58: Rate my council: Climate Emergency UK's Climate Action Scorecards

How well do our local councils perform when it comes to tackling the climate crisis? One not-for-profit organisation - Climate Emergency UK - makes it its business to rate and measure the performance and progress of local authorities, with their innovative Council Climate Action Scorecards. For our first episode of 2023, Becky and Matt are joined by Hannah Jewell, the group's Campaigns and Policy Officer.

Episode Transcript:

[Music flourish]

Matt:  Hello and welcome to the first Local Zero of 2023. It’s Matt here...

Rebecca:  And Becky [laughter]. Happy New Year, Matt.

Matt:  Yeah, Happy New Year and here we go again. Coming up in this episode, we’ll hear from Hannah Jewell, Campaigns and Policy Officer at Climate Emergency UK.

Rebecca:  It’s going to be yet another fascinating chat and an episode that’s packed full of practical, concrete things that you can do locally, wherever you live, to drive climate up the agenda for your local authority.

[Music flourish]

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Matt:  Absolutely and I think, before long, we’re probably going to have to create a Mastodon account as well. There are all sorts going on in this space but for now, you can, of course, find us on Twitter. So, Becky, before we go any further, did you have a good Christmas and a Happy New Year?

Rebecca:  I had a fantastic Christmas and New Year. It was a really lovely and welcome break.

Matt:  Good.

Rebecca:  Not a relaxing time...

Matt:  No, of course, it wasn’t. It’s Christmas [laughter].

Rebecca:  ...but really wonderful with family. Yeah, [laughter] how about yourself, Matt.

Matt:  Yeah, it was similar. I mean I wracked up a lot of road miles seeing family and friends and actually, going back to previous discussions we’ve had around Evs, we’re driving a plug-in hybrid and I was pretty thankful for it not being pure electric because we were in some seriously busy parts of the UK and getting around the Midlands. Maybe one year, we’ll try it but it wouldn’t be a relaxing experience I don’t think.

Rebecca:  No, and actually, my mum sent me an article from The Times, I think it was yesterday or the day before, and it was someone reflecting on why they are trying desperately to get rid of their EV and all the problems that they’ve had with these longer journeys. But yes, maybe another episode to come back to in the future.

Matt:  Definitely. Any New Year’s resolutions? Are you hopeful about 2023? Is there anything that you’re wanting to get done, particularly on the climate and green front? Because obviously, you’re in a completely new location. You have moved. You’ve upped sticks. You’re in Cornwall and you’ve got a new home, new job and all sorts.

Rebecca:  I do. It’s very exciting. Lots of stuff going on. I’ve really been reflecting, Matt, on how things have changed in my life over the past five to ten years, kids aside.

Matt:  Kids aside [laughter]. 

Rebecca:  Yeah, kids aside [laughter].

Matt:  They’re not disruptive at all [laughter]

Rebecca:  Yeah, I mean it’s probably partly influenced by that but I used to do a lot of travelling for work. I’d go to a lot of conferences. I would really love that kind of interaction and getting around. What I’ve realised is that that’s still great but I think Covid has changed a lot of that. I’m really excited about doing more practical stuff on the ground in my local community. It’s something that I feel like I’ve been missing for a long time and so I’m really, really looking forward to digging in, whether it’s looking at joining a community garden. I was chatting with someone yesterday about local volunteering that can be done. The kids are starting to get that bit older and I think that’s going to be something that we look to focus on this year like how we can really have a much stronger role in that local community.

Matt:  Yeah, I’d agree. A few years ago, I had the same feeling; hence, I connected with my local environmental charity through South Seeds and that’s been a really important counterweight to a lot of the work that you and I have done in terms of academia, whether it’s classic academic publications or working much more with policy and industry. It’s actually getting to grips with real people in a real-world environment and a real community and figuring out how we can get stuff done. As soon as you start doing that, you start to see a whole host of other opportunities but also barriers. If I’m honest, it’s just getting that sense of satisfaction that you’re kind of shifting the dial somewhere in the real world and seeing a community change direction and trying, I guess, to translate some of the stuff that we know, the lessons we’ve learnt through this pod and actually, put that into practice. So I’d agree; that’s a really good New Year’s resolution.

Rebecca:  Yeah. Any on your end? What are your family up to?

Matt:  Well, I don’t know. I’ll maybe put this into the ‘hopes’ category. I was reflecting a lot on the podcast we recorded just before Christmas which I thoroughly enjoyed actually. It was great to have most of us there. Obviously, you were dialling in but it was really good to have us all in the recording booth there. There was this sense of industrial action in reaction to the cost of living crisis and this sitting alongside a much broader ecological and climate crisis and it feels like all roads are leading to a different way of tackling this kind of omnicrisis; this omnishambles shall we say. It’s this idea that industrial action could provide a plinth for tackling the climate crisis in a different way; a communal response to a shared problem and one that yields society-wide benefits. I just think the way that we’ve been going about the climate crisis and trying to shove a kind of round peg in a square hole by saying, ‘Look, we need to deal with this cross-cutting, systemic problem by acting as individual consumers,’ is just not the way to go about it. I think this pod very much speaks to that. It’s about local climate action working together to tackle this issue. I just feel that something is coming in from stage left in terms of the industrial crisis and cost of living crisis which could really offer a springboard for 2023. I think we’re entering a brave new world now and we have a general election coming up as well and so the question mark is how do you combine these two crises with a manifesto that can speak to both of those? So I’m very excited about 2023 because I think all the big political parties and small political parties are going to have something to say about this.

Rebecca:  Yeah, it’s a really, really interesting point and for me, what really brings it together is this idea of folk from very different walks of life or different career stages coming together to support that transition: the bringing together of industry with local businesses, households, local government and national government and getting a lot of that aligned. I’ll tell you, it’s been an absolute eye-opener over the past few months that I’ve been doing this in terms of my house renovation and I’ve not been overly focused on the sustainability aspects. I’m moving into a house that is fairly well-insulated. It’s already double-glazed. I’m not terrible on the whole Energy Performance Certificate rating. I know you’ve had a number of challenges that you’ve been tackling in your home that we’ve talked about on the pod before with your double-glazing and so on.

Matt:  Yeah, don’t remind me [laughter].

Rebecca:  Let’s not get into that.

Matt:  I’ve had therapy and all sorts [laughter].

Rebecca:  You do see things from the point of view of how you actually could go about delivering this if you’re trying to take that individualistic approach. If we try and take a market-led approach where we just put incentives out there, expect people to take this up, to deliver it on their own, to do all the research and to make all the decisions, I just can’t see that happening. So the idea that industry is getting involved and that we’re starting to see this kind of culmination of action from different players is quite exciting.

Matt:  I think that really neatly segues into what we’re covering today. We’re talking about councils. We’re talking about their net-zero strategies and their response to the climate crisis. We’ve got local elections coming up in May but there’s a lot of stuff that came out in the lead-up to COP26 in terms of we’re going to go net zero by X or Y year. We’ve got our Climate Emergency UK guest today digging into what these commitments are. Ultimately, we talk a lot about national government and national political parties but really, the government that we spend most of our time actually connecting with most is our local councils. Actually, a lot of the time we spend grumbling about stuff or, indeed, praising tends to be stuff that local councils have done but often, we don’t join the dots. I think today’s discussion will be really interesting. What are councils actually doing? Who is doing the most and who is doing the least?

Rebecca:  Yeah, and, of course, they’re in a real tough spot. Our councils are being squeezed in so many different directions. I think back to the second-ever episode of Local Zero that we recorded and if you haven’t listened, go listen to that. There was a focus on Covid but I actually think that a lot of the points that we talked about still hold true when we’re looking at this from a cost of living crisis instead of a Covid crisis perspective. Councils have been squeezed in so many different ways but ultimately, they are where the rubber hits the road.

Matt:  I agree, yeah.

Rebecca:  They have to have a say and they have to be involved but it’s often not within the mandated areas that they need to be delivering on, so it’s a really, really hard space.

Matt:  And, indeed, if you look at the direct powers that councils have, often, they don’t have a great deal of control over emissions but when you take their influence in the round and where they can nudge, push and encourage... there was a report undertaken on behalf of the Climate Change Committee which suggested that local authorities have influence over a third of emissions in their local areas. In this context, 83% of councils have declared a climate emergency. So all of them are trying, at least on paper, to make a positive change but as you say, their ambition is there and their heart is in the right place but the resources have been stripped and shrunk over the years. This analysis is a couple of years out of date but the Institute for Government said that between 2010 and 2020, the typical budget for an English council shrunk by 16%.

Rebecca:  Whilst what they needed to deliver probably grew about the same amount [laughter].

Matt:  So how can you do more with less? That’s what I’d like to know. Yeah, it’s really important to understand which councils are trying to do the most and then the question is what are they actually doing and how if those budgets are being cut.

Rebecca:  I’ll tell you what really excites me and then what worries me with this. What really excites me is the convening power that councils can have. We’ve seen that working with the EnergyRev programme that funds this great podcast, working with the Prospering From the Energy Revolution programme and just looking to see how councils can be really situated in that space of bringing together a number of the key players in their local area to work together to drive change like the NHS, big industry, businesses and other perhaps local functions within there and connected through to community groups. That really excites me. For me, it’s thinking about not necessarily how they can do more with less but how can they think about doing it in a smarter way and making sure that the onus isn’t all on them but they are acting in that way to bring together people in that local area. What really worries me is that we see and we have seen very ambitious climate action plans, particularly from Glasgow. Glasgow’s is extremely ambitious. Are we going to see that delivered on in the timeframe that we have left? That’s what worries me.

Matt:  Yeah, political will is one thing but the resource is another thing. But your point about them being the lynchpin for all these different stakeholders, I absolutely agree with. So I think, without further ado, we ought to hear from the experts.

[Music flourish]

Hannah:  My name is Hannah Jewell and I’m the Campaigns and Policy Officer at Climate Emergency UK.

Matt:  Welcome, Hannah. Welcome to Local Zero. It’s absolutely fabulous to have you along and a happy 2023 to you. It’s great to have Climate Emergency UK on the pod. We’re big fans of what you’ve done. We’re very much interested in local authorities and councils and their actions in terms of tackling the climate emergency. I think first things first for our listeners. Could you tell us a little bit about Climate Emergency UK and what it does and why it was set up?

Hannah:  Climate Emergency UK is a CIC (Community Interest Company) or a micro-organisation as I like to call us because there are only three of us. Basically, we were started by Kevin Frea, who is the deputy leader of Lancaster Council, back in 2019 as all of the councils started to announce their climate emergency declarations. The original intention of Climate Emergency UK was just a simple way to collate every single climate emergency declaration as they came out and just put them up on a website. If you wanted to know if your council had declared a climate emergency and you wanted to read their declaration, you could just go to the website and read it. That was the simple initial starting point. Basically, each time that we’ve done something, another person has come along and said, ‘I love that idea. Why don’t I work with you to do this other idea?’ So we’ve built momentum over time. Firstly, we started working with mySociety who is a great civic tech organisation that uses technology to grease the wheels of democracy. That’s how I’d maybe describe their work. They do things like WhatDoTheyKnow. They came along and said what if they just made that database really searchable so that you can come along and say, ‘I really want to know about this element of something.’ You type it in and then you can see all the climate emergency declarations that have said that. From there, we went on to the next piece of work which we’re going to talk about a lot today which is the climate plan scorecards just as a way to take a snapshot of all of the different climate action plans, compare them to each other and see who is doing really well and who is not doing so well.

Rebecca:  That’s such an interesting space to be working in. I mean my head is hurting already just thinking about the sheer amount of data that you must be capturing [laughter] and how great that you’re actually pulling this together in a useable and useful way. This is quite a big project. How did you get so excited and into this? What was your journey? It’s a small organisation and I can imagine that you’ve got quite a lot of identity embedded within that.

Hannah:  Yeah, definitely. I think that my journey is one of a fan more than one of a participant. I actually started about eight months ago or something like that... several months back now but after the work on the climate plan scorecards had come out. I’ve been working, as I said, on the climate action scorecards which, again, I’ll touch on a bit later. I first started getting involved in council climate action as a child [laughter], hilariously, back in Wales when I was 14 which is when I started learning about climate change. I just started engaging with my local council and also the Welsh Government on climate issues. I think it’s always been a really interesting space to me because it’s probably the most easy-to-influence space just because lots of people don’t understand it and the scale of people wanting to engage with it is just simply smaller. Despite being very small, it’s super influential. Councils can influence up to a third of emissions according to the CCC (Climate Change Committee) which is amazing and it comes from the very basic, very direct stuff around how they heat their buildings, how they keep the lights on and all the way up to the place-shaping stuff and how they engage their local community. I just think that’s a really, really useful and brilliant thing that councils can do. I started there and then I worked supporting other people to engage their local councils and then came across this job and thought, ‘I love data. I really want to do this thing where I’m also working with local people to open up this world of councils to the wider public and also support councils to take further action themselves.’

Matt:  I’ve been involved in this space for a while now but it struck me that maybe if we go back 10-15 years, councils were very much at the forefront of a lot of this climate action but it was back in a time when they were better resourced and they had the personnel and the capital funds to make investments. We then saw the 2010s period of austerity and this started to get peeled back and they went back to their bread-and-butter services. All of a sudden, COP26 comes along and then these councils, one after the other... I remember, Becky, our heads were spinning at the time in Glasgow because they were almost trying to outdo one another and say, ‘Actually, we could do net zero sooner, better, faster, quicker and cheaper.’ That, I guess, is possibly the inspiration here, is it not? We needed some organisation to pause and say, ‘Wow! What just happened?’ Was that the inspiration initially?

Hannah:  Yeah, definitely. A big part of it is, as you said, that councils do like to outdo each other. They like to compare and say, ‘Wow!  I’m the best of this bunch.’ I think there are other really great people working in this space now but before that movement of looking at the bigger picture, there were a lot of councils saying, ‘We think we’re doing well but we don’t really know. We’re doing well given our circumstances but what we know are just our circumstances and not really what that compares to for the wider picture.’ What we really wanted to do was have that little bit of perspective and that wider picture. So we decided to make these council climate scorecards. As I said, the first ones were plan scorecards. What they’re doing then is writing an objective list of metrics and every single council has to compare to that objective list of metrics. That does mean that some people get to brag about how good their plans are but also, say you’re maybe in the middle of a list of all of the councils, you can look at the councils that are three steps ahead of you and say, ‘What do they have that we don’t have?’ or ‘What do they not have but they’re doing it anyway?’ or ‘How are they getting those gears in motion?’

Matt:  But initially, this was very focused on plans and strategy and what they were going to do and not necessarily what they had done.

Hannah:  Yeah, absolutely. I think the climate movement and also specifically, the council climate movement is always operating on a bit of a sine curve where you see these real big peaks of interest and then you get into the work and sometimes, there’s a little bit of a trough and then it comes back up and you get a bigger peak. The first move, this move of the climate emergency declarations which all started coming out in about 2018/19, was really focused on plans. It was really focused on setting that 2019 target. It’s also more specifically about targets even than plans. ‘What is this big headline that we can have?’ The thing that comes after the big headline is the plan which is ‘Maybe we can do this. This is the way we can do this.’ You then get the really important bit, but the way harder bit, and that’s the action. ‘How are we actually going to do this? How are we actually going to afford this? Is this feasible? Halfway down, are we hitting our targets? What else do we need to do to get things in place? What other new opportunities have we got now?’

Rebecca:  This sounds very exciting and I can completely see how you can set a target and that’s the easy bit but then building it into that plan and looking at that delivery mechanism is much harder. Can you give us maybe a few examples of areas? Because we’re talking about these broad climate emergency declarations and net-zero targets but what does that really translate to? What are the sorts of things we’re seeing councils talking about doing?

Hannah:  Yeah, good question. I think that it’s quite a hard question, in a way, because there are so many different things that councils commit to doing. The sort of targets that they might set and the things that then need implementation are things like they want to increase tree cover by 3% across their city council. That’s the first step. I heard the other day that London is technically a forest. It’s got a high enough tree cover to be technically a forest.

Rebecca:  Wow!

Hannah:  Another city might say, ‘We want to also be technically a forest. We want to get above 20% tree cover. That means that we need to plant so and so number of trees.’ The next step then obviously is that you need the strategy and say, ‘Where are we going to plant the trees and where they’re actually going to grow?’ You get the delivery which is where they say, ‘We’ve planted the trees and now we’re watering them. We are spending the money in the right place to make sure that the trees are in the right place, they work well and they’re not going to be cut down in two years.’ Those are the kind of little things. Basically, if you can think of an area of climate, whether it be transport, waste or perhaps governance and investment, councils touch every single piece of that. The number of actions they can do is just unlimited really.

[Music flourish]

Matt:  So I wonder maybe before we get into some of the methodologies around this... [laughter]. You’re whetting my appetite about what some councils are doing which is similar to other councils as there are common themes here. There is other stuff which is rare and quite unique. Is there anything that springs to mind there like the common or very uncommon?

Hannah:  The very common and the very uncommon? I think one of the ones that is really exciting to me, because I think it’s a really good example of councils using their influence and their local trust in the right way, is banning high-carbon advertising. That’s a project that’s started to take off across the UK. It’s really exciting. We’re at a point now where I think it’s four or five local councils that have done that. They’ve committed and they’re beginning the implementation of banning all high-carbon advertising across their area.

Matt:  Is that council-owned advertising space on the side of a building or a bus shelter?

Hannah:  Yeah, exactly. It can be quite extensive. Sometimes, they say things like, ‘This is red meat which is particularly bad for the planet.’ That ad-free stuff started in Amsterdam which was the first city to have done that but now we’ve got places like Liverpool, Norwich and Nottingham that are starting to get that done. That’s really interesting because we don’t really think about how much advertising influences our life but SUVs make up 70% of car adverts. The reason that we haven’t seen as much of a big dip in our transport emissions is because of this change from smaller cars to SUVs that has happened over the last 20 years.

Matt:  I’m sure there are other examples. Are there any common themes? You mentioned tree cover but is there just stuff that you’re seeing time and time again from councils?

Hannah:  Yeah. It’s a bit difficult to talk about action too much because we haven’t actually marked the action ones. I will save my little call to action for a bit later but we’re going to be starting that marking process in a few weeks. I’ll maybe say about one and, again, speaking as a fan of the plan scorecards and more than as an employee of the action scorecards, one of the really interesting things that we found was that of all the councils that had released a climate action plan, which makes up about 80% of councils, 60% of those had committed to lobbying the government for more powers on climate stuff and more money to spend on climate stuff. I think that’s a really interesting statistic because that crosses all sorts of political boundaries. It’s not just something like maybe a Labour council wanting to lobby the Conservative Government partly to pass the buck. It’s not about that. It’s an acknowledgement that local councils do have a lot of influence and they can really create the world that we need in the local area but they don’t have all the tools that they have in front of them and they all know that what they need is some more of that support. They need to reverse that 40% real-term budget cut if they’re going to do any of the stuff they need to get done. I just think it’s interesting because it goes beyond that blame-game thing. I know it’s an impossible situation often for councils to get as much as they want to be done. Not every single council wants to get loads done but also the house is on fire and taking that political action that they have is great.

Matt:  It’s a good example of soft power on the fringes of what they may do.

Rebecca:  So often, we think about the more perhaps tangible ones. Matt, you and I work in the energy space and so often, what comes into my mind, first of all, is maybe to do with transport, heating or building efficiency. I think it’s great that you’ve given us some examples that are well outside those spheres. What really immediately comes to mind is the fact that you don’t always think about everything. I can imagine that just having this could be so useful to the councils in and of themselves and say, ‘We didn’t even think about that but look at what an impact that could have. How can we do more?’ Not from a lack of desire or motivation but sometimes, possibly from ultimately not seeing some of the different actions that may be possible. Yeah, really great ones there.

[Music flourish]

As we’ve been talking, you’ve been talking about the plan scorecards and the action scorecards and I’m wondering if you could just set out the difference between them and where you are with both of those as well.

Hannah:  Yeah, definitely. The plan scorecards... the clue is in the name. It looks at the climate action plan. We also looked at a few of the plans that were on the same page as the climate action plan. Suppose they say, ‘Here is our climate action plan and here is our climate resilience strategy,’ which is directly on the same page. It was laser-focused and it was a snapshot of time as well. There is this one document in September 2021, which is when we marked them, and we looked at every single council’s one document which was the first one and that was always intended to be a bit of a stepping stone to the action scorecards. With that first one, it was obviously a much smaller project but still unbelievably big. For a bit of context of scale, we are a tiny organisation and everything that we do is partly with volunteers and we had over 120 volunteers commit time to just mark plans. Again, speaking as a fan, I always think that’s just unbelievable because it’s truly the driest form of volunteering I could imagine to sit down and mark plans [laughter].

Matt:  Yeah, but great because that is local climate action.

Hannah:  Yeah, 100%. Even more amazing is the amount of time that those 120 volunteers committed was 2,289 hours. Big, big numbers. That was our first step and it was almost like a trial to start the process of working out what the action should look like. We’ve spent the last nine months speaking to almost 100 different organisations. We’ve done consultations with hundreds of campaigners and council officers. What we’ve done is write up the methodology to mark the action scorecards. They look at action across seven different sections of influence from transport and buildings to communication and governance. That’s 90 questions and we’re going to spend the next six months marking them, sending them out to councils, receiving a right of reply and then publishing them.

Matt:  Because Becky and I are bona fide nerds... complete nerds, as soon as you say the word ‘methodology’ to an academic, they start doing odd things and clicking and clucking. I’m just wondering, in practice... maybe give an example of a theme and how a council maybe would score high versus low. What would the markers be looking for here? I know this is dry stuff but ultimately, if people are going to use those cards and for them to be useful, that needs to mean something.

Hannah:  Yeah, absolutely. Perhaps we’re just a room of nerds talking [laughter] but I’m a big believer that...

Matt:  That’s fine! It’s not a belief; it’s a fact [laughter].

Hannah:  I really think that the dry stuff is often where the change happens because that’s where you can make the smart targets and that’s where you can deliver evidence to change. I’m just going to pull up one of the sections so that I can give you a bit of a flavour of what might be in that section. We’ll go for buildings and heating.

Matt:  Very on theme as well.

Hannah:  Yeah, very.

Matt:  Obviously, with where the energy prices are but in the news yesterday, there was talk about energy relief for commercial organisations, and I guess councils are in this, is going to be cut from March potentially.

Hannah:  Yeah, absolutely. Quite intimidating to talk about with such experts in the room but we have spoken to a lot of experts, so I’m confident that you’ll appreciate this. This section has 12 different questions and they go from the very specific to the council questions... for example, are the councils’ operations powered by renewable energy? They go up to much more diffuse stuff, for example, supporting local or community renewable energy creation. Basically, for each of those questions, it might be that the answer is just yes or no or it’s perhaps tiered according to how ambitious the thing that they’re doing is. For example, there is a question which says does the council have a target to retrofit all council-managed homes and has it been costed? Depending on how ambitious the target is, they’ll get slightly more or slightly less points. Some of those are also marked not using volunteered data but using national datasets which is really exciting. That’s different from plan scorecards. It gives us a chance to look at, for example, EPC ratings for the whole area. That’s something that councils have some influence over but not loads of influence over, so it’s not a particularly heavily-weighted question but it’s there. We can look at all the different councils and then when we come out with this dataset, an individual or a council officer can look at it and say, ‘We actually got a relatively low score on this because our area is particularly bad for EPC ratings compared to other areas.’

Rebecca:  Once this has been compiled and once you have both the plan scorecards, which you’ve already got, and now the action scorecards and one would hope would correlate in some way but perhaps not, who do you see using them? How do you see them being used to really help deliver net zero? Is it the council themselves or is it other people you see using them?

Hannah:  Yeah, great question. The really nice thing about doing the plan scorecards is we’ve got a sense already of how the action scorecards will be used because we’ve heard back from loads of different people. The answer is it will be used and we hope that it will be used by campaigners, councils and also NGOs and other people in the space. We heard from Luke McCarthy, who is the Green Skills Specialist at Surrey County Council, that he wanted to understand what other interesting green skills projects Surrey County Council could do. He looked at the answers to that single question on green skills projects and reached out to councils that had scored really highly on that and also were in similar situations of being a relatively affluent county council to see what would work for their area.

Matt:  You mentioned earlier that councils like to outdo one another and I guess there’s a whole culture of competition and in the same way, councils are there to support one another and to learn from one another because they’re not really in direct competition or, at least, not from my perspective. In that, these scorecards can actually say, ‘These guys are the exemplars for X, Y and Z,’ and by definition, I bet it creates a centre of gravity and other councils start reaching out to them. That’s fantastic.

Hannah:  Yeah, absolutely. That thing of creating networks that flow out really naturally on issues that you want to work on together is a really exciting thing that the scorecards can deliver. We’re hoping that the action scorecards will do the same thing so it’s like, ‘Oh, these people are doing particularly well.’ Generally, on the buildings and heating section but particularly on the ones that are connected to BREEAM, for example, we do have a few questions that look at that as a kind of standard and how people are standardising their climate projects. Similarly, that means that you unlock that for councils to talk to other councils but you also unlock that for campaigners to talk to councils and to take their time to do the research and follow through on the stuff that we’ve presented to say, ‘Here’s the big picture. They are doing this thing. How are they doing it?’ They click through and they learn more about what their neighbouring council is doing on things. They can take that back to their own council and say, ‘We’ve actually seen that Leeds County Council is doing some really interesting planting stuff in their area and we really think that Liverpool could do something similar.’ That’s just pulling two random councils out of the air.

Rebecca:  I can see you’ve got them on your website. Are you seeing anything interesting? You’ve got three with stars at the top: Manchester, Solihull and Edinburgh (perhaps no surprise) but I would say I was surprised by some of them that were lower down the list. Knowing what’s happening in those areas... I can see Orkney Island Council is quite low down but there’s so much going on in Orkney. Were there any surprises for you when all of this came together?

Hannah:  One of the really interesting things that we found is that the majority of our top councils, Manchester being a notable exception, were either minority or coalition councils. That’s really interesting because I think that that’s a really good example because democracy needs scrutiny and councils that are minority or coalition councils do have a much more rigorous internal scrutiny going on with all of the work that they do. If you want to go beyond the status quo and push forward on an issue that is deeply urgent but also doesn’t feel very urgent when it’s fighting with priorities like hospital beds, having that ongoing scrutiny and pressure is a really good way to get things done. I think Manchester is an interesting example because it’s one of those councils that is deeply, deeply Labour. I don’t know if you know much about the area but 91 of 96 councillors are Labour but there’s a really lively local government scrutiny from citizens. I think that’s an interesting story of local people being the scrutiny if the council is unable to be the scrutiny for itself.

Matt:  By extension, these scorecards give citizens and voters a platform to scrutinise... to praise as well but to criticise and critique maybe where action isn’t forthcoming.

Hannah:  Yeah, absolutely. The other thing is I think that we have seen that plans are not the be-all and end-all. Places like Orkney might be doing really well because, to some extent, they’re already at implementation and so they maybe didn’t need that one big overarching climate plan. They’ve already moved on to getting the stuff done. I think it will be really, really interesting to take the time to compare how well the plans do against action. One of the things that we thought was really interesting that we saw from the plans is that over and over again, we found really interesting nuggets of policy and information that people wouldn’t have picked up because they’re not in these big shiny documents. They’re in slightly horrid-looking papers from a certain scrutiny committee. It’s really exciting to find those nuggets of policy and be able to pull them out for people but also, they’re sort of failing to communicate them to the general public at the same time. There’s space always there to be learning.

Matt:  When we looked down to the bottom of the table, we noticed that there were some councils that hadn’t scored well and then some councils that hadn’t scored at all. I scrolled right down to the bottom. I should note that the caveat here is that these were councils that didn’t have an action plan on 20th September 2021. You had to take a cut-off date and that’s the cut-off date. My council, East Renfrewshire Council, is in there. I don’t know whether they have one now. I should actually check that but I’m assuming, Hannah, that this is because this isn’t mandatory. The councils haven’t had to release climate action plans, have they?

Hannah:  No, they haven’t. I think that is the story of councils in that there is this massive amount of variance because there is a real reluctance to put mandatory requirements to do certain things on it. Again, that’s something that I totally understand. I feel like lots of councils are somewhat against it because often, those statutory requirements don’t come along with the support that needs to come along with it. What we’ve continued to see, as of today, is that 80% of councils have climate action plans. That means that 20% don’t and that’s a really high number.

Matt:  Actually, of that 20% - again, from 20th September 2021 before we get various angry emails – many of those were Scottish as well like East Renfrewshire Council, Renfrewshire Council, Highland Council and there are others like Clackmannanshire. Were there any patterns here with councils that hadn’t had action plans by that date?

Hannah:  It’s a good question. I’m not sure that I am quite familiar enough with what those councils have instead. I think that’s something to maybe explore later. Councils in England and Scotland both did better than councils in Wales. I think that’s an interesting thing to think about and chew on because the broader, higher average scores in Scotland maybe speaks to having that structural national support in place and also working to improve it. It’s interesting then that quite a lot of them also simply didn’t have anything out and it would be really interesting to see, from the action scorecards, whether Scottish councils continue to score better than English councils.

Matt:  Before I give way on this, how do you mark councils that haven’t had action plans but maybe are doing important climate action? That’s something [laughter] that will become apparent, hopefully, when you’re marking. Are you going to mark all councils regardless of whether they’ve submitted an action plan?

Hannah:  Yeah, absolutely and we’ll just have to find ways around it. We did a trial mark of all of the councils and we were looking for whether or not councils did schemes for compost bins or food waste collection. Food waste collection is something that is about to become mandatory across the country but for certain places, that might not be very useful for that particular area. We found that one of the councils we marked had a funded wormery scheme because they weren’t able to collect in flats but they said, ‘You can have a wormery on your flat balcony. We will pay for it.’

Matt:  I would love a wormery [laughter].

Hannah:  It’s the dream. It’s what we all want.

Matt:  It is the dream [laughter].

[Music flourish]

If we rewind, you may not have an answer to this and that’s okay but how are you going to rank and score councils’ climate actions that don’t have any actual climate strategy?

Hannah:  That wormery example is really interesting because that’s not mentioned in the climate action plan. When I went to find that question, it’s saying, ‘If you, as a local resident, wanted to have your food waste collected, is it possible?’ You then go on the general website and there it is in the bin section. You don’t need a climate action plan to be there to mark that. I think that’s what we’ll find a lot of. There’s a very small number of questions that rely on the climate action plan, although there are other questions where the climate action plan might be a place where we can find that information. There’s a very small number that are just about whether they’re releasing any reports based on the action plan and whether they’re communicating it to the general public. Otherwise, it’s definitely possible to get a really good score without it.

Rebecca:  I can imagine that this is going to be an absolute mammoth task when you start to collect the data; just that one example that you gave there of really needing to get into the nuances and the intricacies of where those actions sit and making sure that you find them. Just recognising that you haven’t done all of the scoring yet looking forward, there has been a lot of work that has already happened in this space. Do you have any key takeaways for what councils could or should be doing to help deliver net zero?

Hannah:  Yeah, definitely. I think one of the things that councils really need to be prioritising is just generally taking an approach of looking beyond the targets and looking beyond the headline into the weeds. I mentioned this already earlier today but there was news which broke last week that some councils’ tree plantings had something like a 10% survival rate which is unbelievably small. That’s because the implementation beyond saying, ‘We just got 6,000 trees into the ground,’ simply wasn’t there. So it’s about looking beyond those big headline targes and looking into what you actually need to do to get things done is really, really important. Another thing is that it’s really important for councils to look at what good looks like elsewhere. I said earlier that some councils are doing it but it’s so, so important to be getting out there, doing it and widening the scope of what that looks like. Say you’re in Trafford Council, you might be really tempted to say, ‘I’m just going to look at Salford Council, Manchester City Council and just the ones that are directly around me.’ Actually, it might be much more useful to look at the slightly suburban councils outside of other cities. I think that’s one of the things we were really pleased about our scorecards. mySociety helps us build these amazing filters so that you can do things like filter by indices of deprivation, for example, or filter by whether or not it’s a minority-controlled council. Perhaps you might want to filter by what part of the country you’re in. There are lots of different sorts of filters. Casting your net a bit wider and looking for what good looks like elsewhere is really, really important. Another thing that we’ve seen over and over again is starting to build that internal expertise is really, really powerful, whether that be hiring for experts in specific roles... one of the scorecard questions that we’re going to be asking this year is about whether or not you’ve got a biodiversity net gain ecologist in the planning department to help you make sure that biodiversity net gain is correctly implemented in your area. You can also do things like carbon literacy for all of your staff and other schemes to make sure that that internal expertise is as good as it could possibly be and you’re not relying on basically Google to work out what the right thing is to do in your area. The very last thing that I think is really important is that local councils need to understand what that local context looks like from a climate perspective and use that to support the most affected in your community first. That might look like this particular area has an increased flood risk due to climate change. It might look like this area has a particularly big community of people who are Pakistani and they’re experiencing more emotional distress because of flooding. It can look like lots of different things in lots of different areas and it’s really important for you to understand all of the ways that climate affects people and the ways that it affects the area in order to focus your attention correctly and prevent the worst things from happening.

Rebecca:  I want to just close out our conversation almost back to where we started and certainly where you started your journey in this space. There are regular people in their own homes that might be listening along and thinking, ‘I want to get involved.’ How can we take some of this work and use these scorecards to really help make a difference?

Hannah:  I love to answer this question. It’s always relentlessly inspiring to me to think about the influence that campaigners can have and the way that campaigners are partners with councils in taking action. I think the very first thing you need to do when you’re starting off this journey is to know the actors in your local area. Start with understanding the difference between council officers and councillors; understand who else cares about climate in your area and maybe who cares about transport and how that intersects with climate stuff; understand who your local councillors are. Who are the councillors who are supportive of your local causes? Finding those allies in councils is really important. The thing that I think is really important for campaigners to understand is councillors aren’t like MPs. They don’t have a lot of time on their hands. They usually have other jobs. MPs don’t have a lot of time on their hands for other reasons. Councillors don’t really have much support there and I think it can be really transformational to understand that because if you understand that they don’t have time to find useful data and they don’t have time to think about policy decisions, as much as they might like to... even if they’re putting in the work and even if they’re working 100-hour weeks, you have to understand that, to some extent, democracy is always going to be a participation sport. So go out there, send them the scorecards, send them other useful information and find out how your council turns an idea into policy and support them through that entire process. The last thing that I think campaigners can do, and this is my shameless plug, is I think that there’s a good opportunity here to think local and act global. We’ll sort of flip that over. We’ve got this massive task ahead of us and we’re all going to be marking the council climate action scorecards. This is a really good opportunity for activists to volunteer to mark them. We’ve got a policy programme where you can hear from experts like Louise Marix Evans but you can also just come along. We’re sending 4,000 FOI (Freedom of Information) requests and so if you want to learn more about FOI requests, you can do that. That gives you a really good opportunity to see this big picture and maybe say, ‘What is this council doing on this? What is possible? What are the variances out there?’ You can then take that back to where your council is and get them to do something.

Matt:  Hannah, there seems to be a huge opportunity here for citizens and I’m particularly thinking of my students and others out there to do some analysis of this data. The fact that I’ve been able to download it and it’s on a Creative Commons license, I’m assuming this data that you’ve collected is freely available to use for analysis, as long as it attributes your organisation. Is that correct?

Hannah:  Yeah, absolutely and we will also be doing some research off the back of it ourselves.

Matt:  There are huge options in terms of how you’ve disaggregated this data and basically come out at the end of it with a summary of the types of councils or council areas that are doing this type of action. This feels like a really important springboard going forward in terms of net zero and climate action. I just want to say a big thank you to you, Hannah, for the fantastic work you’re doing. I’m really excited to see the action scorecards and so maybe, if you’re willing, we’ll have you along later on to hear more about that.

Hannah:  Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a great convo.

Matt:  Thank you.

[Music flourish]

You’ve been listening to Local Zero. Thanks to our guest for this episode, Hannah Jewell, from Climate Emergency UK. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the pod wherever you get your podcasts from. Go find and follow us on Twitter @LocalZeroPod to get involved with discussions over there. If you’ve got some longer thoughts you want to share, please email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com but for now, thank you and goodbye.

Rebecca:  Bye.

[Music flourish]

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