Minutes:
Question
I'm very pleased that this Council has declared a climate emergency, and delighted to see in some literature through my door that £50 million will be spent on reducing our carbon emissions, which is set to be approved at tonight's meeting as part of the Council's budget. Specifically, how will this money be used?
Answer
The committed investment of £50 million over the next three years (subject to approval at this Council) will allow some of the actions identified within the initial Climate Emergency Action Plan to progress.
To significantly reduce the Borough’s carbon dioxide emissions within 10 years, the Council will require the implementation of substantial actions. The Council efforts will focus on the key emitting sectors; energy, domestic gas and transport.
The assigned funding will be allocated over the next 3 years to the following projects:
· Development of infrastructure for the generation of renewable energy. These will take shape in the form of solar farms, which will either feed into a battery or grid arrangement.
· Reduction of energy consumption in council-owned assets. These will see a wide range of energy efficiency projects at existing properties to reduce our energy demand. These include installing LED lighting, cavity wall and loft insulation boiler controls. These are envisaged to deliver demonstrable energy saving benefit.
· Investment in energy reduction schemes to support residents and small businesses to fund energy efficiency and retrofitting projects.
· Investment in public rights of way, cycle networks, greenways, new foot and cycle structures and other non-motorised routes throughout the Borough to support mode shift to active and sustainable modes of transport.
· Enhancement of transport infrastructure in the Borough to expand and improve the use of public transport.
· Improvement in waste schemes to increase recycling and food waste collection.
· Implementation of a rolling programme of capital projects aimed at enhancing biodiversity of various sites and other assets.
Supplementary Question:
When I look through last year’s Capital Spending Programme a lot of that money was already in there before we had declared a climate emergency. For example, food waste collection had £20,000 in the Budget for the coming financial year but it was under the Customer and Locality section. This year the same amount is under Climate Emergency. Coppid Beech Park and Ride was under last year’s Budget for £2.7m to be spent in the coming financial year in Customer and Localities. The same amount has been transferred to the Climate Emergency section of this year’s Budget. Likewise, greenways were down for £1m in the coming financial year and in this year’s Budget it is actually less at £874,000 under Climate Emergency. There are many examples of this and I believe it is a bit misleading. How is this £50million for the Climate Emergency when it looks like old money with a new name?
Supplementary Answer:
Actually almost half of the money that is being spent on climate emergency is new money. The money that we are putting into solar farms, the money we are putting into our Green Bank project, is all new money coming in. It was not in the Budget last year and it was not in any budgets beforehand.
What we have done though is very deliberately brought together under one roof, one remit, all of the programmes and projects that we believe will influence and help bring down our carbon footprint and our carbon budget. Yes, some of these are existing programmes. The Council has already been working on things like greenways and cycle routes, but it makes sense to have them all in one place under one officer group, to make sure that it can be monitored effectively, and that we can make sure that going forwards we are recording all of the net savings that we are making on our carbon budget, not just small fractions on it here and there.