking about just
now, and I think the local authorities are best placed to educate
the public and through a combination of carrot and stick actually
get them into the position where the Government wants us to be,
because clearly it is, as with recycling, one of those things
the public has had to change its general rationale of how it operates.
You can persuade them that at the end of the day action may have
to be taken through legal routes to actually bring it into effect,
or through financial means.
Q109 Mark Pritchard: Could I give
you an example? Local authorities are very good now at recycling.
Where I am in Shropshire most of them are very good are recycling
residential or domestic waste, but they lag behind on recycling
commercial waste and this seems to be the case in pretty much
most of England. That is an example, perhaps, where having this
high rhetoric in both the local authorities and at the Despatch
Box here yesterday, but in fact a businessman in my own constituency
wrote to me this week and said, "Look, I want to recycle
my commercial waste but they're not interested". I just wondered
about that window of opportunity which you alluded to. If we raise
people's expectations and we actually ask them to do more and
the systems, the infrastructure and the incentives are not in
place, then we may not ever get them back on this point again?
Cllr Haines: It is only about
7% of waste which local authorities actually deal with. We want
to have the opportunity to actually get involved with the recycling
of business waste, but the structure is not there to allow us
to do that. We would have to start paying more money, so it would
be detrimental to us financially. So that is a problem as it stands,
but yes, we would wish to do that.
Q110 Mark Pritchard: But you are
best placed, as you said earlier?
Cllr Haines: Yes.
Mr Hurford: The other important
point to note about the recycling of waste is that there was an
additional £128 million put into waste and recycling for
local authorities, I think it was about two or three years ago,
and that is what has brought about the sea change in recycling
throughout all local authorities across the country. That has
enabled all authorities to put in place some basic form of recycling
service.
Cllr Haines: On that document
I notice they said we are saving 10 million tonnes a year of carbon
dioxide emissions or equivalent through recycling, so WRAP clearly
is addressing some of what you are looking at as well.
Q111 Mr Stuart: Could I move you
now on to the Climate Change Programme published in March which,
as you will be aware, had very little to say really, a very small
section on local authorities which suggested that just 0.2 million
tonnes of carbon saving could be expected from local authorities
with additional effort by 2010. Does this underestimate the potential
savings in carbon which could be local authorities in that period?
Mr Hurford: I would imagine that
covers the corporate stock, so that would be savings from the
town halls, the libraries and the other corporate buildings. It
probably is not talking about the catalytic effect which local
authorities can have through the housing stock, through working
with energy efficiency advice centres and with other groups, really
providing advice to the public on how to save energy because basically
we are a public facing service and we do obviously network daily
with the public. That is where there is additional potential carbon
savings that we could make, but I would imagine that 0.2 million
is just representative of our own stock.
Q112 Mr Stuart: In those terms then,
is that, in your opinion, an ambitious/realistic amount? Again,
Woking comes up all the time, but from when they started I think
a 79% reduction in carbon emissions is what they claim to have
got from their own corporate buildings, et cetera. Could you give
us some idea of how the 0.2 million tonnes relates to the overall
emissions from councils?
Mr Hurford: Without knowing the
overall facts as to what percentage that is, it is quite hard
to say. I think on the Woking example, without looking at innovative
funding mechanisms, it would be hard for other authorities to
replicate Woking. That is the experience so far, because we have
been working quite hard. I have been talking to Allan Jones, who
used to fund the Woking system, for about five years and we are
still not quite there on how to make the funding work, to give
you an idea of how long it might take.
Cllr Haines: I do not personally
know the figures, so I could not give you a criticism about them,
I am afraid, but I am sure if it is something you wish to receive
in due course then that can be forthcoming.
Q113 Mr Stuart: I do not know where
else we would turn other than the LGA to get a proper idea as
to whether that is a sensible figure or not.
Mr Hurford: I think basically
we could find out for you, but we would need to analyse the figures
and come back to you.
Q114 Mr Stuart: Excellent! How happy
are you with the Government's pledge to consider how to ensure
that the local government performance framework will include an
appropriate focus on action on climate change? Will this incentivise
those councils currently not doing enough?
Mr Peverill: I would say that
the current performance management framework for councils, the
CPA (Comprehensive Performance Assessment) is something which
councils take very seriously indeed and that is the sort of thing
and that is the sort of things which agitates every chief executive
up and down the country. So yes, including climate change within
a performance framework will be an effective way to get it registered
and ensure that some degree of action is taken accordingly.
Q115 Mr Stuart: How would you react
to the Government giving an indication of the sort of carbon savings
it wants local authorities to find in periods after 2010? Perhaps
you have given an answer on that already, but could you give us
more of an idea?
Mr Hurford: I think if we talk
in percentage terms, if we are looking at a 60% reduction by 2050
then it is going to be a few percent per year. Chances are it
would not occur at a rate of 1% per annum, it might be 0% one
year and 5% the next, and we would make step changes, but certainly
you would need to look at whatever it is, 1%, 1.5% per annum to
get to the 60% reduction.
Q116 Mr Stuart: How important is
it for you to have long-term signals from the Government on that,
because business has told us it is tremendously important for
them to have market signals over a long period so that they can
invest in order to deliver what is expected of them?
Cllr Haines: I think the same
applies. Clearly there have been lots of short periods of funding
which when they come to an end you have got to work out where
you are going from there, and sometimes you can get gaps in the
funding so you cannot carry on a piece of work. So having long-term
assurance of where you are going, I think, is very important,
yes.
Q117 Dr Turner: The Centre for Sustainable
Energy reports that local and regional government is somewhat
variable in its quality of performance in local authorities and
they say that most local and regional bodies in England are generally
weak or fair on all aspects of carbon management and there are
very few authorities which could be characterised as achieving
good or excellent standards. Would you agree with that assessment?
Cllr Haines: Yes, clearly that
is the assessment which has been made. I would not disagree with
it, but clearly you have got to look at what timescale that was
taken over and where we move on from now. So I would hope to see
improvements. Clearly you cannot measure it exactly like with
like, but that is how things would be moving and I presume that
is taken over a couple of years.
Q118 Dr Turner: If we accept that,
is it going to be possible, given current frameworks and incentives
or lack of incentives, as things stand for more councils to achieve
a higher standard or do they need to look at funding changes or
changes in structures to do it?
Cllr Haines: I think the changes
are going to be coming with the Local Government White Paper.
Clearly that is going to change things as well, but yes, those
other changes will have to happen.
Q119 Dr Turner: Do you think it is
going to be a little sad that all the councils who have failed
to perform in the past will be given help and all those who have
actually managed to do it in spite of everything will miss out?
Cllr Haines: It is a bit like
the bus passes for pensioners. That is a similar situation where
councils were actually in different positions and clearly some
felt it was unfair. As a "wilful individual" I would
like to think that everyone was brought up to the speed the rest
of us are at. If it is in the long-term good interest, then that
would be my opinion, but yes, there will be councils perhaps receiving
more than others should have been rewarded already. I do not know
whether my colleagues have got anything to add.
Mr Hurford: As I stated earlier,
the reason that performance is not that good is because neither
climate change nor sustainable energy are statutory functions
for local authorities, they do not have to do it, so when there
are funding cuts you go back to your core services which you have
to provide, and you do not have to work on climate change and
you do not have to work on sustainable energy. Therefore, there
will not have been enough investment. Again, that comes back to
the LGA's repeated request that perhaps each local authority should
have a nominal sum of, say, £70,000 (which I think was £28
million in total) to act as a catalytic sort of seed pot to work
on these issues. I think that would be an incentive for everybody
because those authorities which had already done a lot of work
would perhaps be able to move on that much quicker and the smaller
authorities would be able to also start work on it.
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