Examination of Witnesses (Questions 66-79)
COUNCILLOR PAULA
BAKER, COUNCILLOR
TONY NEWMAN
AND MS
CHRISTINE SEAWARD
25 OCTOBER 2006
Q66 Chairman: Can I now welcome as witnesses
representatives of the Local Government Association. Before introducing
them, may I apologise for the delay in bringing you on, but I
saw you in the audience enjoying the last evidence session, so
I hope you do not feel your time has been wasted and we did have
a division which slightly slowed thing up. We have Councillor
Tony Newman from the Local Government Association, who is an Environment
Board Member, Councillor Paula Baker, who is also an Environment
Board Member, and from Hampshire County Council the Environment
Futures Manager, Christine Seaward. For the record, Councillors
Baker and Newman, which are your respective local authorities?
Cllr Newman: The London Borough
of Croydon.
Cllr Baker: Basingstoke and Deane
Borough Council.
Q67 Chairman: You are very welcome
indeed. You have probably got a flavour already of the type of
area of our inquiry. We are looking very practically at matters
that can take forward the people that you and we represent in
Parliament and the Local Authority areas to become more involved
in this whole area of carbon and energy saving. The Government
is very fond of making lots of great declaratory statements about
this whole area and your evidence attests to lots of good messages
and requirements for local government to take various aspects
of energy saving into account in terms of your policies, but do
you really think that Government are absolutely serious about
the role that they want local authorities to play and, in that
context, do you see any signs that Government are giving you adequate
resources to play that role or that part?
Cllr Baker: First of all, thank
you for the opportunity to come here this afternoon. Clearly,
as I hope you will see from our evidence, we feel that local government
takes a really serious view of the issue and the part that local
government can play in trying to deal with mitigation and adaptation
to climate change, but, as we have indicated, we do feel that
we would very much welcome a clear statement of the trajectory
that we should be moving in from the Government and, as always
with local government, talking about issues such as this, we would
also welcome greater and more consistent resourcing. I think this
picks up on some of the issues that you were just hearing evidence
from the Energy Saving Trust about. We have a multiplicity of
different levers in play that, particularly for smaller councils,
makes it very difficult for them. The highest part of their expenditure
is on their staff costs and they really need to have certainty
and sufficient resources to have a dedicated officer resource
to be able to make the most opportunity and to recognise the various
opportunities that there are to use some of the schemes that have
been coming forward and continue to come forward.
Q68 Chairman: I notice in your evidence
you give examples of a number of authorities who, if you like,
are seen as the market leaders in this field. I suppose, inevitably,
Woking has to be amongst the most prominent. Hampshire, indeed,
has done good work and there are others that are listed here.
It is very impressive. The question I kept asking myself (bearing
in mind there is a range of large to small authorities in this
examples) was: why is it that some have been able to resource
going out ahead of others when there is an underpinning flavour
through this of lots of good intention but, for the reasons that
you have mentioned, Councillor Baker, perhaps a reluctance to
engage? What motivates the market leaders?
Cllr Baker: Leadership. I think
a lot has depended on where there are key individuals in local
authorities who take the issue of being of high importance and
have had the ability to lead their communities: because inevitably
the priorities within different councils are different and are
led by their local communities.
Cllr Newman: If I could add to
that, in recent years, as this whole area has rightly shot up
the agenda, local authorities, through the Local Government Association,
are doing a lot more work now pulling together that best practice
so that we do not have to rely on every single councillor in the
land, however large or small, having the expertise but are bringing
it together, using the LGA and other mechanisms, in terms of best
practice, in terms of getting the council to sign up to things
like The Nottingham Declaration and others, so that councils can
share that best practice and perhaps can accelerate the process
in those councils that have not embraced the agenda. So it is
not just an issue of resource; councils do recognise we can do
more collectively.
Q69 Chairman: One hundred and forty
councils, am I right in saying, have signed up to The Nottingham
Declaration?
Cllr Newman: Yes.
Q70 Chairman: Who monitors what they
do, having signed up? You mention the more involved role of the
LGA. Do you have any kind of feedback arrangement to know, having
signed their piece of paper, what they then do?
Cllr Baker: Hampshire have signed
up.
Ms Seaward: Yes. I think in the
first round of The Nottingham Declaration it is correct to say
that there was no formal audit of what people were doing. It was
very much up to the commitment of the individual organisations
to ensure that actually what they promised to do they actually
did do. I know in Hampshire we have set that up ourselves and
we are monitoring it and making sure that we are delivering it.
I am sure that the second round of The Nottingham Declaration
has addressed itself to those issues, because it is perhaps easy
sometimes to say that you are going to do something, have the
intention to do something and then not be able to follow through.
Q71 Chairman: You mentioned that
the LGA were monitoring and collecting examples of good practice.
How do local authorities access that? Is it on some kind of web-based
system for open access or do you have a publication?
Cllr Baker: That is available,
but also we have recently launched a Planning Policies for
Sustainable Buildings guide—that is a paper document—and
we have a pack of information called the Greener Communities
Pack, and one of the strands within that relates to energy
and climate change, and within that there is a whole suite of
documents relating to different areas. So, that is the kind of
work. We have conferences and we have also just announced that
we are establishing a new independent commission to boost local
action on climate change which will be gathering information about
best practice and also looking at barriers and disseminating good
practice and, hopefully, shaping future policy development.
Q72 Chairman: That is something that
you are doing as an association, but, going back to the point
you were making with particular reference to the smaller scale
local authorities, can you give us some examples of where funding
issues conflict, if you like, with the good intentions? Clearly,
you cannot achieve what some authorities have already achieved
without some use of their resources. Can you give us a flavour
of the kind of programmes that have been followed and how much
they cost authorities?
Cllr Baker: Some are able to invest
and to recycle the money, but that relies on having that initial
investment to make. I believe Leicester is doing that with offering
loans for solar panels, interest-free loans, and, as they get
the return, that is used to offer further loans. So, there are
schemes so that the money can be recycled to overcome the lack
of resource issue.
Q73 Chairman: The thing that I was
grasping at was that throughout the evidence you discussed the
interrelationship between government identifying the crucial and
central role of local government in helping to deliver a climate
change agenda locally and the problems that authorities, particularly
the smaller ones, face in responding to that, because at the moment
it is not a statutory requirement to do it, if I have understood
things correctly, but it does require something. You mentioned
`officer time' for example. Do you have one specific—
Cllr Baker: I cannot off the top
of my head, but we could probably come back to you with that from
evidence that we have from local authorities who may have submitted
bids that have been unsuccessful, and that may be the kind of
information that you are looking for, where councils wanted to
do a piece of work but actually did not have the funding available
to do it.
Q74 Chairman: What I think we would
find particularly interesting is to find out what are the barriers
between responding to the rhetoric and actually delivering a locally
based programme, because on the one hand you have helpfully given
examples of local authorities who have reordered their priorities
to deliver a range of energy saving programmes within their borough,
but clearly there are a number, again, as you indicated to me,
who signed up to The Nottingham Declaration in a spirit and frenzy
of good intention but who are now struggling to say, "What
shall we do?" In my own borough of Fylde, I have been trying
to run an initiative with the ambitious strap-line of making us
the most energy efficient borough in the country and I found it
singularly difficult to get this baby off the ground, partly for
the reason, Councillor Baker, you indicated, that our authority
is restricted in how much resource it has to be able to help us
with the administration of the initiative. There are no lack of
supporters. We are making progress because we have now got monies
from various public bodies and private bodies to get it off the
ground, but I have noted how difficult it is to actually do it,
and that is the kind of first-hand experience that we could do
with feedback on so that that, when we write our report, we can
highlight to government where improvements need to be made so
that we can liberate local authorities to play a full part in
this exercise. That is what we are after.
Ms Seaward: I was going to say
something from Hampshire's experience. What has made a difference
for us is when we have had external funding to support work that
we have wanted to do, and we have been quite successful in doing
it that.
Q75 Chairman: Where has that money
come from?
Ms Seaward: Usually from European
funded programmes, and we have had some money from government
on one particular project that we are running.
Q76 Chairman: I believe in Hampshire
you have got some officer time which can be put to the rather
complex business of filling out the forms and getting the project
under way?
Ms Seaward: We have some, but
it is very limited. What we are pleased with is that we have support
to do that because it brings benefit further down the line. Certainly
with The Nottingham Declaration we looked at what we had committed
to deliver and actually, from the resources that we had in-house
at the time, it was very obvious that we were not going to be
able to deliver the full range, so we put that into an external
funded bid. That is where you get a pioneer, that is where an
authority can step out and be a pioneer, but what I think you
are considering is, beyond the pioneers, how do we get the rest
who are not able to attract external funding because they are
not doing a pioneering activity, they are doing something themselves.
Q77 Chairman: For example, Defra,
in a great blaze of publicity, earlier this year launched a six-million-pound
information fund and, by the time those who had heard about it
got their act together, all the money had gone. It sounded to
me as if they knew at the beginning who was going to get it, advertised
the fund and then dished it out. I do not know whether you have
monitored the way that these initiatives operate. Do you think
that they have been fairly administered, giving people a chance
to prepare their projects, or has there been an element of a predetermined
agenda that you might have found?
Cllr Baker: In a sense I would
not want to comment on a predetermined agenda, but certainly there
are limitations for small councils being able to divert the officer
time to put forward a credible bid for that kind of funding stream,
and that is one of the things that can hold the council back.
Q78 David Lepper: Just a little question,
Chairman, on perhaps a different kind of frustration that some
local authorities might feel. I gather, for instance, that Cambridge
City Council wanted to write into its local plan a requirement
in terms of minimising energy consumption, maximising energy efficiency,
and so on, that went beyond the Building Regulations and was criticised
by the Government inspector for trying to do so. Is that a common
experience of local authorities, where there is an aspiration,
leaving aside the issue of resources, at the local level that
comes up against a bureaucratic obstacle?
Cllr Baker: Some local authorities
have been successful in getting policies in, for example, to require
a percentage of renewable energy on new developments. There is
a very grey area between planning policy and building regulations
which is referred to at some point in this document for exactly
the reason that you have just raised. I do not know whether you
would like to speak about your own borough's experience.
Cllr Newman: Yes, there are individual
planning inspectors out there, but, as this becomes good practice—briefly
to talk about Croydon—it is now a requirement for any residential
development over 10 units that at least 10% of the energy that
is used will be renewable, and there is a will to do that. It
is not a party political issue in Croydon, it is a cross-party
view, and that is very much now part of the local planning policies.
I know, coincidentally perhaps, the neighbouring borough of Merton,
ahead of Croydon, did that around industrial units over a certain
size and expected a certain amount of energy to be renewable.
As this becomes practice, as it becomes written into local planning
policies across the country, it will be more difficult for perhaps
individual planning inspectors up and down the country to take
differing views, but we are in that grey area at the moment because
a lot of this is relatively new.
Q79 David Lepper: You have both said
this grey and difficult, and yet planning, as your evidence attests
to, is a potentially very valuable tool in building in, particularly
for new premises, some energy saving potential. Is Government
aware of this problem? Is it taking any action to resolve these
difficulties that you are aware of?
Cllr Newman: My own experience
is that Government are aware that the planning process needs to
be refined to reflect the priorities that we are now talking about.
Some of the planning regulations do not. There is an awareness
there that this needs to be done. I think it is the role of the
LGA and other local government associations, encouraged by the
likes of yourselves and other perhaps, to drive this forward so
it does become rapidly the way to do things and not a block to
doing things.
|
