Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-121)
MR LEWIS
MORRISON, MR
STEVE WALLER
AND DR
CHRIS WEST
22 JANUARY 2008
Q100 Mr Stuart: The Environment Agency,
in its submission to us, suggests that following the Nottingham
Declaration the response has not been consistent, nor has it been
coordinated with considerable variation in the quality of outcomes.
That was in the context of the Nottingham Declaration, it is not
an attack upon the Nottingham Declaration, it was about the response
of regional and local authority bodies. Do you accept that?
Mr Waller: We certainly accept
that the response of local authorities, even those who have signed
it, has been very varied, and you heard from the two here earlier
on who are amongst some of the frontrunners in performing on that.
The Beacon Councils, when we announce them, will all have signed
the Nottingham Declaration—most of them signed it several
years ago—and they will be exemplars in performance as well,
but there is enormous variation. If I am honest, simply signing
it is no guarantee of action and that is clearly something that
troubles us as well.
Q101 Mr Stuart: I was not quite sure
what you were suggesting in the evidence you gave a few minutes
ago, because the key thing a local authority signs up to is that
it will produce a strategy for climate change within two years.
Local authorities, whatever else they can or cannot do, producing
paperwork is normally their forte and there is a risk that some
of them who signed the declaration have not even managed to write
something with the words climate change and strategy at the top
of a piece of paper.
Mr Waller: Nothing substantial,
yes.
Q102 Mr Stuart: They are not even
doing the bare minimum of producing a document, and that is what
they often specialise in.
Mr Waller: Yes.
Q103 Mr Stuart: That is a fairly
desperate situation, is it not, so can I note that and then ask
you the question I asked the earlier witnesses which is are we
in a position to meet the Climate Change Bill aspirations, the
first set of targets, as far as local government is concerned.
Are the incentives there in place?
Mr Waller: Again if we are honest
about the declaration, one of the reasons it has flourished is
because it has been a policy vacuum, local authorities have not
been compelled, encouraged or even required to address climate
change by government and that position has persisted until very
recently until the announcement of indicators and until the racking
up of a land use planning system, new PPSs and various other measures.
What none of us can really tell is what the impact of this new
policy climate will be. You met with John Cheshire, the chair
of the LGA's Climate Change Committee last week, and they were
in this very same dilemma, trying to judge whether this new framework
would actually deliver actions, let alone whether it would deliver
actions at the kind of level envisaged nationally in the Climate
Change Bill. I do not know any of us will know but they were willing
and I think we are willing to take a deep breath on that and allow
the Government's new policy climate to take effect over the next
couple of years, to continue to revisit the situation during that
period and then at the end of a couple of years decide whether
there are more draconian measures needed to require or incentivise
local authorities to address climate change. The short answer
is that none of us can be entirely certain.
Q104 Mr Stuart: You wrote the Nottingham
Declaration, you are with IDeA, close to Government thinking on
local government; why has a government which protests that it
is a global leader in climate change so singularly failed in ten
years to put any kind of framework in place that leads to real
change at local government level?
Mr Waller: My interpretation of
that, certainly on mitigation, would be that the Government in
its earlier climate change strategies or performance reviews saw
what the impact of the public sector, including local government,
was and what our actual carbon usage is, which is fairly modest
by comparison with industry and decided to target its resources
and energy at the main energy users. This was certainly the signal
internationally and the Government responded to that. It is only
since 2006, since the publication in April 2006 of the most recent
climate change performance review, that the potential impact of
local government has been acknowledge by central government. Some
would argue that it is our local authorities' role in galvanising
other stakeholders in their area which is more significant than
simply reducing their own carbon emissions, so it was the Government
prioritising other more obvious carbon users than local authorities
first.
Q105 Mr Stuart: Although they had
given them a duty of community well-being specifically for the
environmental welfare of the citizen, so it is rather odd to do
that years ago and then not do anything to back it up.
Mr Waller: Yes.
Mr Morrison: I would just add
to that in terms of my experience of working with local authorities.
They welcome the performance framework as a significant step,
but I think the litmus test really is on the latest round of negotiations
on local area agreements and for the 150 or so negotiating local
authorities at present quite how their local area agreements will
manifest themselves and whether they will include mitigation and
adaptation as targets. We are waiting with bated breath and certainly
working through our own relationships with local authorities to
assist that process, whether it be on data, whether it be making
them more savvy to implementation further down the line, but by
the middle of this calendar year I think we will have a better
idea.
Q106 Mr Stuart: What do you think
about the fact that it is not mandatory that they have a local
area agreement?
Mr Morrison: There is potential
for local authorities if they recognise that other priorities
take precedence over mitigation and adaptation and they choose
those priorities.
Q107 Mr Stuart: I am a critic of
too many targets from the centre and one could be accused of inconsistency,
but a particular area where targets would be justified would be
something of national or international importance which may not
be driving local priorities. Although setting local priorities
nationally seems absurd, this is just the area where you would
expect that targets set from the centre would be precisely proper
and reasonable and accepted across the political divide as the
right thing to do, yet this is the area where they are not being
set.
Dr West: On the adaptation side
there is certainly, I have perceived, on the Government's part
a perception that this is something that is going to benefit the
adapter and therefore there is no need for coercion. That has
led to a gap, because if people are not required to look at it
they assume it is not a problem. I see the same thing in big business,
they tend to devolve environmental management to a site level,
and so the impact of climate and weather on the company is again
assumed to be dealt with at a local level. Within local authorities
I have certainly seen managers dealing with environmental problems
of extreme weather, and because they are managers it does not
get reported upwards to the board so these problems are invisible
to the board, and so the board sees no requirement to adapt to
climate change because they do not see the impact they are suffering
at the moment. Where we have done experiments to uncover that
and to show the economic cost of extreme weather, then the council's
senior officers start to notice it.
Mr Morrison: Certainly I would
echo that in terms of the relationships that we have with local
authorities in the North that were the subject of flooding recently.
They are responding positively to adaptation plans, whereas I
would say that local authorities that have not been subject to
climatic catastrophe are less galvanised. If I could just get
a point across here about the spread of intelligent skills and
capacity, not just within local authorities but with their partners
and perhaps going up to the regional level as well and the government
office level, in a sense we have all been scrutinising the consultation
process on the local government performance framework and what
it is going to look like, submitting our own responses as a partnership
and as individual organisations, hoping that the indicators will
be there and they are. I could not give you statistics to support
this actually, this is just a notion that I have picked up from
interfacing with local authorities, but I sense that there are
a number of local authorities out there who are just waiting.
There are some more galvanised local authorities who are ahead
of the game in dealing with it, and the Beacon Councils would
be examples of that, so I would say that in terms of the local
government performance framework being to a point finalised and
this latest round of local area agreement negotiations, there
is perhaps not quite enough time for the infrastructure to spread
the intelligence and the resources and skills needed to really
make a difference on the ground. Again, I do not know what the
results of the latest negotiations will look like, but I would
say if there had perhaps been a longer time or maybe looking forward
to the consequent round of negotiation on local area agreements,
everyone will be a little bit more intelligent as to what adaptation
is, what mitigation is in their own service areas and they will
be much more enabled to act.
Q108 Mr Stuart: But if specific targets
are not in the local area agreements—this is a question
I asked the earlier witnesses—what needs to happen to ensure
that laggards are identified and can be brought on board?
Mr Waller: Defra still expects
local authorities to report against all of the indicators, including
the climate change one. Your question is around those local authorities
who choose not to or feel unable to include it within their LAA.
I worry particularly about those 100, as I said before, where
we do not know whether they have any commitment to climate change
or not.
Q109 Mr Stuart: I worry particularly
about the ones who have signed, put it up in a frame in their
reception area and then cannot even be bothered to write a strategy.
Mr Waller: The percentage of those
in that latter state as suggested from the research that LGA and
EST have done is not very great, who having signed it have failed
to act at all. As I said earlier, I think if they looked closely
at what they have done they would find they were actually doing
more than they realised. What worries me is the 100 or so councils
that have not signed in and made no public statement about climate
change; those are the ones that we will want to monitor quite
closely. What LGA has offered to do is to pitch in as well. EST
have led the encouragement of local authorities to sign the declaration
and LGA have also offered to explore the opportunity of actually
visiting and paying particular attention to those 100 or so councils
who have not signed it, in order to get them all to sign it within
the next 12 months. That was one of the recommendations that the
Climate Change Commission made to the LGA and that seemingly is
the way they are going to respond to it, so perhaps within the
next 12 months we will have as close to 100% signed up as we can.
Q110 Dr Turner: How do you see the
relationship between what the local authorities are achieving
in terms of targets and the interface with the regional and national
targets? Do you think there is enough support to help local authorities
mesh with national and regional strategies?
Mr Morrison: I would say the infrastructure
is there. If we are looking at government departments, pushing
down through government office, there is a clear flow of information
on climate change. The Energy Saving Trust work with government
offices and RDAs through our regional support programme and we
work to increase the intelligence, skills and capacity within
those bodies. The infrastructure is there as I say, also from
the government office going down to the local authorities in negotiating
local area agreements, in putting together local development plans
and what have you, but again I go back a little bit to the knowledge
within that both parties have, at a local and a regional level,
and I sense that with the English regions we are working with,
broadly they might feel left out from target-setting. There are
national targets set that can be calculated at a local level,
as Mr Waller has already explained, but quite where the regional
spatial strategies and targets and what have you fit in, the regional
strategies tend to be more aspirational rather than quantitative
and so I perceive a piggy in the middle scenario developing a
little bit there. Again, I do not have statistics to support that,
but I know we have hard of good practice from the North East—if
we can use them as an example—but I perceive that from my
government office contacts, that they feel perhaps a little bit
left out of that communication.
Q111 Dr Turner: How do you think
the effectiveness of the approach we are taking in the UK compares
with other countries, particularly Scandinavian countries, but
any examples you can choose to use?
Mr Waller: There is a perception
certainly on mitigation that in terms of the quality of the buildings
that we have built in this country and the quality of our planning
and our building control process—when I say the quality
I mean the standards to which it is achieved—we are 20 to
30 years behind the best practice in Scandinavia. Clearly in terms
of insulation levels and in terms of defining what we mean by
a zero carbon home we have still got a long way to go in terms
of delivering on it. Maybe Chris is too modest, but one thing
that is worth reporting in my experience, having spoken to representatives
from the Canadian government and regional French representatives,
is that they are very envious of the work that we have begun,
led by UKCIP, within the UK on adaptation. One of the things that
marks the UK off differently is the progress that we have made
towards adaptation and the support provided to local authorities.
That might seem a little incestuous so perhaps I should shut up
and let Chris say whether my perception is held by UKCIP as well.
Dr West: Yes, I believe we are
doing something that the rest of the world has not caught up with.
Other countries are very good at doing academic studies of impacts;
all over Europe it is being done, all over the world people are
doing lots of impact research. What we are doing that nobody else
is doing is deliberately tying that research to decision-makers
so that it is led by decision-makers. Three years ago the last
of the regional scoping studies on the impacts of climate change
were undertaken and all of those studies were steered by steering
groups, with the usual suspects—the Environment Agency,
the regional assembly, the RDA and the government offices—always
involved and others as well. Each of those studies has led to
a partnership of people picking up the baton, trying to progress
adaptation, and yet I would say maybe one or perhaps two of those
partnerships have got serious sustainable funding to maintain
a single officer. For the other ones we constantly have stories:
my secondment comes to an end, I am being posted back to so-and-so;
these partnerships are not stable, they are not sustainable, they
are kept going by individual enthusiasm and little pots of money
stolen from elsewhere. The regions have immense power, as you
suggested, to influence local authorities. I do not think they
are able to do it in the current uncertainty about how much the
RDAs are going to pick up from the regional assemblies—that
has not helped.
Q112 Dr Turner: We will come to that.
Even if we could provide stable and sustainable arrangements,
do councils have the necessary skills, capacity and staff time
to do this properly, because it is quite a complex web of interactions
that we are building here. Have councils got what is needed?
Mr Morrison: I would say there
is a vast spread, a vast disparity, between local authorities.
Through our key account programme I have sat with some executive
boards and management boards where climate change has been very
much on the agenda of the director of planning, director of transportation,
director of waste, they have a sustainable development director
in post and the chief executive and the leader or the environment
portfolio holder are all well-switched on, and I could cite a
few examples around the country, but also there are local authorities
that I have met with over this past six months, certainly, where
it is definitely down to the wilful individual, whether it be
an over-taxed HECA officer or an over-taxed procurement officer
who is dealing with energy on the side, so I would say there is
great disparity with local authorities and there is not really
a formally recognised local authority infrastructure, I suppose,
a human resource infrastructure, to deal with climate change.
Q113 Dr Turner: Can this be helped
by additional support from the Carbon Trust and bodies such as
yourselves?
Mr Waller: Absolutely. There is
a perception, as I think again you heard earlier, that for certain
skill sets, certain functions in local government, energy management
being one of them, there are insufficiently trained energy managers.
The Carbon Trust have said they would work with what would be
the Construction Industry Training Board in order to try and fund
additional in-house training courses for that work. This is mirrored
very closely, in my experience, with the position that local authorities
find on waste as well and part of that solution has been for WRAP,
the Waste Resources Action Programme, a Defra-funded organisation
to actually constitute and organise in-house training courses
for recycling officers and for waste officers and I suspect that
that may well be the kind of solution we would be looking for.
You also heard earlier, and again it would be my experience, that
there is a national shortage of planning officers as well. It
is fairly well understood that a land use planning system can
deliver huge potential for carbon homes, avoiding developments
in the wrong places and adaptation generally. Again, it is going
to take increasing investment in what universities have seen,
which is planning courses disappearing quite quickly, certainly
as undergraduate courses. Nottingham University, where I did some
work myself because I used to live in Nottingham, have managed
to include green electives within Masters programmes for planners,
but if we are not careful then we certainly will find a national
shortage. The other thing to bear in mind is that climate change
is often seen as a cross-cutting issue and, as such, is not just
looking at particular professional skill sets but looking at the
skills that people need in order to negotiate across different
disciplines within local authorities and to try and co-ordinate
work as well. Local authorities work on sustainability and on
local agenda 21—if your memories are that good, ladies and
gentlemen, you might remember some of the work that local authorities
did in the late nineties on that. It is that kind of work, being
able to work across different departments, being able to work
across different sectors outside the council, and those kind of
skills we need for climate change as well as the energy manager
type of skills as well.
Q114 Mr Chaytor: Could I just come
in on that point? Do you see any evidence that universities are
adapting the structure of their degree courses to build in more
training on climate change in planning degrees, or is it still
assumed that they will train planners who will then have to learn
about the climate change issues once they have graduated?
Mr Waller: I can only really speak
for the university I have had anything to do with which is in
Nottingham and certainly they abandoned a long time ago, as did
the other university, Trent University, the idea of a planning
degree in favour of bringing electives for planners into other
degrees such as architecture. I could not comment nationally,
I have just not had enough experience.
Mr Morrison: Pertinent to that
point, I presented recently at the Sustainable Development Commission,
their Working in Partnership Forum for the Future. It was a scholars'
programme and they have placed Masters degree students on sustainable
development in local authorities and other places around the UK,
and I have met one or two of their scholars out on site in fact.
It is there, I think there is a gathering base of knowledge, but
again I could not comment in the wider context. Could I very quickly
return to the gentleman's point here on can we help in terms of
a partnership in enabling local authorities with their own structures?
Steve made a very good point; climate change as an issue has centrality,
it is cross-sector, cross-theme and historically there has been
a perception or a culture within local authorities that it is
not my bag, I have got enough to do. Certainly, the shared insight
of the partners on the Nottingham Declaration is that we are helping
local authorities through our own organisational programmes, we
are working with planners, we are working with transport managers
as well, we are working with human resources et cetera across
the board, so by bringing that insight together or next stage
of development of the Nottingham Declaration resources will be
more service specific so that the language is understood by the
audience. In the past, certainly, I have been a recipient of the
Nottingham Declaration when I worked in local authority; I was
a wilful individual and found it very useful, but in translating
that to other colleagues within a local authority it took a lot
of convincing and an awful lot of biscuit-buying. In a sense they
need to understand what is being said and the language needs to
be right, but, yes, we can help.
Q115 Mr Chaytor: Before we finish
there is one other area I really want to cover and this is about
adaptation, which we touched on briefly earlier. What I would
like to ask, if you can respond fairly quickly, is in terms of
the specific actions needed to move forward on adaptation, what
are the most important areas; secondly, which local authorities
have got the best record on adaptation; and, thirdly, do you think
that there would be a value in having a statutory duty on all
local authorities to take action on adaptation? Chris, do you
want to come in on this?
Dr West: Help me if I do not retain
the three questions but, first of all, why they struggle I think
that although climate change is acknowledged to be a central cross-cutting
issue it actually has a home in many organisations, in councils
in particular, in the environment directorate. One of the problems
that we have perceived is moving it outside that directorate,
so we can expect the environment officers to know about it, to
understand the issue. When the finance director takes notice we
know that they have taken a quantum jump in dealing with the issue.
I said before about how councils at a top board level do not appreciate
the issue because they do not experience it. One of the things
we are experimenting with is actually challenging the council
to quantify their vulnerability in the present with a view to
helping them think about their vulnerability in the future, maybe
by identifying the thresholds beyond which they have a problem
so that they can then ask sensible questions about risk.
Q116 Mr Chaytor: Could I just interrupt
you there? I take your point about the need to spread the message
across the organisation and particularly get the senior management
to take it on board and not get trapped within the environmental
field, but I am interested to see what you think, once the finance
director and the chief executive take it seriously what are the
main actions and adaptations that the local authority needs to
take, or have we got good examples of local authorities already
doing this?
Mr Waller: We have got some examples
of local authorities being active.
Q117 Mr Chaytor: Who are the best
ones?
Mr Waller: I am not going to answer
that. I could not say.
Q118 Mr Chaytor: Would anybody on
the panel answer that?
Mr Morrison: Again, I speak outside
of my remit because I do not deal with adaptation, but what I
perceive from local authorities is that I have not yet identified
one that is dealing with it perfectly across the board. I do see
good examples, for example, Bournemouth have got sustainable drainage
systems to cater for floods and I know that Rotherham and Bolton
are dealing very well with it. I could not cite examples across
the board; this is just some intelligence I am picking up.
Mr Waller: In terms of having
visited ten councils recently as part of the assessment of those
that have applied for Beacon status, we were pleasantly surprised
that most of those ten—which included Worcestershire, Middlesbrough,
several London boroughs, Eastleigh District Council—and
these are all publicly available so I am not sharing secrets with
you here—most of those had done more on adaptation than
we perhaps had anticipated they would. The kind of actions that
they had reasonably consistently taken—which was what we
wanted them to and most had begun to do—was to take an across-the-board
risk assessment of the vulnerability of various services and the
functions that they undertake to climate change and then, hopefully,
to respond to it. That would characterise the ideal council responding
on adaptation.
Q119 Mr Chaytor: That is very helpful.
Finally, back to Chris on the final point, this question of the
statutory duty on councils, would that be useful or is it just
another meaningless development?
Dr West: I believe it would. Councils
struggle with this concept of delivering well-being of the community.
They all acknowledge they have it as a task but how they actually
deliver it, I think they struggle with that. You can argue that
adapting to current and future climate must be a major component
of that well-being of the community.
Mr Waller: With my IDeA hat on
I would have to go with LGA's position which is to say let us
give the new policy framework a couple of years to bed in and
then review that question.
Q120 Mr Stuart: The Climate Change
Bill has got adaptation in it; is there anything else in particular
that you would like to see because it will be coming here soon?
Dr West: I really think that the
statutory duty to test the vulnerability of public bodies is important.
In an idea world everybody would do it anyway, but we need the
statutory duty to actually give people the push to undertake something
which, yes, they probably ought to be doing anyway.
Q121 Mr Chaytor: Chris, Steve, Lewis,
thank you very much indeed, it has been extremely interesting
and valuable. If there is anything that you feel you have not
had the opportunity to say in the course of this session, because
we were under some time pressure, please feel free to send us
further evidence.
Mr Waller: Thank you, Chairman.
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