Playing nice
The new climate action pledge becomes more than that when the funding rubber hits the road
The UK has more than 770 local authorities (LAs) of one form or another. We hear lots about shortage of funds for said LAs and, in England at least, some commentators are saying this is getting to crisis point. Judging by the increasing number of section 114 notices, they may well have a point.
Local authorities are now issuing section 114 notices at an alarming rate which puts them and local taxpayers at risk. In the last six years, eight local authorities have issued a section 114 notice, which notifies of severe financial distress — while none had done so in the preceding eighteen years.
Source: House of Commons, Feb 2024
Certainly, LAs are having to devote increasing amounts of their budgets – perhaps as much as 70% - to social services, with demand driven by issues around poverty, housing, health, and education support. And, with a total funding gap in England alone of something like £4 billion over the next two years, surely luxuries like climate action and sustainability are being put on the shelf, aren’t they?
And yet…
A glance at the new pledge from UK100 and Mission Zero Coalition, entitled Taking the heat out of local climate action, shows a sign-up rate moving towards double digits each day. By the time this post goes out, it may have surpassed that figure. Signatories include council leaders, cabinet members, councillors, and candidates seeking election to local and combined authorities, and we note with interest that at least one signature there is from the leader of a council that is currently working under a section 114 notice.
Not that we’re pooh-poohing this pledge, mind you. Oh no. far from it. Anything that commits such people to rise above party politics when addressing the climate crisis, resist the urge to drag climate policies into culture wars, and to tackle the rising tide of climate misinformation by providing accurate, accessible information about climate policies and the need for urgent local action, works well in our book. After all, we have long said that the job of restoring a sustainable world is far too important to be put in the hands of politicians.
So, just a promise to play nice? Well, a couple of paragraphs in the pledge caught our eye as being the points at which the rubber hits the road as far as moving any one of these signatories from being a person who plays nice, to one who plays nice and is actually trying to do something about it.
[We, the undersigned, commit to:]
Champion the role of local authorities in driving the transition to Net Zero, working in partnership with central government, businesses, and civil society to deliver inclusive, equitable place-based solutions.
Recognise that local authorities are constrained and will need to make difficult decisions. While accountability is essential to local democracy, we will scrutinise with an understanding that our shared goal is to learn from our mistakes and advance climate action by improving delivery.
Source: UK100 / Mission Zero Coalition
That’s the nub, isn’t it. LAs must drive the transition to sustainability (we prefer to drop that confusing ‘Net Zero’ slogan these days) because, let’s face it, central government, many businesses and civil society in general doesn’t have much of a clue. But, LAs are pretty hamstrung with all their other commitments – many of them growing – so they’ll have to use all their collective ‘green’ skills of creative collaboration, systems thinking, problem framing and the rest, to figure out the best way to build the seven-storey sustainability house with just the few left over bricks that didn’t get lost from last Christmas’s Hogwarts Express Lego set1.
But, while we may be sounding a little pessimistic here, we’re actually quite positive: in our experience, many of the good folks working at all levels in the LAs we’ve had dealings with are actually just that – pretty capable people. Or, put it this way, they’re going to need to be…
…to take on the increasing load. As more and more gets demanded of LAs in terms of local economic regeneration via Levelling-up, together with the adult education budget and other things that Westminster and Whitehall like to call ‘devolution’, they’ll need to keep looking for collaboration opportunities and economies of scale, particularly in the sharing of skilled labour and expertise.
…to build strategic partnerships. We already see some LAs developing major strategic partnerships, like the borough councils of Eastleigh, Fareham, Gosport, Isle of Wight and others, plus Solent Freeport and Hampshire County Council in the line-up for the Solent’s version of the UK Industrial Cluster programme. We see this going even further when we read about the regeneration of whole regions built on flourishing green economies.
UK Industrial Decarbonisation Clusters. Image: Black Country Consortium.
…to enhance trading flows between local businesses. One interesting concept here is Community Wealth Building (CWB), which among other things preaches (and, presumably, practises) ‘progressive procurement’ to leverage public sector purchasing power alongside that of local ‘anchor’ institutions, for the benefit of the local area. Local sourcing, supplier diversity, community engagement, capacity building, long-term partnerships – all good stuff. CWB originated in the States, but it’s sometimes known as the ‘Preston’ model because, well, Preston’s doing it, along with similar schemes in Manchester, Birmingham, Oldham, Salford, Kirklees, Islington, Enfield, Southampton, Wakefield, and Bristol.
We also see growing interest – particular in Europe – in public wealth funds and their various guises, including public venture capital wealth funds, climate wealth funds, and regional and urban wealth funds. In our view, this builds on what we are seeing in terms of clean energy boosting economic growth by collective action and pooling of resources.
On the debit side of the ledger, though, we hear from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and others that the costs of not acting on climate change could be far worse than initially thought.
Projected income changes (%) in 2049 compared to an economy without climate change. Image: PIK.
The bottom line? PIK estimates that, even if we meet the 2C target in the Paris Agreement, climate change will reduce global GDP by 19% relative to a world without climate change.
If that’s true, along with LAs leading the transition, shouldn’t we be chucking as much funding as we can to LAs right now to help them to help us sort it out?
Why does Lego do that? Used to be, we had a big box of bricks that we could build anything with, given a little imagination.