Examination of Witnesses (Questions
132-159)
MS ISABEL
DEDRING AND
MR ALEX
NICKSON
5 JANUARY 2010
Q132 Chairman: Good afternoon and
welcome to the Committee. Sorry we are a few minutes late in starting.
We are slightly short today because this meeting clashes with
a statement in the chamber by Ed Miliband and some of our colleagues
are there. At least one of them, I think, will join us during
the course of the evidence. Isabel, it is a bit of a marathon
session for you. I do not think we have ever had the same witness
dealing with two completely different inquiries, but I think it
is convenient from your point of view and it is quite convenient
from ours because these are successive subjects that we are dealing
with.
Ms Dedring: I just wanted to say
thank you very much for having us consecutively because I know
that is unusual.
Q133 Chairman: It is, but it is fine.
Thank you for coming in. I do not know if you want to make any
opening statement or shall I just crack on with some questions?
Ms Dedring: Yes, that sounds good.
Q134 Chairman: We are dealing with
adaptation first because we are towards the end of our evidence
taking on that. We are not quite at the end of it, we have got
Hilary Benn coming in later in the month, but we are towards the
end of it. Do you want to say how big an impact you think climate
change is going to have on the way Londoners live and how soon
that impact will be felt?
Ms Dedring: You will have seen
the UK Climate Projections that recently came out and those numbers
for London are not completely out of line with what we thought
previously. They have been revised slightly, but directionally
they are the same. It is quite a significant impact in terms of
averages often obscure some of the variation around an average.
I guess our general view is that impact, which we already knew
was going to be significant, unfortunately will be very significant
unless we start to move out of the analytical phase and into a
delivery phase. For example, in 2050 80% of the buildings that
are here today are going to be here still in 2050, so having eco-build
for new buildings is important but retrofitting London's existing
building stock is very important as well. Our general view is
that we are trying to shift into a phase of continuing to understand
things better, but at the same time moving towards a delivery
of programmes like large-scale rollout of water efficiency measures,
trying to prevent overheating and adapting to drought, again on
the ground rather than simply analysing what the impacts are going
to be for London overall.
Q135 Chairman: I would like to come
back to buildings in a bit more detail in a moment. Just looking
at it from a business point of view, it is quite topical to see
how London is going to fare business-wise in light of the recession
and possible tax changes and so on. What do you think the implications
and the opportunities, indeed, from climate change are for businesses
in London?
Ms Dedring: The big emphasis for
me is London is possibly the financial services centre in the
world and certainly a major financial services centre. The discussion
on the adaptation front has not moved on as far as it has on the
mitigation front on the financing of these measures. If you wanted
to talk about delivering a sort of future-proofed London, the
cost of doing that is not going to be borne by government grant
alone. There is no way that there is a sufficient volume of grant
funding, particularly not in the current environment, so the challenge
for all of us is to think about how we actually pay for the kinds
of measures that need to be put in place. In many cases there
is already an underlying, in theory, economic incentive for people
to do this because if you have a building or operations that are
more robust and more climate-proof then in principle your insurance
should come down, your risks should come down, but you are not
seeing the level of retrofit activity, of adaptation activity,
that you should be seeing based on that economic theory. Clearly
there is something going wrong in the theory when you actually
translate it into reality. The big opportunity for London is in
the financing sphere, much like the CO2 front where, again, I
do not think we are anywhere near where we need to be, but there
is a fundamental issue about how through some combination of public
and private funding streams we actually deliver implementation
of these things at the scale they need to be implemented on the
ground and we are just not even remotely in the territory of where
we need to be at the moment. The 2080s sound like they are far
away, but when you are talking about three million homes in London
and millions of square feet of office space then the 2080s are
actually quite close. I think London could be unique on that because
it is a fantastic opportunity for us if we can demonstrate ways
of approaching this. It is something we have looked at through
the London Climate Change Partnership a little bit. There is no
creative financial thinking around that at the moment, but we
have been trying to say that it is a great opportunity right now
for the banks because they are arguing they have got quite a lot
of money, they are interested in these new approaches, but we
need them to be putting their thinking caps on to come up with
ways to actually finance the scale of activity that is needed.
Q136 Chairman: Is adaptation something
which is now affecting political decisions generally in London?
Ms Dedring: I would not say it
is in the tokenism category, but it is not mainstreamed in the
way that it needs to be. There is not that level of funding that
is needed. For example, and Alex can talk a little bit more about
this, we are doing this Drain London Project and it is £3.2
million worth of funding from Defra which is both to understand
better the flooding problem in London both now and in the future
and also to look at how we can more effectively respond to that
problem. Within that, we are not just doing analysis, we are trying
to demonstrate things like how do you get uptake of green roofs
on existing buildings to reduce surface water flooding, how do
you get communities to take ownership of the flooding issue rather
than just thinking, "Right, I've got my house and periodically
it floods, there is not much I can do about it", whereas
if you look at a localised area that is subject to flooding risk
then you could actually say every home is going to have a water
butt, permeable surfaces in the front yard and the cumulative
effect of that would be to minimise the flooding issue in that
area. Those kinds of approaches need to be rolled-out much more
broadly and at the moment these are just small pilots. We have
enough funding and within the three million only a chunk of that
is for these actual pilots. We are doing two pilots of community
approaches, but that is the kind of thing one could imagine rolling
out more broadly. At that level there is not that kind of machinery
in terms of rollout. That is fine because it has been a period
of people understanding the issue and getting to grips with the
scale of the issue, but our view is that now moving forward we
need to really think about how we move into the next phase where
mitigation is a few years further ahead but not where it needs
to be.
Q137 Chairman: Looking at buildings
generally which could be offered to either owners or tenants of
all types of buildings for taking adaptation measures, for example
could we have variable rates of council tax or business rates
so that there was a direct financial reward for people who took
adaptation measures?
Ms Dedring: I guess implicitly
they exist in certain aspects in terms of your insurance premium
but, again, I do not think that is translating into decision-making
on the ground and, unfortunately, economic theory does not prove
to be true in reality. For example, on the mitigation side, which
we are also using to deliver adaptation, we have got a London-wide
home retrofit programme that we are rolling out and as part of
that we are looking at energy efficiency measures but also water
efficiency. The scale of funding that would be needed and the
delivery structures to roll that out, as I said three million
homes in London, we need to be doing not 10,000 homes a year but
100,000, 200,000 homes a year, that is simply not there. For all
of those homes the economic incentive to take action exists now
for every home in London. The vast majority of the things that
you can do save you money on the mitigation side, it is a much
more straightforward economic argument, but there is not that
action happening. In adaptation one would expect it will be quite
a lot more difficult because that direct financial incentive,
"Put in loft insulation, save on your energy bill",
does not exist, so if it is difficult on the mitigation side it
will be a lot more difficult on the adaptation side to let the
existing incentives somehow percolate to the top. If we do want
to see that kind of scale of change we need to put something else
in place that is going to deliver that. Having said that, I would
say our experience from the homes programme is that a lot of it
is about the hassle factor, it is not about an economic argument.
What we do with the homes programme is literally, "Stand
aside, we will come in and do it all for you. You don't need to
even take out a single light bulb, we'll put in the light bulb,
you don't have to go to the store and buy anything". That
does make a big difference in the take-up of those measures in
those homes. It is not that people mind paying for it in many
cases, it is simply, "Oh, I forgot to get the light bulb
at B&Q this morning, I'll get it next month". A lot of
those same issues are playing out on the adaptation side as well,
it is simply not a priority for people even though on the basic
math there is an argument for doing it.
Q138 Chairman: Given the scale of
the problem, and you talked about three million homes and the
urgency of stepping up the rate at which this is being addressed,
are there extra policy levers you need? What can be done? I entirely
understand what you said about the difficulty of if we cannot
even persuade people to take mitigation measures which are often
very directly in their own financial interests then how are we
going to get them to do adaptation measures, but is there any
policy lever that would be good for you or perhaps for central
Government to have?
Ms Dedring: Two things spring
to mind, and again new build is a bit easier because there are
already good standards that are rolling out and it is really more
about the big bulk of things that do not relate to new buildings.
One is that certainly on the water efficiency side in our discussions
with the Regulator and with the major water companies in London,
they are all engaged in water efficiency at some scale but not
at any kind of scale that one would want to see. It seems to be
both a regulatory issue, that the regulatory algorithm does not
sufficiently incentivise investment in water efficiency, and there
is seen to be a risk associated with it, which is, "I'm going
to put all this stuff in and then maybe people are going to use
more water than they did before because they will just offset
the savings by letting the shower run longer". There is a
behavioural uncertainty around that and then the water companies,
therefore, do not take any major steps in that direction. We have
had several discussions with Thames Water around the homes programme
saying, "This is a great vehicle for you to roll out water
efficiency measures" and they are interested, but it is not
like they are biting our arm off, put it that way. I think that
would be one specific policy intervention that we are certainly
going to be speaking to Ofwat about. It is about how can we get
water efficiency raised up the priority scale. If you look on
the energy efficiency side, CERT[1]
is not an adequate tool for delivering energy efficiency but at
least it exists and there is no CERT equivalent on the adaptation
side. It is a bit of a blunt tool, it is just a funding pot, but
there is not such a thing on the adaptation side. Again, that
is difficult. If you look at some other cities, things like green
roofs, for example, a lot of other cities have removed the municipal
storm water management charge and that has been an incentive that
has worked quite well elsewhere, but we do not have anything like
that. Here one could imagine having payment for storm water management
which is then reduced or eliminated if you put the appropriate
measures in place. It has been very effective in cities like Chicago
and there is no reason to think that we could not do that here.
Arguably it is fairer because you are paying for the amount of
water that you discharge from your premises. I do not know whether
there is anything else, Alex, on specific policy measures that
might be worth mentioning?
Mr Nickson: I would just reiterate
that I think we do have some problems in the fact that water is
too cheap and drainage is something we do not particularly want
to talk about until it is in our front room and then we just want
it gone, and the fact that there is no real driver for people
to adapt, there is no immediate financial incentive. As we have
seen from all too frequent flood incidences, even when people
are flooded they are selectively oblivious to the fact that it
might happen to them again and take some false comfort in the
fact that a once in a 100 year event having now happened they
are good for another 99 years. Even when we look at Carlisle,
the number of people who signed up to the EA Flood Warning Direct,
which is a free service providing warning, that barely rose after
the flood event even though no major flood defences had been installed
and nothing had really changed. People are particularly obdurate
with regard to wanting to accept the risk that they face. As you
eloquently put, if on mitigation where they are going to save
money immediately we cannot persuade them then it is a really
tough sell on adaptation. Some of the levers we could investigate
are things like water companies, as Isabel said, being required
to push water efficiency rather than sell water as cheaply as
possible. We need to look at the insurance industry being a key
player in helping us adapt because at the moment it is not really
in their interest, the premiums do not differentiate against the
risk. Also, when you are flooded or have to make a claim you get
a like-for-like replacement and basically reinstate exactly what
was affected last time rather than adding to some cumulative resilience
measures. I think the insurance industry themselves need to start
to have this discussion about when we are tied to an annual premium
how they can encourage resilience measures as an industry so they
collectively win rather than pricing it differently.
Q139 Jo Swinson: You have made a
very good case for not just looking at it in silos of energy efficiency
or water efficiency but doing it together and, good news as it
sounds, the London-wide programme is more integrated in that sense
although I am not sure if it involves resilience as well as water
and energy efficiency. What do you think the barriers are to addressing
this in that kind of integrated way?
Ms Dedring: At all levels of government
these issues are handled by different departments. It is just
an organisational culture issue, is it not, so they are not used
to working together and, therefore, with the funding streams attached
to that. Not to come on to air quality but we have got that issue
there too where you have got the DfT dealing with issues around
transport emissions and Defra talking to each other but it is
not really a single integrated whole in that same way, and I am
sure the same accusation can be made of the GLA. I think at an
institutional level that is the biggest barrier I can see. Trying
to go into somebody's home every three months to do something
else is not realistic. We might succeed in getting them from level
23 on their priority list to 21, but you are never going to make
these issues number one for the vast majority of the population.
I wish they were, and I wish everybody thought what I think, but
unfortunately all market research shows on green issues that,
quite interestingly, you always have the 20% who are quite passionate
and want to do something, 60% do not really care unless it is
super easy and 20% who are going to drive their SUVs just to annoy
you, kind of thing. The issue is how we get at that 60%. For me,
speaking a language of encouragement is not going to work, it
literally has to be so easy and that means bolting as much together
as possible. The homes programme already includes things like
smoke alarms and benefits checks because that is a way to incentivise
the local authorities to participate and it is a cheaper way of
delivering those kinds of things to deliver them once. We would
love to bolt other things onto that as well on the adaptation
side because it is not comprehensive on that front. Again, there
is a lack of funding and lack of partners. At least with the energy
stuff you can talk to the energy companies—good luck, but
at least they are there—but on the adaptation side there
is not really that same obvious set of interlocutors to speak
to.
Q140 Jo Swinson: Just following on
from that, what do you think Government needs to do? Does Government
accept that doing it in that kind of integrated way is the best
way forward and, if so, what should they be doing that they are
not to make that easier for you to implement?
Mr Nickson: I think the first
thing is making sure that wherever they are pushing energy efficiency
they are pushing water efficiency too because at the moment the
CERT and the HESP,[2]
replacement of CERT, currently only focus on energy efficiency.
We have things like Energy Performance Certificates which do not
consider water as well, but when you say we take the average home
and 27% of the carbon produced in the home comes from heating
water for washing and cleaning, if you can be water efficient
you can be energy efficient and, therefore, you can be drought
resilient and double the saving. A systemic change across all
the government programmes to make sure that the water message
and the energy message are perfectly aligned would be a very big
help. I also think that potentially a reduction in VAT, if not
a complete removal of VAT, on adaptation measures would make an
enormous step forward. At the moment that would help to reduce
some of the cost barriers that we perceive. That would be an enormous
start.
Q141 Jo Swinson: In terms of funding
options do you think it would be best to proceed with CERT as
it is but to have something additional created for water efficiency
or other adaptation measures, or do you think that CERT should
be amended, expanded or scrapped and a new scheme put in place
that deals with all of them?
Ms Dedring: I think the important
thing is that the consumer does not want to know all about that
stuff. They want to know somebody is going to show up, this is
all going to happen and there might be some massively complex
thing behind it. Obviously we would like to completely scrap everything
and design a perfect solution but that is probably not realistic
just accepting that there should be a single frontline delivery
structure, if at all possible, even if that is coordinated at
the local authority level. The reality of life is that it is probably
not realistic to expect a successor to CERT to be merged with
five other funding streams or, indeed, 30 other funding streams.
Just on the energy efficiency side there are more than 30 funding
streams in London alone. What we are trying to do is cobble them
altogether, but behind the scenes because trying to get the right
answer seems to be very difficult just because of the inertia
of life. At a minimum there should be some kind of recognition
that these things should be delivered jointly, but there is no
forcing mechanism for that to happen at the moment. I do think
to the extent that some of this is delivered in partnership with
or through the local authorities, if you look at the National
Indicators on adaptation they are much weaker than they are in
mitigation, so the NI targets around CO2 are about reducing your
carbon and you sign up to an actual percentage reduction in carbon
either on your own estate or for the territory of the borough,
and when you look at adaptation it is more about having an adaptation
strategy. If we could change the National Indicators for the local
authorities to be much more outcome based, certainly we have seen
on the energy side a lot more engagement from the local authorities.
They sign up to 12% and then say, "How are we going to get
there?" We have had a lot more engagement on the homes programme,
for example, as a result of that. That might be quite a useful
way of moving. Where they are at the moment is appropriate for
five years ago maybe, and that is fine, it is just that the issue
is now moving on quite quickly so one would want to move to a
more outcome-based metric. I do not know whether that is percentage
of buildings that have been adapted or retrofitted, however one
might want to define it, but moving towards a more outcome-based
metric.
Mr Nickson: The Pitt Review went
a long way in trying to reduce the separation between spatial
planning and emergency planning, but we still have a fundamental
capacity lack in London and, therefore, I am presuming nationwide
in getting spatial planners and emergency planners to work together.
When you look at things like the civil contingency it is always
about what is the priority in the next five years rather than
what contributes towards a priority that is going to exist for
the next 30 years. We do have this problem that needs to be tackled
there and a lot of that is awareness-raising capacity. Isabel
referred to the Drain London Programme where we are going to try
to bring together groupings of boroughs that face a shared flood
risk and make sure we have got a mix of emergency planners, spatial
planners, building control experts, so we can start to look at
how to manage flood risk across a flood zone so there are shared
solutions. That expertise may come from several different boroughs
but it builds the capacity towards a single approach rather than
the fragmented individual approach that we saw, say, through strategic
flood risk assessments where you had individual local authorities
working on their own and quite often the solution was to get rid
of the water as quickly as possible and pass it downstream to
your neighbour. We really want to learn the lesson and ensure
that in London we use this capacity building. Support from Government
on that through Drain London has been great and I think we will
be able to pilot that system to be able to look at how to roll
it out much wider. The other thing is any communications just
to raise public awareness. As I said, people are very selectively
oblivious on a lot of the climate impacts they face. One of the
things we are doing on the consultation of the adaptation strategy
we are going to be launching shortly is we are building a bespoke
website that is going to ask Londoners what they as individuals
and communities can do. It is not about, "You the Mayor,
you the Government need to do this", it is trying to say,
"You live at a certain risk and a lot of that risk is caused
by your lack of awareness and your lack of capacity to act. What
is it you think you can do as an individual or a community?"
and be able to monitor that and understand what it is we can do
to actually help Londoners. I think that is going to be a very
powerful tool because, for once, it is going to take the responsibility
to act off Government and put a certain element of it back on
to the public. We all remember those pictures from Carlisle of
the guy saying, "I've rung my local authority 15 times for
some sandbags and they are still not here to come and do anything".
We need to enable people to know what to do to help themselves
and, importantly, to pull together as a community to help each
other. So someone will go and help Mrs Miggins next door as well
as helping themselves rather than sitting around waiting for the
emergency services who really need to be tending to the most vulnerable.
Q142 Chairman: That suggests clearly
there is an important role for the local authority in raising
public awareness about what they should and could do, but is there
also a role for central Government in raising public awareness?
Mr Nickson: Yes. I am not sure
exactly how. There have been a lot of Government adverts recently
about eating healthier, stopping smoking, but you cannot scare
people into being slim, green and healthy. A lot of money has
been put into that. As I said earlier, adaptation is a tough sell
but we do need central Government on this. The Mayor in many ways
is a very good voice for Londoners because of his independence.
We have been talking to the water companies about the Mayor being
a voice about water efficiency, particularly during drought times,
because no-one is going to respond to Thames Water telling them
to be water efficient when they know they are losing 600 million
litres of water a day from their leaky pipes, whereas a message
coming from the Mayor may be much better received. We are starting
to work out what are those communication channels, who are the
voices and the agents that can actually provoke this change.
Ms Dedring: There is a fundamental
issue across all green communications of "stop this"
or "don't do that". I was talking to Eddie Hyams the
other day, the Chair of the EST,[3]
and he was saying "low-carbon, micro-renewables". It
is all deeply unaspirational and, whatever you might think of
it, does not fit with the quite consumerist society that we live
in today. We find that loft insulation might be ten times more
effective than having a solar panel on your panel or a wind turbine
in particular locations but that is not what people want because
they want the eco-bling factor. I do not think any of that has
been brought to bear on the adaptation side of things. A lot of
the things that you can do to make your home more adapted are
nice, attractive, make the comfort of the home increase. One thing
we found in the homes programme was draught proofing has quite
a poor payback but people love it because it makes their home
more comfortable because they could feel the draught coming through.
You need to accept those are the kinds of things that motivate
people, not the, "This has a 2.5 year payback" or "This
is the best way to battle flood risk", just focusing people
on things they can do that they would want to do for other reasons,
almost irrespective of adaptation, things like green roofs. People
love green roofs so that is a lot easier to sell to people than
even something like a water butt which is going to take up space,
is plastic and looks ugly, just starting with those messages that
are more positive for people. There has been no connection, as
Alex was saying, between, "It's flooded here and here's something
you can actually do about it". People do not make that link
at all as far as we can see. That is the kind of connection that
people can make, but in the absence of anything to point people
towards it is quite difficult to try and do that because what
is Government saying at any level but "Go out and buy a water
butt", and that does not really work. I think the tone of
the communications needs to change quite significantly.
Q143 Dr Turner: The GLA is quite
unique amongst local authorities in actually having a statutory
duty to address climate change. You have not had this statutory
duty for all that long, how much difference has it made towards
the work on adaptation and addressing climate change risks in
London?
Ms Dedring: A personal view almost
is it does not have any real practical implication but has a big
impact almost internally in convincing other parts of the bureaucracy
who think that they do not need to worry about environmental issues,
"That's something the environment team worries about over
there", and it makes people take the issue more seriously.
Whilst it is quite symbolic perhaps, or semantic, it has made
a big difference and anything like that can help. The more that
those kinds of pressures can be made outcome-based, as I was saying
about the National Indicators earlier—we are not subject
to that regime because we are not a typical local authority—all
those things are useful and moving in the right direction. Having
said that, as I said earlier, it is not something that is considered
in the mainstream of decision-making at the level that it needs
to be. It is improving all the time but it is not where it needs
to be. There is a lack of joined-up thinking still.
Q144 Dr Turner: It has not made a
quantum difference then?
Ms Dedring: I think that is a
fair statement. It has made an incremental improvement over time,
but it is still hard work. All the work that is going on in the
urban realm and green space and making the case for some of those
things and for more funding internally to be routed in that direction
is not just about "trees are nice", but "this is
actually going to improve the resilience of London" and that
case is not really made internally even to the point of when you
look at the business cases they will not necessarily even be aware
that is a value that could be assigned to this. I used to work
at TfL and the way they valued the impact on the environment—it
sounds quite parochial but it is an important point because this
is how these bureaucracies work—was that there was a box
in the business case that said, "If you want to say anything
on environment, say it here", but it was not quantified as
part of the economic analysis. That has now changed, but that
is not untypical for a lot of bureaucracies.
Q145 Dr Turner: Has it created a
new cost burden on the Authority? In Private Members' Bills in
the past I have tried to impose statutory duties with respect
to the environment on local authorities and Government has been
terrified of creating cost burdens. Has this actually created
a cost burden for the GLA or perhaps even relieved some cost burdens?
Ms Dedring: Looking at it over
time it relieves cost burdens but it is very hard to get decision-makers
at any level to see this. It is the "invest to save"
argument which is very difficult. The way that we do budgeting
it is very difficult for people to find. There is not a line item
that says, "£100 to invest to save £30 a year forever"
or "To reduce my risk of X happening by Y", which if
you quantify that totally justifies the £100 investment.
Just the way the budgeting processes work, it is, "I haven't
got £100 today", which is why some of these financing
issues are so crucial. Obviously we would not do things on the
environment front that made absolutely no sense at an economic
level because they probably would not make sense at an environmental
level either. These are all things that are good because they
are reducing your risk, improving the quality of life or whatever
it is. It is very easy to make a case for most of these things;
the problem is more the distribution of the cash flows effectively.
That is still an issue and it is very difficult to extract those
line items out, which is the green investment bank where people
have talked about public-private vehicles for funding these kinds
of things and there was a recent announcement around Partnerships
UK, I think.
Q146 Dr Turner: It is kind of aspirational
window dressing then. Do you think it is worth extending the statutory
duty towards all local authorities?
Ms Dedring: I do not think it
can hurt. If people think that is going to be the solution to
all the world's problems that is not going to work. We are quite
far away from where we need to be. In our experience, in a lot
of fields the more we can start to create programmes that deliver
on the ground the better, and those kinds of duties do not really
create sufficient pressure to trigger the creation of, say, the
homes programme, for example.
Q147 Dr Turner: What about the monitoring
of compliance with your duty? Does the Audit Commission rate you
on your discharge of this duty?
Ms Dedring: I do not know the
answer to that. Do you know?
Mr Nickson: No. Adaptation is
notoriously difficult to measure. There is no nice, easy metric
like tonnes of CO2 or gigawatt hours of energy saved, which is
why many of the Government measures of adaptation have resorted
to being process-based rather than outcome-based. We do not actually
have a measurement of how we are achieving it. I think this is
going to be one of the interesting things that is going to come
out of the reporting power, how we are going to be monitored on
our level of adaptation over every five years based on that process.
This is one of the things I have really struggled with in developing
the adaptation strategy, to find a nice, solid metric that demonstrates
how we are adapting well to climate change rather than the fact
that we just have not had any extreme weather over that period
to have caused any impacts which tends to be how most people like
to measure, the number of houses flooded and so on. No, there
is no easy measure there. That is something we are trying to set
for ourselves as a way that we can benchmark today and then measure
our adaptation going forward, but it is a very complex issue.
Q148 Dr Turner: What mechanisms do
you have to ensure that climate change and adaptation is taken
into account in business as usual activities and new projects?
Mr Nickson: It is part of the
decision-making framework we have at the GLA. There is the inevitable
tick-box exercise of "Have you considered sustainable development,
equalities and climate change issues?" The London Development
Agency has it as part of their gateway funding process where you
have to demonstrate it. Transport for London have written it into
their procurement codes where new assets being procured need to
demonstrate how they have considered the future environment and
so on. That is the start we have made so far.
Q149 Dr Turner: Are you convinced
that different departments of the GLA have the skill sets needed
to make this work?
Mr Nickson: Particularly with
the 2009 UK climate projections it is very difficult to take a
risk-based view, so we have been working very closely with the
Living with Environmental Change research projects to try and
look at exactly these kinds of metrics. I sit on five research
projects looking at how we provide design guidance so we can understand
how we are measuring our adaptation. One of our projects is to
look at how to predict overheating in buildings in the future
so when we are asking developers to use this guidance we can judge
whether a building is going to be overheated or not and, therefore,
how resilient it is to a future climate, but it is a very slow
and technical journey.
Ms Dedring: The one thing we did
at TfL that was very effective, and again it was on the mitigation
side, basically was top-slicing everybody's budget creating a
climate change fund into which people could bid. Of course, it
was their own money which had been taken away from everyone, so
it was the same money, but the incentive it created was to answer
this whole problem of, "Well, I want to do this because it's
environmentally good but I haven't got £100". We required
people to bid into this fund which suddenly created a lot of interest
in the topic because there was money associated with it. Something
in that vein can be very effective. It is probably similar to
the equalities agenda too where in every business case that goes
through the organisation you have got to say "Have you considered
equalities?", "Yes". Have they deeply thought about
the issue? How do you actually measure whether people have seriously
investigated that question? The more that you can put hard numbers
and targets on it you can say, "I'm going to deem you have
not seriously considered it unless I see X to be the case".
That totally transformed the decision-making process within TfL
on the CO2 front, so we could have something similar on resilience.
How you actually specify that, probably the national indicator
route rather than the statutory duty route would be more effective
to deliver that.
Q150 Chairman: Do the latest climate
predictions enable you to assess what the actual impact of climate
change is going to be on London?
Ms Dedring: Yes and no. Directionally,
yes. I get frustrated because I think we spend a lot of time saying,
"Is it a 3.9° increase or a 3.85° increase?"
and you think it is a lot more than it is today, it is going to
be hotter, what are we going to do about that, and while we are
spending all this time arguing about point X or point Y we are
not actually doing anything about it. Whether it is 3.8, 3,9 or
two you would still want to take action to tackle this problem.
In fact, even if you just looked at status quo today you would
want to do something about it because we already have drought
problems and overheating and those kinds of things. That is one
of the nice things about adaptation, it is something people see
every year. They will see some form of drought, overheating or
flooding in a certain part of London typically, unlike mitigation
where it is some amorphous concept of CO2 going up into the sky,
or on air quality where, "It's not affecting me, it's somebody
else down the road and not really my problem". That is all
to the good. Where we struggle is a lot of the projections are
not specific to London and do not necessarily look at the urban
environment, they extrapolate from rural projections to draw conclusions
for the urban context, so that is something we are doing a piece
of work on at the moment that Alex can comment on. It is trying
to look at a more micro-level at what is actually going to happen,
not just, "It'll be hotter".
Mr Nickson: I have to say I have
been working very closely with a number of groups to try and look
at how we make UKCP 09 more understandable and the deeper I get
into it the more I become confused. It is very difficult to take
probabilistic projections and get people to use them unless they
know the point at which an exceedence then affects their system.
The first thing you need to do is understand how your system responds
to various climate variables, to know when you will then change
from a business as usual position to a more extreme position that,
therefore, has unusual impacts, say, upon your budget or other
resourcing. One of the things we have been trying to work with
TfL on is to understand how day-to-day climate variables affect
their basic operation. When do wind speeds mean that you need
to reduce train speeds? When does overheating of tracks mean you
need to reduce the train running times? A lot of it is about starting
to understand the critical points where these things occur and
then using UKCP 09 to understand how much more frequently that
will happen in the future. A lot of the delays in the production
of the UKCP 09 tools have not helped us to understand that. The
critical one was this threshold detector which enables you to
determine how many times, say, a certain temperature is going
to be exceeded in the future, so if you know that at 32°
you have to start changing the way your system works, and you
know that today it may be only three or four days a year you can
manage that under an emergency measure, but if it is four weeks
or four months in the future then you fundamentally need to change
the way your system works, we are on an early path on that. The
Thames Estuary 2100 Project was a very good example of how to
use that. They looked at how various levels of sea level rise
affected the number of closures of the barrier, but also where
certain responses stop working, so they know that at one metre
you can deal with it with the current system, at two metres you
need to be raising flood defences inside and outside London and
at four metres you need another barrage. We would like to see
that now applied, say, to the water system so we know that with
a certain number of dry days or dry years in a row you can survive
on reservoirs but after that you then need to look at a range
of measures, water efficiency, grey water recycling, whatever,
and apply the climate scenarios to that. It is early days but
there is starting to be the ambition on it and things like the
LWEC[4]
project will help. I do think we have lost a lot of capacity,
particularly in the royal and professional institutions, to really
take this by the teeth. Maybe I am being a bit harsh on some of
them but I do expect them to be leading the discussion on this.
We have got to get away from the current, "Look at the X
axis and read off the Y axis and that's what we'll build"
back to understanding that there is a grey area on either side
and, therefore, we need professional advice on that and I am not
sure we have the capacity in the UK on this.
Q151 Chairman: Arising from that
answer, what are the implications in terms of cost if you can
see the range of things that might happen? Are you starting to
estimate what the costs of responding to that are likely to be?
Mr Nickson: We have started to
look at some of the cost-benefit analysis. I would give you one
exemplar of a guy called Dr William Bird who looked at the health
benefits of green spaces. He did a very exhaustive study to look
at what was the health benefit per hectare of a green space when
monetarised and came up with some incredibly large figure that
everyone instantly dismissed because it did not fit in with their
mental projection of what they were worth, but when you combine
reducing obesity, improving mental health, reducing days off sick
and so on, green spaces do have an enormous benefit to society.
We have started to do some of that work looking at the benefit
of green spaces offsetting the urban heat island effect and in
providing sustainable urban drainage. I think we could spend a
lot of money and a lot of time going down that pathway to come
up with a figure that is dismissed as being incredulously large
when actually we just need to get on and do it. We have set ourselves
some fairly robust targets for increasing green space in London,
both street tree cover and green roofs, pocket parks and so on,
because we know it is the right thing to do and, in parallel,
we are going to keep working up the arguments on the cost-benefit
analysis. I think this dual approach is the right one for us and
one we need to encourage.
Ms Dedring: The fundamental point
about is it worth it, is there is a cost associated with not doing
something. The reason that it is valuable to look at that is to
say, "You should be prepared to spend up to X to avoid that
happening". For example, we have set a target based on some
work they did in Manchester which you are probably familiar with.
They looked at central Manchester and if you increased the green
cover in central Manchester by 10% it would stabilise temperatures
over the next century instead of the kind of rises that the CP[5]
work suggests. Obviously those temperature rises have health costs
associated with them, rising use of energy for air conditioning
and, therefore, a further negative feedback cycle because of that.
Presumably that, roughly quantified, would show you that it is
worth investing in the green space in order to do it. We have
talked a lot about buildings, but things like trees and parks
are the first things that get cut in difficult budgetary times
that are seen as discretionary, "It's nice to have trees
but if we don't have any money we won't have any trees or we won't
have any parks". I have been trying to approach some of the
financial institutions and government bodies to think about how
we can think about this from a purely commercial standpoint. There
are benefits associated with X and, therefore, we should be prepared
to spend Y, but the problem is how you capture the benefits. On
the energy side it is a lot more straightforward but even there
it is difficult to do. We are not there yet at all. I think that
is what people like the banks and pension funds need to help us
to look at.
Q152 Mark Lazarowicz: On this issue
of how you pay for the work that needs to be done, given pressures
always exist upon public sector budgets what are you doing and
what can Government generally do to ensure that adaptation is
given a high enough priority in the allocation of funding?
Ms Dedring: One thing that we
do is look at all the potential. If you think about it within
the organisation it is environment fighting everybody else for
funding. Rather than saying, "We need a new budget line item",
we say, "Here's a set of activity which actually delivers
a more resilient city, delivers adaptation", but may not
have been set up deliberately to deliver that in the first place.
For example, the London Development Agency underneath the GLA
has got a big programme of investment in the urban realm, but
because that is about things like making London look nicer it
does not necessarily include things like soft landscaping, trees
and green roofs, those kinds of things. It might just be something
that an architect would deem to be beautiful but would not necessarily
have any greenness in it and because that area is being regenerated
and redone it is an opportunity to put in a lot more green cover.
We are trying to redirect budgets across the board, although that
is a small example. There are also cases such as where the Mayor
has got a programme to plant 10,000 new street trees in London
and that was just a case of cancelling a series of things and
reallocating the money. There is usually limited opportunity to
do that. There are big funding streams associated with things.
Because adaptation is quite cross-cutting there are a lot of funding
streams that one can seek to redirect but that is less than satisfactory
if you want to do something on a big scale. Unless you can somehow
find a way to bring commercial money into these issues through
whatever mechanism, and I do not particularly care, whatever is
going to work, this will not happen. Section 106[6]
is another interesting opportunity which is not publicly exploited
to the full extent that it needs to be for a whole range of things,
but adaptation is one example of where it is down to the local
authorities how they want to use it. They could be requiring developers
to increase green cover in that area by X per cent every time
a new development is put in if you want to think about an air
quality neutrality or water neutrality type of concept.
Q153 Mark Lazarowicz: How do you
cope with a situation where certainly in a smaller local authority
there can easily be a situation where the opportunities and need
for adaptation may be much more than one just literally down the
river and that authority may not be able to fund this sort of
work internally? How does central Government have a role to basically
recognise the fact that different authorities have got different
needs and opportunities as far as adaptation is concerned?
Ms Dedring: Not to be too simplistic,
there need to be central funding streams for some of these things.
It is worse than the mitigation situation where CERT is not adequate
but at least it exists, so that is a good starting point. We need
to be getting about ten times the amount of money we are getting
through CERT into London. What are those funding streams around
adaptation? I cannot think of anything. The Defra money, the three
million, is an astronomical sum in the world of adaptation. It
is partly because it has been so centred on analysis, risk assessment
and those kinds of things so it is not seen as a delivery issue
which has more funding associated with it. The issue is at the
national level can we do something similar as we do at the London
level, which is not about making the case for more money, because
we are not going to get anywhere with that kind of argument, but
about saying, "Look, there are these ten teams which are
delivering those kinds of outcomes, so let's either slice bits
off of it or lump it together and call it the adaptation programme"
and refocusing it in that kind of way. Everyone needs to be pragmatic,
there is not going to be £10 billion becoming available for
something like that.
Q154 Jo Swinson: Obviously funding
is an issue but, as you have said, there is a degree of realism
here, so to what extent do you think the Government is providing
adequate leadership, if not the funding, in terms of the country's
response to the adaptation issue?
Ms Dedring: Adaptation reminds
me a little bit of biodiversity. It is such a broad phrase that
it means everything and nothing to a lot of people. The more concrete
we can be, even if it is just saying, "Here is a bunch of
statutory activity and funding, all of which amounts to adaptation",
so if you are a small local authority that feels you have got
enough on your plate, say you have got a lot of poverty in your
area, it is not going to be a priority to look at adaptation because
it is somewhere out there and you do not need to worry about it,
but highlighting some things you can do today with existing funding
streams and existing statutory powers could help without creating
new big funding pots. Again, something on the National Indicator
side could help as well. It is going back to the delivery side.
There is not a machinery that is rolling out improvements to how
adapted the UK is. There is a lot of work going on around looking
at modelling of 2100, or whatever it is, and we now need to start
getting into the action side of it.
Q155 Jo Swinson: Do you feel that
the Government has properly defined adaptation and communicated
what the priorities for action need to be?
Ms Dedring: I would say no.
Mr Nickson: In some ways that
is exactly the point of the programme. It is a massive leap forward
from where we were even three years ago. The programme is all
about identifying what are the priorities and ranking them. That
is to be praised. In some ways, it is a shame it has taken us
ten years of extreme weather to start to get to grips with it.
A lot of that was due to the fact that adaptation was seen as
somehow detrimental to mitigation and an acceptance of failure,
but I am glad we are now over that and recognise they are perfectly
parallel and quite often mutually supportive aims. I would come
back to my original point. We still have a problem and there is
a lot of inconsistency in government programmes where mitigation
measures are acting against or not necessarily supporting adaptation
measures. We need the Code for Sustainable Homes to take on adaptation
issues much more and building regulations need to be brought up-to-date
as well to reflect that. Things like the water calculator in the
Code for Sustainable Homes just does not work to incentivise water
efficiency, particularly in urban areas. The Building Schools
for the Future and the Better Hospitals Programmes are still building
hospitals that overheat today and they are going to have to undergo
painful and expensive retrofits in the future. There is a lot
more that we could be doing now and doing better. Part of that
is because no-one has really looked at how to use projections
in the future to manage risks today. I do not want to criticise
them too heavily, we are progressing in the right direction, it
is just painfully slow.
Q156 Dr Turner: Has the Government's
Adapting to Climate Change Programme had any effect on your capacity
to manage climate change risks, or is there more that the programme
could do to support the GLA and other public bodies like yourself?
Mr Nickson: We are unusual in
the fact that we are one of the leaders on adaptation, we are
the ones asking the awkward questions such as you are now asking
of us. We are stuck looking for the same answers. I think the
Government is playing catch-up in a number of areas. We are lucky
to have UKCP 09, which are the best climate projections in the
world, and when we get to understand how to use them properly
it will be a phenomenal tool. I think the national risk assessment
is the right way to be going. I am advising the Government on
it and how to deliver it. The National Indictors on it are the
right way to go. Perhaps we should be looking a bit more at outcome-based
indicators rather than process-based indicators because that does
just encourage a tick-box culture. On all fronts it is progressing
in the right direction. I am afraid I do not have a silver bullet
that would instantly help us undertake a quantum leap on adaptation
but I do think a lot of it is to be supported.
Q157 Dr Turner: Is there a coherent
organisational framework to deliver this efficiently?
Ms Dedring: No. It is still at
the first stage of the process as far as I can see. It is analytically
helpful and moving in the right direction. Statutory duties are
great but, again, where is the piece of machinery that says, "Here's
all our large infrastructure across the country", whether
that is transport infrastructure, energy, whatever it is, "What
are the implications of climate change for that, what are we going
to do about it? Who is going to invest to make it happen?"
That is not happening, it is very ad hoc and depends on the organisation.
Everybody is kind of trying to avoid it if they possibly can because
nobody really wants to think about the costs associated with that.
Where is the programme of large-scale green space preservation
and further rollout, whether that is trees, green roofs, who cares,
expansion of parks, protection of existing parks. We have got
a huge issue in London of paving over private gardens which now
the Government has tackled relatively effectively. There is not
that systematic how do we get from point A to point B, and there
is not even the piecemeal bits of it starting to come together
which you do see on the mitigation side. It is not on the scale
that we need but we are starting to see the right kind of activity.
In building and retrofit we see the same thing. Here is a world
that we are going to live in, where London is going to be fully
retrofitted, ready for the future, and maybe it is not going to
be perfect but I do not see that roadmap at the moment at all.
Q158 Dr Turner: Do you see a role
for regional government in the new framework for adaptation?
Mr Nickson: Yes, taking London
as an example and maybe obviously given the unique example that
the Mayor is, we are able to take a view that is strategic and,
therefore, we can encourage local authorities to work collectively
on mutual issues where, if they were left to their own devices,
they would work probably individually, so that is a unique role
we can bring. As demonstrated by the Homes Energy Efficiency Programme,
we are able to cobble together large numbers of small schemes
to create a more substantial scheme which, by value of its cost
efficiency, can deliver much more, so I do think yes, there are
very definite benefits to the regional engagement that just cannot
be seen and are less effectively done at a national level.
Ms Dedring: Potentially rather
than in the statutory duty, national indicator space, but more
in the programme delivery and co-ordination. Certainly we have
got a lot more engagement from the private sector in terms of
participating and putting money into these programmes because
they see us as an efficient route to market basically. They are
not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, but they get
an opportunity to go into lots and lots of homes, which an individual
borough cannot deliver. One of the reasons that we have not had
the scale of activity on water efficiency or home energy efficiency
needed in London has been because of the sort of piecemeal, "This
borough has a 100-home programme here and this has got about a
1,000 homes over here", so that, I think, is where a sort
of co-ordination function or single procurement vehicle can be
quite useful.
Q159 Dr Turner: Do you see any regional
co-ordination going on outside London?
Mr Nickson: I do not feel I am
in a position really to answer that.
Ms Dedring: I would say some regions
yes, others no, and it really depends. It is a bit driven by personalities
and individual parts of the organisation, so it is quite patchy,
I guess.
Chairman: Thank you. I think this might
be an appropriate moment to move on to the next subject.
1 Carbon Emissions Reduction Target Back
2
Home Energy Saving Programme Back
3
Energy Saving Trust Back
4
Living With Environmental Change Back
5
UK Climate Projections Back
6
Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 Back
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