Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
COUNCILLOR IAN
MEARNS, DR
PHILIP WEBBER
AND MR
OLIVER MYERS
12 NOVEMBER 2007
Q80 Dr Pugh: It is not the case?
Councillor Mearns: I wish it were
the case but I do not think it is.
Q81 Dr Pugh: You used the phrase
"best practice" earlier. There must be some areas where
you can say they have done something, and not only have they done
something but you can see the results, the thermal footprint of
the whole borough is less than what it was before. Can you name
any local authorities of which you can say that?
Councillor Mearns: There are a
number. Woking, for instance, has been used as an example in terms
of energy generation.
Q82 Dr Pugh: It does crop up rather
a lot though, does it not?
Councillor Mearns: Yes, it does.
I would like to think that my own borough within the next year
to 18 months will be in that position.
Q83 Dr Pugh: Can you measure in your
borough not what you have done but what have been the effects
of what you have done? In other words, you could have handed out
an awful lot of energy saving light bulbs or things to put in
the loo and all that sort of thing, and my local authority does
that, but in a sense that is going through the motions, it is
not really getting a result. Can you measure the results you have
got locally?
Mr Myers: The monitoring framework
we have had as local authorities has been the Home Energy Conservation
Act and, unfortunately, that has been rather flawed and has led
to the Government finally putting forward a concession paper that
its preference is to repeal it. The problem was it did not come
up with a standard methodology so it left a lot of room for local
authorities to use their own method, but it also only counted
a theoretical notional measure of energy efficiency and did not
count real CO2 savings. That is where we are now seeing
a shift with the proposed new indicator in the local government
performance framework that is due to come in in April where they
are proposing to have a community-wide carbon per capita indicator
which will be derived from actual fuel consumption which are statistics
that are available to Government.
Q84 Dr Pugh: Did you say Camden is
your borough?
Mr Myers: Yes.
Q85 Dr Pugh: You can go through a
street in Camden and, as it were, plot its thermal footprint?
Mr Myers: We have not done it
like that in Camden. We have done a sample telephone survey to
obtain our results in the past, but Camden has not actually had
to—
Q86 Dr Pugh: What are you asking
people in the telephone survey, whether they have got lagging?
Mr Myers: We ask them what measures
they have in place and what measures they have installed in the
last 12 months to arrive at what the difference is and there is
an underlying bit of software which calculates it.
Q87 Dr Pugh: You regularly sample?
Mr Myers: One of the two duties
under HECA is to provide an annual report to the Secretary of
State, but Camden is an excellent authority and excellent authorities
have not had to submit the HECA report for about three years now,
so there are some gaps in the data going back.
Q88 Chair: How is Camden assessed
as an excellent authority?
Mr Myers: That is through the
wider CPA process, comprehensive performance assessment.
Q89 Chair: You mean excellent across
the piece, not specifically in this matter?
Mr Myers: No. There are many authorities
which have got very strong reputations environmentally but are
not an excellent authority overall, and vice versa.
Q90 Dr Pugh: So if you are an excellent
authority you do not have to record your success in this direction?
Mr Myers: That is right. There
was something that CLG brought out about three or four years ago,
which was Lifting the Burdens, so that authorities that
were deemed excellent did not have to do quite so much reporting.
Q91 Dr Pugh: You could remain excellent
and, as it were, knock off and do nothing about it?
Dr Webber: It would probably stop
you being excellent eventually because you would not get an excellent
CPA score.
Q92 Dr Pugh: But it would not be
picked up by any of the data.
Mr Myers: You could stop there,
yes. Camden has not.
Q93 Chair: If you are an authority
that has to demonstrate your energy consumption you do it by a
sampling survey, there is not a big meter in the sky that measures
how energy is being used in Camden?
Mr Myers: That is one methodology.
A lot of other authorities use that methodology but there are
many other methods. Government has been very clear that it should
not be used to compare the performance between authorities because
the methodology is inconsistent, so even in a report to the Secretary
of State it has got a big caveat, although some organisations
have turned it into league tables which are very problematic.
Dr Webber: There is Defra data
which gives you energy output on super output areas or postcodes,
but it is quite difficult to then disaggregate what is going on
in those postcodes. In Kirklees, we will measure the carbon impact
of all of our measures in carbon dioxide terms. We will do that
and we are gathering that data. We have also done a thermal imaging
survey which gives us literally a snapshot of how much heat is
coming out of individual homes, but there have been so many different
rating systems it is quite difficult to know. You can work out
what the energy in the building envelope is but you cannot tell
what somebody is doing inside the house. They might be running
a thousand plasma televisions or something.
Q94 Chair: Or a cannabis farm.
Dr Webber: Or they might be driving
a very long way. Those are big emissions which you do not know
about. I think it is something that people are starting to get
to grips with. The idea of carbon footprinting has become much
more accepted now and people are talking about it. A year or two
ago, if you had suggested that people would be looking at carbon
footprinting people would have said, "Oh, that's ridiculous",
but I think there has been a real change of understanding so now
we can start doing that and you realise just how much needs to
be done actually. I presume you are going to come on to some of
the things which might get in the way of that.
Q95 Dr Pugh: One final point. Implicit
in the answer given by Mr Mearns, I think, and there was a reference
to it, that you wish all websites of all local authorities had
something about this, coming across in your evidence there is
an enormous differential between local authority practices. I
know some have gone very sophisticated and are looking not just
at what they do but also how they can measure the effects of what
they do. Are you really saying that this is, as it were, the cutting
edge and there are a lot of local authorities that are way, way
behind it and nowhere near doing anything like Dr Webber has just
suggested?
Councillor Mearns: There are local
authorities at many different points in the spectrum in terms
of development towards this whole agenda and there are some authorities
where the political leadership is still in denial about the whole
agenda, so we have to accept that as a political fact of life.
It is a democratic system that we are working in and for the authorities
which do believe there is a problem and are trying to do something
about it, we can do an awful lot of work on behalf of the whole
local government family so that when people do wake up to the
agenda there will be a lot of ready evidence for them to move
forward.
Q96 Mr Betts: There has been discussion
within the LGA, as I understand it, probably your Commission,
about the possibility of council tax rebates or refunds for people
who put in energy efficiency measures. Have you got any ideas
about that? Is that something you are moving towards?
Councillor Mearns: I must admit,
I have seen that portrayed as such but I do not think it is as
such. People have been using energy saving grants from national
organisations to give people rebates on measures that they have
put into their own homes, but it is not council tax rebates. I
am not necessarily sure if I would suggest that would be the way
to manage things. We have got to try and find a horses for courses
approach.
Q97 Mr Betts: Other forms of financial
incentives?
Councillor Mearns: There are grant
systems where people do get rebates on measures they are putting
in at the moment.
Q98 Mr Betts: They should be expanded
rather than looking at council tax rebates?
Councillor Mearns: Why not?
Q99 Mr Betts: Another area which
local authorities have apparently been pursuing, and my attention
was drawn to Uttlesford District Council, probably for the first
time ever I have to say in a select committee, who have been looking
at the issue of planning legislation and also building regulations
and what can be done either with existing authority local government
or the possibility of persuading Government to change the law
so that when people come and want planning permission or building
regulation approval for extensions and significant adaptations
there is a requirement that they take energy efficiency measures
at the same time. Is that something that you would favour?
Councillor Mearns: I certainly
would.
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