Examination of Witnesses (Questions 85-99)
MR LEWIS
MORRISON, MR
STEVE WALLER
AND DR
CHRIS WEST
22 JANUARY 2008
Q85 Mr Chaytor: Good morning, sorry about
the slight delay, welcome to the Committee. I wonder if I could
start off by just asking each of you to say, in less than one
minute, who you are and a brief word about your organisation and
the general position in terms of the responsibilities of local
government and regional government in climate change policy.
Mr Waller: If I could start with
myself, we are both here really with two hats on. My first hat
is as sustainability adviser for IDeA, the Improvement & Development
Agency for Local Government which, if you know us, is a sister
organisation to LGA who I think you met last week, and we are
the national improvement agency for local government improvement.
In addition to that I chair the Nottingham Declaration Partners
Group, I am also the author of the Nottingham Declaration as well,
and I have been listening with real interest to the previous conversations
about that.
Dr West: I am Chris West, I am
the Director of the UK Climate Impacts Programme, based at Oxford
and funded by Defra, with two goals: number one to help decision-makers
in this country to understand the impacts of climate change and
number two to help them adapt to those impacts. We have been working
with EST and the IDA on local authority adaptation to climate
change and we are also partners in the Nottingham Declaration
Partnership.
Mr Morrison: Thank you, Chairman.
My name is Lewis Morrison, I am the Head of Community Advice for
the Energy Saving Trust. I do have a background of six years in
local authority within London boroughs and prior to that I was
in forestry and woodland management at Rural England and Wales.
The Energy Saving Trust is primarily tackling climate change within
homes and transport, although my area in community advice deals
with delivering programmes to primarily a local authority audience,
a regional government audience and a community audience. I too
am wearing two hats, the Energy Saving Trust but also the Nottingham
Declaration Partnership. If I can say a quick word about the partnership
itself, as I am sure you are aware there are other representatives
and stakeholders such as the Carbon Trust and the Environment
Agency.
Q86 Mr Chaytor: Thank you very indeed.
Maybe we could start off on the question of Declaration and see
if you could just tell us a little bit more about the significance
of the declaration as you see it and the progress that has been
made in implementing the aims of the declaration by different
local authorities. I would like to ask also about the monitoring
of that progress.
Mr Waller: If I cast my mind back
to October 2000 when I first wrote the declaration, at that time
it was sensed in local government and particularly in Nottingham
City Council where I was working at the time that the time was
now right to give local authorities an opportunity to put a marker
down in terms of building commitment towards addressing climate
change. It was an up and coming issue for local authorities, but
little did I think or dream that by today—or by the end
of December last year—we would have 285 English councils
having signed it along with all councils in Wales and Scotland
having signed their own version and it having permeated into the
private sector as well. Its value is in the numbers that have
signed it. It is a single side statement of a local authority's
commitment at the most senior level to address climate change,
to work with partners and to address key elements of local government
responsibility to both reduce carbon emissions themselves, to
reduce carbon emissions within the community and then also to
integrate adaptation measures, both internally and externally
as well. At its minimum it is just that, it has clearly been attractive
to local authorities as a way of making a public statement, and
I visit many councils who have a framed copy of it, signed, hung
up in their reception as just that, as a public statement of their
commitment to addressing climate change.
Q87 Mr Chaytor: Councils like hanging
framed copies of things in their receptions, but what I am really
interested in is the progress being made and who is responsible
for monitoring that progress.
Mr Waller: We have only monitored
really the number of signatories. We have taken as a campaign
amongst the partnership to encourage as many councils as we could
to make that first step in commitment. We realise though that
in having got the councils to sign that their next question to
us was what do we need to do, what actions do we need to take
in order to address it, and that is why with the help of the All
Parliamentary Group in 2006 we launched our on-line web advice
to councils which we called the Nottingham Declaration Group Action
Pack, which is a web tool hosted by EST, one of our partners,
and it is the only place that local authorities can go to to get
comprehensive advice on how to mitigate and how to adapt. We do
realise as a partnership that that is not enough, which is why
we are considering launching some form of accreditation scheme
which will be voluntary because signing the declaration is a voluntary
scheme, so we will only have a voluntary accreditation scheme,
but one that allows councils to progress maybe through bronze,
silver and gold, but by the time they get to the higher reaches
of that, that will involve some kind of external assessment of
their performance. The first stages, we envisage, will be self
assessment but the latter stages of that accreditation scheme,
which we are just working up, we expect to be some form of external
assessment. I think at that point, which is some time down the
line, we will know not just who has signed it but who is doing
what having signed it.
Q88 Mr Chaytor: As things stand now
is the EST website the best place to go to see what constitutes
best practice in this field?
Mr Waller: It is one of them,
yes, and obviously you will have heard talk of the Carbon Trust
as well, and I would add in also the work that we do, that IDeA
my own organisation does, to support the beacon themes where they
are relevant to climate change. You may well know that round nine
includes a theme called "Tackling Climate Change" and
we have just finished the assessment of the 26 councils that it
applied to for that beacon status. When that is launched on 4
March we will have at least a year of using those best practitioners
to promote good practice to English local authorities.
Q89 Mr Chaytor: Finally, can I ask
what would hold a council back from signing the Nottingham Declaration?
Why are some not signing?
Mr Waller: That is a very good
question and that troubles us as well because there are around
100 councils that have not signed it. Whether that is the same
thing as saying there are 100 councils who have made no action
on climate change we are not quite sure, but I suspect it is the
idea of making a public statement, they perhaps do not quite feel
that their actions give them yet the confidence to make a public
statement. Most of them, if they think long and hard, whether
it is action on waste or managing energy are making some contribution
to either mitigation or adaptation.
Mr Morrison: If I could step in
to quantify that a little bit in terms of the effect that the
Nottingham Declaration has had on local authorities, the Energy
Saving Trust undertook a survey of signatories last year. We had
127 responses from, at that point, 237 signatories around England,
so representing around just over half of signatory local authorities.
In terms of dealing with your last question first, in terms of
what barriers there may have been, over 80% said that there is
no negativity regarding signing the declaration, they were happy
to do it and wanted to do it, but I have some information here
and 10% cited such factors as lack of understanding about what
the Council could expect to achieve, added little value as work
was already being done and under way and question marks over the
means of resources to deliver. However, I should say that over
80% said that they were happy to sign and then take it forward.
Of those 127 respondees, almost a quarter since signing have adopted
a climate change strategy and just over another quarter are preparing
one, but obviously that leaves perhaps 50% that we are not entirely
sure where they are at, hence Steve's comments on the accreditation.
Q90 Mr Chaytor: Can I ask another
question on the accreditation scheme, can you say something about
how that is going to be funded and what is your projected timescale
for that to be implemented, when will this see the light of day?
Mr Waller: We expect to take the
lead ourselves within the partnership on defining exactly what
would constitute achieving the individual levels of the accreditation
scheme. I expect that for the self-assessment part, once we have
provided guidance to councils on exactly what that means then
there will be no external costs, the cost will really only come
at the latter stages of the accreditation scheme, silver and gold,
where we will insist on there being external verification. It
will be providing that means of external verification, that is
where the costs will come. I am in discussions with the Government
at the moment to see whether that is something they might consider
helping the partners with; if that does not come through then
our other option would be to invite local authorities to pay for
that themselves, as they currently do with other verification
schemes such as those on equalities or environmental management
where this is quite a well-established process.
Q91 Mr Chaytor: And timescale?
Mr Waller: We would expect to
hopefully launch this when we re-launch the website in April this
year, 2008, so it is fairly imminent.
Q92 Mr Stuart: It sounds like yet
another organisation setting up yet another accreditation scheme
visiting councils. Surely you should be putting this to the Audit
Commission—I should declare an interest because my wife
works for them—rather than creating yet another duplication.
Mr Waller: There are very important
distinctions between the role of the Audit Commission and what
we are offering here, and we have discussed it with them. Their
response was that an accreditation scheme, if it was well thought-through
and well exercised, would provide them with the assurance that
a council was actually tackling climate change, so it might actually
assist the Audit Commission, but we do not want to set up, neither
is it necessary to set ourselves up, as a statutory auditing body.
The Nottingham Declaration is a voluntary scheme and anything
we develop alongside it should also be voluntary as well, we feel,
and it may well appeal to a different audience as well. We may
well find ourselves able to visit councils in a way in which the
Audit Commission cannot.
Q93 Jo Swinson: Sticking with the
Audit Commission and the new indicators on climate change that
not necessarily all councils will choose to go with—but
clearly the members of the Nottingham Declaration might be expected
to be more likely to—do you think they are going to have
sufficient data for baselines for those indicators, or is that
going to be a problem?
Mr Morrison: If I may begin with
that one to provide a bit of context to the answer the Energy
Saving Trust delivers programmes to local authorities, one of
which is currently called a key account programme, and we are
currently working with 30 local authorities and we are hoping
to extend that to 68, including the devolved nations, next year.
What that provides us with is soft intelligence and insight as
to the dilemma facing local authorities in dealing with the indicators.
Yes, they recognise it as a key step, a step change, but in terms
of data there are concerns about it. Sorry, could you just repeat
the final part of the question so I can make sure I am on track?
Q94 Jo Swinson: Really just about
how will they create baselines that then go forwards and measure
progression.
Mr Morrison: The sources of data
include, obviously, the data from Defra on emissions, burn emissions.
They hold themselves local authority emissions, resources such
as stock condition. The Energy Saving Trust has a Home Energy
Efficiency Database which we may well talk about later, I am sure,
which has information on energy efficiency measures. In a sense
there is perhaps a fear of lack of comparability with all of these
sources, so one of the motives I suppose for the Nottingham Declaration
Partnership is to help address that issue and communicate this
issue up to government departments.
Q95 Jo Swinson: You mentioned the
Burr stuff; there is a lot of national data but how can that properly
be disaggregated to be meaningful for each individual local authorities,
or can it be?
Mr Waller: It already is. You
heard from previous speakers that the indicator on spatial emissions
is already available to local authorities. Burr already make that
information available in terms of energy use and Defra pay AEA
Technology to convert that into a definition of carbon, so local
authorities already have access to that for that particular indicator,
and Defra's intention as we understand it is that that will continue
to be made available so that local authorities will be given statements
about the amount of carbon used or generated through use in their
local authority areas, but their responsibility will be to put
forward actions which will seek to reduce them. I also understand
again that Defra are considering providing further guidance to
councils on what kind of carbon emissions or carbon reductions
could be expected from individual measures, individual interventions,
and that is a missing piece of the jigsaw. As Lewis already mentioned,
the EST have their HEED database, which local authorities find
very useful, but there is this missing gap on interventions for
a spatial area and my expectation is that Defra will plug that.
Chris wants to talk about adaptation as well.
Dr West: On the mitigation side,
where you have got a physical quantity that you can imagine measuring,
on the adaptation side we do not have the same thing and we will
not be able to have an outcome measure for decades. We do not
have a baseline, we do not know how well adapted any organisation
is to the current climate, so we are thrown back on some sort
of process measure, an indicator based on process, and that raises
the problem that we actually do not even know what is good practice.
We have got practice and we can describe that and there are a
number of, if you like, sequelae that we can look for in a council
that is managing climate risk well, but they are only personal
interpretations, we do not have the evidence base to start measuring
adaptation.
Q96 Mr Caton: Continuing on the theme
of the collection and use of data—this is primarily for
Mr Morrison of EST—the Local Government Association Climate
Change Committee's report said all councils should contribute
to the Home Energy Efficiency Database and should have access
to energy performance certificates in their area so they can build
up a better picture of energy efficiency of local housing stock.
Why is that not happening already?
Mr Morrison: The Energy Saving
Trust holds the Home Energy Efficiency Database and there is no
mandate upon local authorities that they should submit data; I
suppose it is a goodwill gesture or where they find the facility
and the infrastructure useful to inform their own campaigns. I
suppose it goes back a little bit to the previous session in a
sense about a wilful individual, a wilful HECA officer for example
in a local authority recognises the logistical need for him or
her to deliver a campaign and target a campaign effectively, and
he or she will use that resource and in fact find that those more
proactive local authorities will perhaps have on their database
up to 60% of their housing stock in their local authority area,
but local authorities who perhaps are less able or less keen to
use the facility maybe have only 3 or 5% population of the database
representing their housing stock. I suppose there is no prerequisite
that they must use it, but we make them aware that they can use
it and certainly with our one-to-one relationships, with our programmes
that we deliver to local authorities, it is there as a resource
for them if they choose to use it.
Q97 Mr Caton: Do you know how many
are using it?
Mr Morrison: There are 125 local
authority users of 460 plus local authorities, English local authorities.
Q98 Mr Caton: Would actually providing
this be one of the boxes that needed to be ticked in a certification
scheme for the Nottingham Declaration?
Mr Morrison: I will probably hand
this to Steve but, absolutely, it is something that the Energy
Saving Trust have put on the table as a resource that we would
be happy to use cross-partner.
Mr Waller: Our thinking at the
moment is a bit broader than that. I am sure Lewis is right on
the details of what we might expect councils to show that they
are doing, but in simple terms as we envisage at the moment the
next stage of our accreditation scheme, having signed the declaration,
to achieve bronze will be to develop actions or an action plan
to address mitigation and adaptation. The next stage, the silver
stage, will be to have delivered on the ground actions as a result
of that and then we are still looking at quite what we would mean
by a gold standard. It would clearly be more than that plus it
would factor in at least at that point local authorities earnestly
engaging in reporting on the indicators, having included those
indicators or some of those indicators within their LAAs, so some
kind of definition of at least above good practice, some kind
of excellent practice, but at the moment we are looking at this
in fairly broad terms.
Q99 Mr Chaytor: Chris, you are nodding
vigorously.
Dr West: I am agreeing; I do not
have anything to add to that. The Nottingham Declaration, a bottom-up
initiative, has got to be seen to have these benchmarks.
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