UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 113-iiHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREENVIRONMENTAL AUDIT COMMITTEE
ADAPTING TO CLIMATE CHANGE
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Environmental Audit Committee
on
Members present
Mr Tim Yeo, in the Chair
Colin Challen
Martin Horwood
Mark Lazarowicz
________________
Memorandum submitted by Local Government Information Unit
Examination of Witness
Witness: Dr Andrew Johnston, Head of the Centre for Local Sustainability, Local Government Information Unit, gave evidence.
Q69 Chairman: Good morning. Welcome and thank you for coming. We are getting a lot of interest in this inquiry on adaptation and we are looking forward to what you have got to say. We are all quite tight for time, as you probably are as well, so we have got about 30 minutes or so to go through this with you. Could I start by asking why you think that many local authorities are rather badly prepared to respond to the challenge of climate change?
Dr Johnston: I think there is a whole suite of reasons for that. First and foremost, there is probably an intellectual confusion. We have just started a learning network for elected members to discuss the adaptation agenda and it was clear there was a lot of confusion between adaptation and mitigation. Mitigation had a lot of the big press and people understood what was going on there, but members had not quite drawn the distinction between adaptation to the inevitable impacts of climate change as opposed to some of the things they can do in order to mitigate it. That was the starting point and I think that is a general reflection on society, to be honest. More specifically, if you look at the channels through which local government creates intelligence, namely through think-tank work and national governments, I do not think we are currently getting clear messages coming out of local authorities that this is what the adaptation agenda is really about, this is where you should focus your attention and here is some resource and support to help you on particular initiatives to get you started. Those very clear signals which local authorities are used to getting around important agenda are not currently coming through around adaptation to climate change.
Q70 Chairman: Do you think there is a particular weakness with elected members?
Dr Johnston: I would not say that, no. One of the pleasant surprises of running the learning network that we did for about 30 elected members from across the country was the high level of awareness and sensitivity and they knew they should be doing something about adaptation to climate change. I am not sure you would necessarily find that across society or the rest of local government where people are focused on their specific service provision priorities, et cetera. I was pleased that we had the meeting - they were the converted I suppose - they were more aware than I was expecting.
Q71 Chairman: Is there anything that central Government should do to try and address this area in terms of raising awareness about adaptation issues within local government?
Dr Johnston: Yes. Starting from the political perspective, I do not think there have been the debates around adaptation to climate change that you would hope there would be. I think this Committee is a really useful start to that process which I believe will grow and grow over the next couple of years in terms of importance. One of the things that I am interested in trying to develop is different solutions and different political solutions. What is the Conservative take on adaptation to climate change, what is the Labour and the Liberal Democrat take? Where are the new ideas coming through and how do we debate and discuss which of those ideas are currently best? That is not happening at the national level, in my view, so consequently it is not happening at the party conferences. I went to all three party conferences and there were not massive debates about adaptation to climate change. There were elements of it, heat wave, flooding, things like that, but most of the debates were about mitigation.
Q72 Martin Horwood: This is half a question and half a point of information. I declare a party political interest, I guess, as a Liberal Democrat. I have to say we did pass adaptation policy quite specifically in Zero Carbon Britain two years ago. That is the party I know about, so I hope you were right in what you said about the other two parties. That debate is happening at national level sometimes and maybe you just do not know about it.
Dr Johnston: I suppose my response would be that I was at the Liberal Democrat Conference and obviously trying to seek out events that were around adaptation to climate change and there simply were not that many. Most of them were on the policy that was being posed at that particular conference, which was around biodiversity and local management of natural resources, which is very closely associated.
Martin Horwood: Adaptation policy was specifically adopted at the previous year's conference. You just need to go a little careful in your judgments.
Q73 Colin Challen: The LGiU has argued for the creation of Local Management Adaptation Boards. What do you think are the benefits of such a proposal?
Dr Johnston: A lot of the reason we have suggested this has come from the experience of trying to think through governance structures for managing flooding. We have done a lot of work on the Flood and Water Management Bill lobbying for local government to have coherent structures in place in order to live up to the responsibility that they will be given under the Bill. What we found with flooding, which is an area which has a fair bit of a track record to it, was there is still an enormous amount of confusion and uncoordinated responsibilities. The example I always like to give is a big river joining a small river with a road going over the top and a culvert. The big river is the Environment Agency, the small river is the district council, the road over the top is the Highways Agency and no-one knows who owns the culvert, yet it is the county council, the responsible lead local flood authority, which has to sort out the mess. Taking that as a starting point, it seemed to me that a much more slimmed down and coherent decision-making structure would be the best way of dealing with this. When you look at the broader, less tangible aspects of the adaptation agenda, that seems to me to reinforce the need for a coherent and simplified decision-making structure.
Q74 Colin
Challen: Typically, what would happen after the floods,
say, in
Dr Johnston: Yes, they would.
Q75 Colin Challen: You are saying the coverage nationally in our response at the moment, even in the absence of these Adaptation Boards that you propose, is patchy but many local authorities, perhaps - not pinning the blame all on them - if they have not had previous experience will think, "It is not a priority for us"?
Dr Johnston: Yes.
Q76 Martin Horwood: Can I ask a question specifically on that issue? I do not want you to think I am on your case today but it seems to me you are being a little unfair now on the Government because in the Floods Bill that has come before Parliament they have proposed a much more streamlined responsibility on flooding which does beg the wider question of whether or not these Adaptation Boards would not duplicate something which could just be given as a lead responsibility to local authorities. What do you think of the structure that is proposed in the Floods Bill?
Dr Johnston: My understanding of what is suggested in the Floods Bill is responsibilities, not structures. The structures are for the local area to decide. I suppose what I am saying is the experience that we have had working with local government is the structure which they prefer to put in place is something which is much more streamlined and pulls together all the disparate bodies in a particular geographical area. My understanding is that the Bill will not stop that happening, but it certainly is not something that is suggested in the Bill.
Q77 Colin
Challen:
Dr Johnston: Clearly I am going to say yes, I wish it had been, but I understand the reasons why it was not. Total Place is a relatively new idea working its way through and it is understandable that a lot of it is focused on core services with a long history behind them. Fair enough on that front, but as Total Place rolls out and becomes much more comprehensive across local strategic partnerships then you do need a strong voice for the adaptation discussions to actually get a seat at the table because the pooling of these budgets will inevitably lead to directors of core services having a very strong voice in those discussions about where money is allocated and the adaptation debate without that strong voice could potentially lose out.
Q78 Colin Challen: We used to have a civil defence planning regime and at county council level they used to have centralised, if not bunkers then certainly departments which dealt with that kind of contingency. Do we still have that? Is there still an infrastructure in place where you have emergency planning as a priority?
Dr Johnston: Local Resilience Forums are at the very heart of that process. One of the suggestions in the paper is one approach to adaptation is to look at that Resilience Forum model and see how it can be expanded and developed to deal with some of the main issues around adaptation. At the moment, the scope of the Resilience Forum is quite tight, it is around risk assessment, identifying the big risks and then managing the emergency services as they respond to particular disasters, so long-term planning in advance and then the long-term recovery that comes after a particular event is not really part of the Resilience Forum's scope, although there is no reason why it could not be.
Q79 Colin
Challen: If there is an emergency will people have - I
know this is all jargon - a one-stop-shop for emergencies? This
Dr Johnston: Inevitably, because these events go all the way from a global perspective down to a specific impact on your house and then a long time afterwards various services being involved in helping recover from whatever happened, it is very hard to see one organisation being able to be the one-stop-shop for that. I do come back to the idea of the Local Adaptation Management Boards as being an opportunity to at least bring all of the players who are involved in that long chain of events into one decision-making body so that they can come up with a structure which works best within a locality.
Q80 Colin Challen: How happy are local authorities with the National Indicator 188? Is it helpful to local authorities or is it a bit of a tick box exercise, do you think?
Dr Johnston: My understanding of the uptake of NI 188 has been that elected members and senior decision-maker engagement has been low with NI 188. There are specific officers who are the ones who lead on either the adaptation agenda or the climate change agenda or the reporting framework who tend to have led on putting together the evidence for the processes that NI 188 asks for and then reflecting those back on Government. We are not hearing that it has been a stimulus for political debate or radical changes in decision-making.
Q81 Colin Challen: If you are looking at preparations for emergencies, we can see how you could measure outputs but perhaps measuring outputs or outcomes could be rather more problematic for obvious reasons. Do you think perhaps an output or outcome based approach should be looked at?
Dr Johnston: I think we have to get to that point for two reasons. The first one is that quite quickly we need to move to having far greater clarity about what we mean by adaptation to climate change and, therefore, that means we are able to identify and assess what it is that we hope would be happening within localities to tackle that. The adaptation agenda has to move on relatively quickly and get to the point where it knows what outcomes it is looking for. Also, from a local government perspective I think what local government would want is help from Government in the general direction that they should be heading, but they do not want a process-based indicator which tells them exactly how to do it.
Q82 Colin Challen: Less than 40 per cent of local authorities have included NI 188 as a priority in their current Local Area Agreements. What can be done to increase the number that are prepared to prioritise adaptation in local area agreements?
Dr Johnston: I would suggest it is actually quite hard without the demand from the electorate. The framework for which these indicators and particularly the local area agreement indicators are to sit within is the sustainable community strategy, the story of place, which is something that local authorities pull together with the people who live within the area. The LAA framework is to reflect the priorities of the people within a particular area. For adaptation to find its way into those 12 indicators then it has got to be seen as the solution to the problems that the electorate have been putting forward as part of that process. The long-term answer to whether an indicator on adaptation would find its way into the LAA is if the people think it is important enough then it should do. The alternative is there is a top-down incentive from national government: "If you took on NI 188 we would smile upon you under these particular circumstances". I think I would prefer the former, but the latter would be quicker.
Q83 Colin Challen: If it is driven by the electorate then it may only be driven after the event, which is too late, so perhaps we should have a requirement to set targets on adaptation.
Dr Johnston: I would not have a difficulty
with a local area deciding what it is going to do about the adaptation agenda
and being held to account for that. In
Q84 Colin Challen: Defra has excluded for the time being local authorities from the reporting requirements in the Climate Change Act. Do you think that ought to change, that there would be benefits if that requirement was initiated or would the benefits be outweighed by the cost of yet more reporting?
Dr Johnston: That is a tricky one because obviously there is a case for, "Why isn't local government reporting in the same way as other parts of the public sector" and inevitably the private sector is involved with water companies, et cetera. It would be helpful to have that co-ordination. However, a lot of time and effort has been invested in NI 188 as it exists and, despite my earlier criticisms, it has been extremely useful in a technical sense in doing the local risk assessments, in identifying what the big problems are and coming up with suggested strategies for taking them forward. My feeling at the moment is that I would be looking for a long-term change around this, but not a short-term shift to the duty which would mean that a lot of work that has been put in by local authorities would effectively be wasted.
Colin Challen: Thank you very much.
Q85 Martin Horwood: Can I ask you specifically about the UK Climate Impact Projections which were issued to local authorities in the summer. What impact do you think they have had on local authorities? Do you think local authorities need more support to make best use of them?
Dr Johnston: Surprisingly little impact, I have to say. I was one of the people who were waiting with bated breath for the projections to come out because I thought this would turn the debate and we would have a completely different attitude to adaptation after these scenarios came out. Unfortunately, that has not been the case and the evidence that is coming through from local authorities is they are not using the scenarios or their capacity to work on the scenarios in anything like the numbers that we hoped would be the case. There is a disappointment there. Obviously there is a need for further work in terms of the interface between the data and the potential users. At the moment there is a training programme going on for local government officers to get engaged, which is obviously a good thing, but it seems to me if this is going to make a real difference everybody needs to be looking at these scenarios, the community, industry, everyone needs to be looking at them, talking about them, discussing them, and that does not seem to be happening.
Q86 Martin Horwood: From my local experience, I am not aware that they have penetrated through even to elected members, let alone the wider public. Do you think we need to have a different way of delivering information or it just needs to be about more guidance on what you are supposed to do with this information and how to use it or implement it?
Dr Johnston: I think the former. Providing more guidance does not feel like it is going to be the answer, to be honest, there has been plenty of guidance and exhortation out there. Changing the interface so it is more user-friendly would be something which would be useful long-term, but short-term I think what is going to have to happen is whoever does really understand how to use UKCIP and produce useful data out of it has to do that and provide that data for local authorities, so local authorities to be provided with scenarios for their areas which they can take from there, as it were.
Q87 Martin Horwood: Can I ask you about your suggestion of a Climate Adaptation Trust at national level? You do seem to keep on setting up a lot of new bodies and structures at a time when most of government is going in the opposite direction. The obvious question is how much do you think it would cost to run and establish this?
Dr Johnston: The first point on that, the Local Adaptation Management Boards are about removing tiers of decision-making around adaptation and streamlining, so it is not about a new structure, it is about removing tiers. The Climate Adaptation Trust, I do make the point that I use the terminology for effect to get people to understand what I am heading for. You can see from the rest of the paper we can see this being part of the Carbon Trust or the Energy Saving Trust or part of Defra. It is a brand more than necessarily a whole new organisation. The point being, there is a whole raft of functions which we list around the adaptation agenda which are to do with stimulating business, people understanding more about what is going on. Things that the Carbon Trust and Energy Saving Trust do for mitigation are currently not being done for adaptation, so somebody needs to step in and do those.
Q88 Martin Horwood: It is an interesting slightly philosophical debate, I guess, but the Carbon Trust, the Energy Saving Trust and others have a very clear focus on mitigation that is quite different in many ways from managing environments to adapt to climate change. For instance, would it not be more logical to extend the responsibilities of UKCIP and give them a more proactive adaptation agenda as well as just looking at the impacts?
Dr Johnston: Our starting point was the same as the Chairman's: what is going on in the round; what are the debates; what is happening; what is the level of awareness; and how do you get to that point. On how do you get to that point, our feeling was more to do with the strategies which are being employed currently by the Carbon Trust and Energy Saving Trust about behaviour change in society than they are about where the strengths of UKCIP are, which is providing the evidence and information to understand what is going on. We need both obviously, but it seemed to me the better skills match for a strategy for an Adaptation Trust would be the Carbon Trust and the Energy Saving Trust's work.
Q89 Martin Horwood: On an issue like flooding we have already got the National Flood Forecast Centre where you have got the Environment Agency and the Met Office working together. It is not obvious that those kinds of skills on hydrology and landscape are particularly present in the Carbon Trust or that family of bodies, but you think there is a skills match, do you?
Dr Johnston: In terms of the list of activities that we have outlined there, I think the skills match is closer to those organisations. I make the point later on, and I think you ask questions, about skills gaps generally around this area, and there are vast skills gaps and that is why part of the role of any new body would be to stimulate interest and fill those gaps.
Q90 Martin Horwood: My point is on that specific example of flooding and landscape. I think the Met Office and Environment Agency might take it amiss if you say there is a skills gap, I think they think they have got the skills. You are setting up something that seems to be under a separate structure. Are you sure there is not a risk of having too many of these things and too much duplication in the end?
Dr Johnston: There could be. I come back to the basic point that there is a gap. Taking flooding as the example, the Environment Agency are doing a lot of really great work, especially on the technical and evidence side of things, things have really stepped up working with the Met Office, et cetera. I know they were very pleased with their performance up in Cumbria, which was a step up from the Gloucestershire floods of summer 2007, so that is all going extremely well, but I think they would also acknowledge the fact that they do not have the capacity or even the inclination or part of their mission to work on future solutions to the flooding problem in Britain, stimulate new technologies, stimulate people to get together to pool resources to make things happen. All of that softer side, if you like, is not currently part of the Environment Agency's remit but my feeling is if we are going to adapt successfully we need both to be going on.
Q91 Mark Lazarowicz: The Local Government Association has said local government should be responsible for taking local adaptive action but should not be expected to meet all the costs, which is perhaps not surprising. What are the principles that we need to use to decide who does pay locally? For example, how do you take account of the fact that clearly some authorities may require very large-scale adaptive action but may be quite small authorities with small resources?
Dr Johnston: In terms of the broad strategy you need to have a mixture of funding for vulnerability and then wider funding for resilience. It is the mixture of the two that we need to put together. In the example where a small local authority has lots of vulnerable groups, clearly that strategy is around national government being able to identify where the vulnerable groups are and allocate resources per the vulnerable group rather than necessarily the geographical location. That underpins things, but there is a broader resilience issue here that is something we do need to find new sources of funding for. In terms of the flooding, things that we have been looking at are the use of bonds, funding leases, the use of the business rate supplements, looking at differences in insurance values and whether or not that can be a benchmark for giving loans to property owners, for example. We do need to unlock new money around this whole area and in order to do that we have to use different financial mechanisms that are to some extent based upon partnership. If a business community or a community wishes to join with the state in order to improve the resilience of their particular area then we need to find mechanisms that will help them to do that.
Q92 Mark Lazarowicz: Is that not going to cause a problem? You might have some areas where businesses are stronger and are more economically successful areas that can raise money in that way and others that may not be successful may still have very large needs for adaptive action. Does that not to some extent require some centralised funding regime as well and is that not going to make it more difficult for local government to be the ones taking responsibility for local adaptive action, or is it simply a case that big schemes should be funded centrally and local schemes funded locally? How would you go about that?
Dr Johnston: Something similar. I would say big and vulnerable. Clearly there is a national imperative there to make sure that something happens, but small, local and where groups are not necessarily at immediate threat but feel that they want to take control of their own responses to adaptation, those should be local responses. The situation you have outlined where different things will happen differently across the country is localism and people decide priorities within a local area.
Q93 Mark Lazarowicz: Okay some things can be done locally but can you not see circumstances where perhaps on a particular river or water course one authority does something in its area which then has a negative affect on the ones downstream because it may not be able to do it there? Surely there has to be a bit more co-ordination than leaving it very much up to a local level in this particular area because of the fact that consequences can be in more than one area? Clearly if there is a very local problem that is something the local authority or local community can deal with but it is not one which is too easy to do on a local basis everywhere, is it?
Dr Johnston: Not everywhere, and I return to the earlier discussion with Colin Challen, hence the idea of the joint management boards because particularly for flooding these are catchment-based organisations in order to work properly, and so you have vertical integration within a local authority area but you also have horizontal integration across local authorities within a catchment, so you get the joining up of policies and strategies, so one local authority does not put a housing development on their plot of land which actually makes things worse for people further down stream.
Q94 Mark Lazarowicz: What are the common discussions that are taking place, which I assume are taking place, between central and local government about how adaptive action should be funded? Are you aware of that? Maybe it is not in your remit.
Dr Johnston: I am not really aware of those discussions, to be honest.
Q95 Mark Lazarowicz: Maybe that is for the LGA or the LGiU, I do not know.
Dr Johnston: Probably. We know that the Adapting for Climate Change
Centre has about £9 million of funding and that feels like about a tenth of
what would be required to make a significant difference to adaptation in the
Q96 Mark Lazarowicz: Are there any particular barriers to local authorities funding adaptive action at present, other than just lack of money - organisational barriers, planning barriers, something like that for example?
Dr Johnston: I think there are significant what I would call governmental structural barriers which are to do with local authorities generally being able to make decisions which affect their local area across the board, and they do apply in terms of adaptation to climate change as well in so much as, for example with flooding, the Environment Agency tends to decide where most of the cash is going, and not necessarily to the local area. Then the heat wave side of the adaptation agenda is a slightly different set-up in so much as there is a big lack of knowledge there, and so support is required for local government but, again, the anticipation will be that the national house building standards will come down and they will tell local government exactly what a resilient house looks like within their area. In terms of any local authority taking a lead on these things, it is still quite difficult given the fact that it is very difficult for them to come up with local planning by-laws and local building regs and things like that and actually take a lead and take it forward.
Q97 Mark Lazarowicz: Are there risks that competing short-term priorities could squeeze out investment in longer term action?
Dr Johnston: Absolutely. We know that local government is looking at something like a 20 per cent squeeze on finances next year. Inevitably ideas which have not even started yet may not get the support that they may have done in better times. If you are looking at cutting existing services, it is very difficult to justify new services coming through.
Q98 Mark Lazarowicz: And is there a possibility that some local authorities at least might be put off from taking adaptive action if they see central government meeting the cost of clearing up the effects of extreme weather? If others are going to do it then why should they do it? Is there a danger that that might happen?
Dr Johnston: I do not think so, to be honest, because despite the fact the Government is stepping into and putting a lot of money into recovery from the Cumbrian floods, for example, we know that there are significant long-term impacts from weather events of all sorts which government funding does not cover and which the local authority has to pick up and take into the future and the health sector has to pick up and take into the future. Things which are not talked about in terms of these events are for example the effect on mental health of people who have been impacted by these events. The Government is not swinging in and paying for that, for example.
Mark Lazarowicz: I can see that from experience of my own constituency, in fact.
Q99 Chairman: The Greater London Authority has a climate change duty requiring it to mainstream climate change adaptation across its strategies. Do you think it would be helpful for other local authorities to have the same thing?
Dr Johnston: Not yet I think is my response to that because until government is completely clear about what it means by adaptation to climate change, it makes it very difficult to have a duty on local authorities to actually deliver on this thing. As an example, in a different part of the LGiU we are also working on the power to promote local democracy, which was in previous legislation, and that is also extremely difficult for local authorities to understand and take forward because it is such a nebulous concept. While adaptation is still a nebulous concept I would say no. When it becomes clearer and people have a much better idea of where thing are going then maybe. For the time being we would argue that powers to locally adapt would be much more useful than a duty to have adapted in some way.
Q100 Chairman: A lot of what we have been discussing in the last half hour is process and technical. One of the reasons perhaps that some elected members do not get very excited about this or interested in it is that there does not appear to be a big political question that they need to be addressing. Do you think that is a problem?
Dr Johnston: I think it is a problem but my feeling about where that will go is the security agenda. Many councils now are talking about climate change mitigation as an energy security issue and that is something which has much more resonance locally than climate change, is it man-made, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You can put all those debates to one side and you can talk about what a local authority member is doing for their constituents in their area, and it is around security and safety and "that's why you voted for me in the first place." I think we can begin to get a narrative going around adaptation to climate change in the same way, that this is about the long-term security and resilience of the area where people live. If you talk about it in those terms, then I think you will begin to get purchase from local authority members rather than talking about this abstract concept of adaptation.
Chairman: That is very helpful; thank you very much. We have to draw it to a close because we have a couple more witnesses to come now. Thank you.
Memorandum submitted by Town and Country Planning Association
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Gideon Amos OBE, Chief Executive, and Dr Hugh Ellis, Chief Planner, Town and Country Planning Association, gave evidence.
Q101 Chairman: Good morning and thank you for coming in. You will have heard the previous evidence and, as I said earlier, we have got about half an hour to try and get through some of the key issues. Could I ask you to begin with what demands you think adaptation places on the planning system?
Mr Amos: I think there are two broad areas. Of course there are hundreds of areas of adaptation one could look at but there are two broad areas clearly where we need to adapt the environment. One is in terms of the increased temperature, particularly exemplified by the urban heat island effect, and the other is managing water in its broadest sense, so that is fluvial flooding, coastal change and weather-related rainfall flooding. Those are two very broad areas. Obviously one could expand a lot more on all the adaptation measures needed, and I suppose the main point I want to make in response to your question, Chairman, is that the planning system, if you take a decade-long perspective, actually is a huge lever to create major environmental change. You can look at regional parks such as the Lea Valley, you can look at green spaces throughout cities, the fact that hundreds of our houses post-War have gardens, all these changes to the landscape crucially have had planning behind them, and of course river catchment planning is another tool in that armoury. I suppose the benefit of an active and purposeful approach to planning is that over the long term these changes can be made and new development can be used as a catalyst to try and retrofit the neighbouring neighbourhood at the same time. I suppose those are the kinds of changes we would like to see in the impacts of new development on existing towns and cities.
Q102 Chairman: So in that way the planning system is capable of helping the country adapt to climate change. Are there other ways in which the system itself needs to be modified to make that easier for planners to make a contribution?
Mr Amos: I think the most important thing for us is probably having a plan-led approach. There is a lot of evidence before you and Members about the need for strategies and the need for adaptation plans and green infrastructure strategies. None of these land use changes is really going to take shape unless there is some sort of statutory plan-led process behind it. We regarded it as a huge step forward in 1990 when development planning applications became the subject of a plan-led approach. As it happens, just a brief point of history, Chairman, 100 years ago last Thursday Parliament got Royal Assent for the first Planning Act in the world which empowered local authorities for the first time to have development plans, town planning schemes, and that unleashed a whole generation of garden cities and garden suburbs-type development. We will return to the subject of gardens, but I think it just shows how important a plan-led approach is and how important it is that we do not lose that in the next few years of undoubted change in policy and legislation.
Q103 Chairman: On another point of history, the plan-led process you referred to in 1998 occurred when I was a Planning Minister.
Mr Amos: I was aware of that.
Q104 Colin Challen: You said that the planning system must be transformed if climate change is to be placed at the heart of decision-making. What is preventing this from happening at present?
Dr Ellis: There are some complex reasons and we touched on these in the coalition work we did producing a framework for a new PPS on climate change, but two or three top headlines would be political will, skills and culture, as perhaps the biggest driving force behind the difficulties that planning has to deliver. There are complexities in the structures of planning which we could probably sort out as well, but there are also complexities about the duties and priorities. One of the things that has to be addressed really carefully is what tasks we set the planning system to do. At the moment those tasks are confused and although there are critical duties in the 2004 and 2008 Acts on climate change, those duties are written in the weakest possible form, and so it is not surprising they do not necessarily drive transformational change. That means that local planners are conflicted about what they need to be doing. In our view, there is no greater challenge than climate change and the fact that we are not delivering anything like the way we should on the ground is scandalous and we need to sort it out, but that requires changes to skills and education and it requires changes to duties, and it requires changes to resources.
Q105 Colin Challen: Are we going to get a two-tier system where major infrastructure projects now of course have a separate planning route and then there is all the rest. Are there going to be any lessons learned when this really comes into force next year?
Dr Ellis: I do not think the two systems are well-related and there is already a fairly critical lesson there about the kind of narrative that we need from top to bottom on policy. There are the overarching principles of adaptation which are really well established. We know what we need to deliver mostly, but that kind of narrative is not clearly laid out. National policy statements are extremely controversial obviously and Parliament is examining them at the moment. The content on adaptation seems to me to be relatively good, but underneath that what we found is that the transformational PPS on climate change published in 2007 did not have that much effect on local government. Why did it not? Because even though the rhetoric was strong, it did not send a powerful enough signal to say that this is your first and foremost priority.
Q106 Colin Challen: Can you give me an example of that signal in terms of being able to translate it into concrete terms?
Dr Ellis: We have sent the planning system confused messages about priorities. We are talking about nothing less than the most significant transformation of the system post-War, and that requires very strong national prescriptive guidance. There is no other way forward because the amount of time we have left, given that we should have started adapting our cities a decade ago, is extremely short and that means that the overall national framework needs to set very clear guidance. We need to have national centres for knowledge which we talk about in our paper. It means that the profession needs to step up to the challenge through a very radical education programme. On top of all that you are talking about transforming local political leadership on climate change.
Q107 Colin Challen: I get the impression that perhaps we have conflicting PPSs, some advocating other priorities. Could you provide any examples of that, if you agree?
Dr Ellis: There is definitely a mixed message not between climate and housing but between climate and economic development. Economic development post-Stern should not be in conflict with dealing with climate change and a low-carbon economy, but I think in many local planners' minds, the traditional methods of economic development are taking precedence. That means that we are still engineering our cities and urban spaces to be problems for the future of climate change. We are not grasping overall nationally the need, for example, to consider the redistribution of population, which we are probably going to have to deal with if we do not get an agreement to limit temperature change below two degrees. That is the biggest conflict. Those things should be integrated. There is a huge opportunity to deliver a low-carbon economy but we have not managed somehow to grasp the opportunity yet.
Q108 Colin Challen: Should PPSs be so prescriptive that they prevent for example building new housing on floodplains?
Dr Ellis: There is still certainly some very disturbing practice given the risks of development on floodplains. I hasten to add that means that we then have to find sites for the housing we desperately need in other places, but the coalition document asks DCLG for a higher level of prescription for planning policy statements. To give you an example of the precise conflict, a planning policy statement's status in planning is defined only in case law, which is unhelpful. A national policy statement has clearly defined legal status for the new national framework. Those sorts of gaps and uncertainties could be resolved, but essentially this is not like public policy-making that I have ever known. If we are to deal with climate change there has to be a level of clear central framework.
Q109 Colin Challen: You make these points; do you think the DCLG is listening?
Dr Ellis: Yes I do but I think there are barriers to them delivering on the ground. They can write what they like, but if local decision-makers and local practitioners are not skilled enough to deliver it and do not have the resources to deliver it and do not feel they have political support, then plainly that has little effect.
Q110 Chairman: You mentioned that you thought the draft national policy statements were quite helpful. Do you want to enlarge on that a little bit?
Mr Amos: Can I declare an interest, Chairman. I have accepted an appointment as an IPC commissioner so I am leaving all the questions on NPSs to my colleague.
Dr Ellis: The contents of section five of the overarching Energy NPS for example sets out what I regard as a reasonably straightforward, commonsense framework. You need to think about adaptation. It would be desirable if our new nuclear build was not within one metre of sea level, for example. However, there are difficulties I think - and this is a very important point - because the duties that exist on secretaries of state in the preparation of NPSs on climate to think about climate change have had some effect on adaptation and no effect on mitigation, which we are frankly terrified about, but the question is that those duties do not apply to the decision-maker, so there is no duty to think about climate change inside the IPC or placed upon the IPC. That means that there are big questions about whether or not the IPC has a sufficient skill-set (although of course they are some very talented people amongst the commissioners!) for example to interpret properly the UKCIP projections or the weather generator inside UKCIP to enable them to make a judgment about whether or not any of our infrastructure, our nuclear build, should be anywhere close to the North Sea, for example.
Q111 Chairman: Just on an example local to my constituency, to respond to the likely establishment of another nuclear power station at Sizewell and the definite establishment of offshore wind power, National Grid are proposing to upgrade the transmission capacity. They are doing that through the upgrade of their overhead power lines. Presumably, an adaptation strategy would encourage the burying of power lines rather than creating more overhead ones at a time when one of the certainties is bigger storms, higher winds and more violent conditions?
Dr Ellis: The IPC may very well conclude that but that is certainly what they would have to consider, absolutely.
Q112 Martin Horwood: I want to follow up on this. That is quite a major spanner in the works you are throwing in terms of the new nuclear build because almost all the sites are going to be based on existing power station sites which are almost all on the coastline.
Dr Ellis: Yes.
Q113 Martin Horwood: So you think there is a major problem with the whole nuclear new build plan?
Dr Ellis: There is undoubtedly a major problem. In TCPA in the climate unit we have three sets of science. We have the IPC, we have the mainstream generally, but if we take where the science is going on climate change and sea level rises, by mid-century, if we do not get an agreement in Copenhagen, then the optimum sea level rise, if we lose all the ice, is 22 metres. No-one is suggesting we get that necessarily by the end of the century but it does not seem sensible to have nuclear facilities with a lifetime of 150 years, 200 years post-decommissioning, anywhere near sea level.
Chairman: Martin, you still have the floor if you want it.
Q114 Martin Horwood: This is moving back on to some of the comments you made about green infrastructure and the planning of green infrastructure. CABE in their evidence suggested that one of the problems was the lack of a clear national database of information about green infrastructure, and that it was not properly mapped. Do you think that there would be a benefit to planners in particular of having that database and having a very clear process of mapping and identifying green infrastructure?
Mr Amos: I think also one of the points CABE made about assessing the quality of green space is particularly important in terms of whether green infrastructure are delivering the adaptational benefits or not, because there is a whole variety, so having a database and knowledge in that whole area has got to be beneficial. The short answer is yes.
Q115 Martin Horwood: What would you include in that database? Would you include gardens and things like that?
Mr Amos: Absolutely and clearly the whole issue of back gardens is central to this whole debate. There has been a small move forward with regulation to require planning permission before paving over front gardens but we did not make the same advance on back gardens and obviously with the classification of back gardens as previously developed land, and therefore brownfield land, the quantity of building on back gardens has to be a serious concern given that 60 per cent of new housing is meant to be on brownfield. A huge amount of that could be an impact on gardens. The way the data is collected at the moment means that you cannot easily get at those figures. There is data on the quantity of development on existing residential land, and that is the closest you can get to an estimate of how much of that is garden land. It is a very difficult issue. Obviously the Mayor of London has been grappling with this as well. However, it must be central to value urban green space, and green space close to where people live, very highly in our planning processes, if we are concerned about adaptation, and the current system, partly because of the data gathering, does not do that.
Q116 Martin Horwood: Can I just ask you about definitions. You said "urban green space" but you also said "green space close to where people live". I want to ask a specific question which is about some work that the old Countryside Agency did before it was abolished talking about "green space on the urban fringe", which is often some of the most volcanically contentious in planning terms because developers love it and local people obviously want to protect it. Do you think that urban fringe countryside should also be counted as part of that urban green space and identified and mapped and protected in that way?
Mr Amos:
Obviously we have pretty tough green
belt policy to protect that urban fringe if that is the objective. I think for the adaptation debate what is
particularly important is the fact that, as the Manchester research shows, a
ten per cent decrease in green cover can mean a seven degree Celsius change in
temperature. That is a massive change in
temperature. It does not matter so much
whether you are living on the urban fringe or right in the centre of an urban
area or in the middle of suburban
Q117 Martin Horwood: Groundwork
Mr Amos: I think having an LDF would probably be the first step in that direction.
Q118 Martin Horwood: Do you think it is logical to do it on a local authority level or do you think, given what we know about the landscape and catchment areas, that these landscape policies need to be on a larger scale?
Mr Amos:
Exactly.
Obviously there are some questions that can be dealt with entirely
locally but there are also huge issues that need to be dealt with at a strategic
level. Earlier with the previous witness
you were mentioning river catchment planning, which obviously crosses local
authority boundaries. We are concerned
about rumblings about a move away from any kind of strategic or regional
planning given that these problems are not local. We accept that the environmental debate is
international, do we not, and we accept that these things need to be tackled
over international boundaries. We need
to recognise that when it gets down to a
Q119 Martin Horwood: Can I ask you about
one specific sentence in your submission as well. In talking about the 60 per cent re-use of
brownfield land for redevelopment target, you said: "Regional spatial
strategies and local development frameworks have used this target to encourage
urban regeneration and discourage potentially sustainable greenfield
developments, rather than considering the benefits of proactive planning and
re-use of brownfield and greenfield land to form a network of green
infrastructure to contribute towards adaptation." It is quite clear what the benefits of the
proactive planning approach are for urban areas, but are you actually saying
that local authorities could benefit the environment by proactively planning
Mr Amos: We are not suggesting that every single application would be better done on greenfield land - that would be quite wrong - but I think it does fall to us to speak up for the point that there are occasions where a greenfield location, particularly some which are very heavily farmed with perhaps high levels of chemicals, very poor biodiversity, perhaps neighbouring of brownfield sites, could be part of a development that actually brings about environmental through development. The RSPB has done a lot of work about biodiversity in urban gardens. Some of these options do come up, especially if public transport is also excellent perhaps around a country station. The important thing is that we are very happy to support the 60 per cent brownfield target, but it is important to recognise that there are opportunities to do highly sustainable developments which improve the natural environment through development on occasion and it is not as simple as saying greenfield will always be bad.
Q120 Mark Lazarowicz: In your submissions you say that there is a need for a "step change in the skills and education of decision-makers, both political and professional, in local and regional government." What evidence is there of a coherent strategy for delivering a step change in the skills of planners? Is the necessary training available or does it need to be put in place?
Dr Ellis: There is no doubt progress and the RTPI have announced progress in the education of planners. I think given the scale of the challenge I keep coming back to these words "transformational change". That is not just about young planners being trained on climate, which needs to be mainstreamed much more centrally, but it is also about continuing professional development. You almost need to take the profession out for a month and reskill them on climate change. When you look at some of the statistics that are quoted in our submission from the Arup study about the number of planning applications in authorities that go through the system with no consideration of climate change or adaptation at all, it is frightening. There is also the interface between professional planners and particularly between elected members and their training. Our experience of that is difficult because there are some fantastic elected members out there prioritising climate change, but there is also a significant body of elected members who remain climate deniers, which is very difficult.
Q121 Mark Lazarowicz: Should central government be doing anything to help address the skills gap?
Dr Ellis: Absolutely they should. They need to put as much pressure as possible on the profession to evolve and change and reskill itself. That is partly about resources. Some of that is pointing in the right direction. In terms of communicating key strategies, to give one example, it would be the renewable energy strategy, so a programme of communicating that to both professionals and to elected members is absolutely critical if we are going to get the right kind of renewable energy, and the same applies to adaptation.
Q122 Mark Lazarowicz: Can local government do more to either improve skills within a particular local authority or even the climate of opinion or understanding amongst local planners and local communities, for example?
Dr Ellis: I certainly
think it is beginning to happen, but the problem we have got is that it is
driven by events rather than driven by strategy, so we have the
Q123 Mark Lazarowicz: I was interested in what you were saying about a lot of local councillors denying climate change. Are they denying climate change is happening or do they just not think it is that important?
Dr Ellis: When you seek to pursue climate through the energy route, I have been roasted many a time, probably fairly, at events on renewable energy, particularly onshore wind, so where you approach the climate debate from that perspective there is tremendous resistance, perhaps for understandable reasons. There simply is not the grasp of the scale and urgency and there simply is not the accessible science or information. One critical example of that is that UKCIP does a fantastic job but the way that they have conveyed risk and probability through their findings is not one that is easily understood, so what they are saying is should you pick a 50/50 risk of a major event happening or an 80 per cent risk of it happening, and that kind of probability does not work. What people need at the local level is, as the previous witness said very well I think, a clear scenario about what will happen in their community and then people can coalesce around that.
Mr Amos: Could I add very briefly that we are leading a European project to provide the skills and methodology to produce adaptation action plans which would then do exactly as Hugh says: to identify what the changes are in the particular area and how then you respond to those through adaptation measures.
Q124 Chairman: You have advocated a Climate Change Technical Advice Body. Why on earth do we need yet another organisation?
Dr Ellis: A coalition of 60 organisations came up with that idea. I was very struck, given that there is a huge presumption not to have another body and yet more complexity, about the massive consensus there was around that. That is because there needs to be, as I have just described, a body at sub-national level really, providing local authorities with a trusted source of information. There are two dimensions to it which are important. The first is that we must not have adaptation organisations split off from mitigation because strategising about both resolves the conflicts that exist between them. Some mitigation strategies will conflict with adaptation strategies. Unless that is done and the methodologies and data are collected by one body, there is a horrible risk of conflict between the two ideas. The CCTAB idea was not simply to re-create organisations but to pool the information in an accessible form. It is interesting for example that although the Environment Agency and UKCIP work well together, I am sure, there is no formal agreement between the organisations and there is significant uncertainty amongst local decision-makers about what each organisation's remit might be. That is replicated in mitigation, particularly in relation to information on energy for example. The idea of the CCTAB is essentially a laboratory. It is not a political body, if you like, but a laboratory where you can access - and the phrase has been used - in a one-stop shop everything you need to know to come up with a decent climate response in a local authority area. There is a fairly desperate need for that, although little sign that it will appear, because the greatest sin of all in responding to climate change is the fact that most local decision-makers do not know where to access critical information that would really transform communities.
Q125 Chairman: If we accept there is a case for this body, who will pay for it?
Dr Ellis: I have two
responses to that. The first one is we
did not work out who would pay for it.
We hoped that it would sit within the regional planning function and
obviously there is debate about where the regional planning function might go. There are other bodies and other examples of
how that is done, in relation to aggregates planning for example, where it is
dealt with in a similar way, so we were not thinking of creating an entirely
new structure. It sits within the
regional planning function, but the other side of that coin, which is reflected
by Stern and the
Q126 Martin Horwood: Lots of the issues we have talked about today touch on areas outside of planning. We have talked about energy and water management and things like that, and you could add in transport and health. The only body that exists to co-ordinate the response to adaptation at the moment is the Government's Adapting to Climate Change Programme. Do you think that has the necessary resources and clout to actually bring all these different people together and make them work together in a co-ordinated way?
Dr Ellis: All I can say is that I do not see it happening at the moment. I would suspect that the departmental split on responsibilities for climate change will probably have to be considered very carefully. There is certainly a need for a strong unity of purpose between the three departments with responsibilities on climate change, in particular the relationship between Defra and DCLG. I am not suggesting they do not work well with each other but it is in the nature of departmental conflicts that we do not have time for any kind of uncertainty. Let me apply this test: are we driving towards adaptation in urban and rural areas effectively enough to avoid significant damage to civil society and the economy? No, absolutely not. What that will require is a much more unified approach centrally to dealing with adaptation and much more resource.
Q127 Chairman: What can the planning statistics tell us about how current buildings are being improved?
Mr Amos: I covered this in one of my earlier answers, Chairman. Actually it does not tell us an awful lot. One of the crucial issues that we have already pointed to is how much development is going on in urban gardens, and the figures do not tell us that specifically. There are all sorts of other things the data do not tell us. For example, planning permissions are not monitored so we do not know how many permissions are out there. We know there are a number of decisions but we do not know what permissions have been granted, so the debate about the effectiveness of planning and adaptation and a whole range of other areas is somewhat obfuscated by that. I guess we are really arguing particularly with regard to development of green space. There might always be important development impacts on flooding, water management patterns, those kinds of impacts of development which we need to be gathering some data on, and we are not at the moment.
Q128 Chairman: What is the cost of doing that?
Mr Amos: When the TCPA is large enough to have a huge financial department we could estimate the cost, but I am afraid we have not got that far in our submission, Chairman.
Q129 Mark Lazarowicz: As you well know, 80 per cent of the buildings that will be around in 2015 have already been built. Does the Government have a coherent approach to encouraging the adaptation of existing buildings and what should the Government be doing to encourage owners of those builders to do so?
Mr Amos: One of the interesting things about planning is that when it comes to climate the whole area is going to change. It does not actually matter whether it is an area zoned for development. The whole country is going to be subject to a change in temperature and other changes, so environmental change will be happening across existing urban built-up areas and sites of new development, so to answer your question I think that we need to be seizing the opportunities that new development offer to retrofit existing neighbourhoods. We also of course need retrofitting of existing neighbourhoods even where there is no new development, and that might be regeneration schemes. Ironically, it could be the case - and Hugh referred to movements of population earlier - that large amounts of our housing stock become pretty much untenable, for example very small flats in highly dense urban areas with a heat island effect, with insufficient ventilation, these kinds of units may need to be replaced on a fairly large scale, so ironically there may be an even greater need for development and redevelopment of existing neighbourhoods as well as retrofitting of the buildings one keeps.
Dr Ellis: There is a priority in terms of section 106 or CIL money that is generated through planning, particularly on the social justice aspect of that, because some of the scenarios the University of Manchester are generating for where Manchester city might end up are already indicating that the urban heat island effect is much more very severe and will have a much more lasting effect on populations who are least able to adapt to it. If there was prioritisation about the retrofitting it would certainly be in that direction.
Q130 Chairman: Do you think there is an opportunity to encourage both retrofit but also in the case of new build better environmental standards by offering people concessions in the planning system? One of the perennial complaints is the delays that are incurred by developers. If there was a fast track offered for schemes which achieved higher environmental standards, would that be appropriate?
Mr Amos: Do you mean like eco-towns, Chairman?
Q131 Chairman: There are all sorts of other problems associated with that but someone who is trying to get permission to put up a dozen houses on the edge of a village, it might take him two or three years to get through the process. If it could be given in two or three months by saying these will be zero emissions houses, would that be a good idea?
Mr Amos: I mention eco-towns partly in jest, but it was an attempt to do something quickly in terms of an exemplar. It ran into problems, although now the local authorities are very supportive. I suppose there is always a danger of setting up a special procedure in planning for a special kind of development. My stock answer would be that if it is such an excellent development, it should be getting permission straight away anyway, it should be meeting all the policies and standards, so it should be fast-tracked. Why that is not happening is another question. I do not know if my colleague wants to add.
Dr Ellis: Absolutely. I would also highlight one of the recommendations in the coalition document which is about climate change being the first amongst equals of material considerations. At the moment climate change is so novel I have yet to see a planning application refused because of its climate impact, even now, which is again fairly disastrous. If climate change was raised up as one of the critical considerations, then in theory that would solve that problem because developers coming along being able to meet that high standard on climate change would find their pathway through the planning system much easier.
Chairman: I think we have probably come to the end of our time. Thank you very much for coming. Climate is a very crucial aspect to all of this so we are grateful to you for your evidence.