75: Rights Community Action

Why is place-based work so important?

For the 75th (!) episode of Local Zero, Becky and a rain-battered Fraser are joined by Naomi Luhde-Thompson, leader of Rights Community Action, to discuss how we can work with communities, not for them.

https://www.rightscommunityaction.co.uk/

Episode Transcript:

Produced by 

BESPOKEN MEDIA 

Fraser:  It’s currently pissing rain and I’m out in my shed working in my little home office space which is nice most of the time but it’s also a wooden shell and it’s Scotland. It’s lovely weather. It’s meant to go off. It is meant to go off [laughter]. 

[Music flourish] 

Rebecca:  Hello and welcome to Local Zero. Matt is on a well-deserved holiday for this episode but you are in the very safe hands of Dr Fraser Stewart and myself, Dr Rebecca Ford.  

Fraser:  Well-deserved is a strong term but he’s on holiday. Today’s episode will focus on place-based work within communities; a very local-focused episode of Local Zero and an issue that is obviously very important to both Becky and me. Joining us later is Naomi Luhde-Thompson, leader of Rights Community Action, to talk about this very important topic. 

Rebecca:  In his absence, Matt has asked us to let you know that the fourth and final episode of the Carbon Offsetting for Communities mini-series is out everywhere now. It’s a deep dive into nature-based offsetting in Scotland, so check that out wherever you get your podcast. 

[Music flourish] 

Fraser:  As always, if you haven’t already, it would be brilliant if you could subscribe or follow Local Zero wherever you listen to your podcasts. Fans of the pod can check out our website, LocalZeroPod.com, and follow us on Twitter @LocalZeroPod where you are more than welcome to get in touch with us. Episodes, suggestions, questions and constructive criticism are all encouraged. 

Rebecca:  So how are we doing, Fraser? While the cat is away, the mice will play, eh? Matt being the cat [laughter]. You’ve got some interesting noises going on in your background. It’s calmed down for a minute now. 

Fraser:  Yeah, I’m very fortunate to have a home office outside which is not a shed. Whoever tells you otherwise is wrong. It’s not just a shed. However, it is a small, wooden shell [laughter] that is very exposed to the elements. So when it rains, as it has been most of today, on an outdoor wooden box in Scotland, it can get quite noisy in the background. If that comes and goes throughout this episode, my apologies. Otherwise, though, everything is good. It’s a nice Scottish summer. 

Rebecca:  I just have visions of the water slowly filling up on the screen [laughter] as your leaky, office, shed-like wooden structure outside is exposed to the elements but it must be doing wonders for your garden. If anybody listening is interested in gardens, do check out the last episode we recorded which was with Kate Bradbury and it was all about greener and wilder gardens. I wonder, Fraser, have you had any time to implement any of the brilliant advice that she shared? 

Fraser:  I will say the rain is doing wonders for the garden. I don’t know what happened but I hit 30 years old and started saying things like, ‘Oh, that will be good for my grass.’ That combination of words wasn’t in my vocabulary until the age of 30 but it is now [laughter]. Yeah, I’ve been trying to. In our garden, we have some plants, we have a lot of wildflowers and we try and let things grow out. We keep a couple of nice patches for comfort and messing about but it’s mostly been food. We had spinach and shallots. We’ve got some carrots. We’ve pulled some of those since Kate’s episode and I’ve been cooking with them recently and it has been really, really nice. How about you, Becky? 

Rebecca:  We’ve been growing tomatoes and courgettes. The tomato plants look very good but they’ve yet to yield anything but the courgettes have been doing brilliantly, so we’ve been having some lovely fresh courgettes going on. We’ve got a bird feeder for the little birds and we’ve got one of the ones where you can put the big fat bombs in as well. Many people might not know what they are [laughter]. They’re just big balls of fat that birds like to eat basically. We’ve had a lot of wildlife in our garden which has been really, really lovely. Maybe from birds and wildlife to lab rats? 

Fraser:  Oh wow! You didn’t write that. I can see in the notes that you didn’t write that segue but it was pretty smooth [laughter] or it was smooth until I pointed it out [laughter]. I guess there will be a lot of people who listen to this podcast who are aware of this already. I’ve seen a lot of people talking about it on Twitter, LinkedIn and on Threads but the big news is about the Hydrogen Village Trial in Whitby which was a trial that aimed to install hydrogen boilers into people’s homes in Whitby and serve them with hydrogen to see what it would cost and operate. After a pretty hefty community backlash, it has now officially been cancelled. This has been rumbling on for a little while and there’s a similar trial planned in Redcar where, by all accounts, the community is similarly pushing back against the way that it’s being handled but interestingly, this wasn’t a trial that fell off the cliff because the technology wasn’t there or it didn’t work. It was the community itself that said they weren’t interested. Becky, have you been reading up on this? 

Rebecca:  I’ve been gently following along for a while now. I think it’s a really interesting trial. I also think that there’s a bigger, more fundamental problem with how we are talking to people about the future of heating because ultimately, this is what it all comes down to. How do we get off the gas grid? How do we move to more sustainable solutions? I worry that the continual push of hydrogen in spaces like these, particularly where it’s not coming from the community, can have potentially troubling messages. When we were looking to replace our boiler, my husband did his own research and came up with the solution that we should just get a hydrogen-ready boiler because that is a lot of the rhetoric in the media. We know that that’s just not going to happen quickly enough or fast enough and we need to be pushing down this route of cleaner heating, heat pumps and electrification. I feel like there’s a whole mish-mash of messaging which is prevalent across the UK and once you then look at the specific communities and how things are evolving in place, there’s also a whole lot of problems around how engaged people are, what those messages look like in places and how you can really start to pull a whole community together around this. Yeah, it’s a big challenge I think. 

Fraser:  Absolutely. I think with the point about the hydrogen for home heating question, whoever you ask in the industry who doesn’t work as part of the hydrogen lobby or maybe legacy gas-type industry, we’re mostly pretty convinced that hydrogen is going to play a very little, if any, role in home heating. So letting that rumble on, and I think you’re right, really is slowing down action but I think what we find with this and what’s interesting to today’s episode is that it seems to be – again, from accounts of people from the community who were supposed to get the hydrogen trial – a really important case of what happens when you try and do something to people and to a community versus trying to do something with them. That’s not just because there’s a lot of misguidance and misinformation around hydrogen and what it can do, which the community itself noted when they heard from other experts in the field, but for anyone who wants to make changes in people’s homes or in communities, it’s not enough to say, ‘We’ve got this solution. We want to give it to you and we want to figure out a way for you to accept it.’ You have to be designing solutions with people that suit their needs and that meet the things that they want in their lives or the things that they don’t want as the case might be. Somewhere else we see this play out increasingly, and I see this in my local community Facebook group all the time... the big thing around here in Angus in the Northeast of Scotland is the build-out of transmission lines and electricity transmission networks. We’re expected to get a whole load of new big pylons. Everyone in the country generally – not everyone, of course, but most people in the country agree we need to do the net-zero thing and we need to build out transmission to deal with renewables but what seems to be happening here is that networks come along and say, ‘We’re building this infrastructure on your land. What is the least bad way that we can go about it?’ There’s the premise of ‘We’re doing this and how do we get you to accept it?’ rather than ‘How do we work with the community to develop the solution, plan or proposal that works for everyone, suits everyone’s needs and unlocks those opportunities?’ That engagement piece fundamentally is really, really critical to getting net zero done. 

Rebecca:  Yeah, so what you’re saying is that right now, our prevailing paradigm is ‘We’re doing this to you,’ or ‘We’re trialling this on you.’ There was a great quote, just looking back to the hydrogen trials, where one of the residents said, ‘I wake up in the night thinking about it. We’re guinea pigs,’ and others talking and feeling like lab rats. You’re absolutely right. How do you flip that entire paradigm and move from this perspective of ‘We’re doing net zero to you in the least worst way’ to ‘How do we support communities?’ Communities generally have very strong opinions and can be passionate about a whole lot of stuff. How do you take that passion? How do you translate it? How do you mobilise that action? How do you really support them to drive forward and create things that not only will benefit the wider society in the UK but will benefit that community as well? I think we’ve got the most perfect person coming along today to help us through this discussion, so maybe we should bring her in. 

Fraser:  Absolutely. 

[Music flourish] 

Naomi:  Hi, I’m Naomi and I lead an organisation called Rights Community Action. 

Rebecca:  Could you give us a little bit of an overview of Rights Community Action? How did it come to be and what are the sorts of things that you’re really focused on? 

Naomi:  I think it came into being because I used to be Head of Planning at Friends of the Earth, so I got involved in a lot of work supporting communities to get involved in decisions that were happening around them. What I often found is that the focus was not so much on what the communities wanted to see happening but more on national campaigning; so we need to push for change here or we need to create this legislative change there. The focus wasn’t on how communities change that balance of power and become more empowered to say, ‘Okay, this is my place and my community. What do I want it to look like and how do I go about getting it to be like that?’ That’s what Rights Community Action was born from; that idea of communities getting involved and taking that responsibility is the most powerful thing that you can do to build resilient communities that can face up to the climate crisis. 

Rebecca:  That hits the heart of so much of what we talk about and I know, Fraser, up in your shed in Scotland... sorry, we’re not calling it a shed. Fraser is currently sitting in a shed-like office structure in the garden [laughter]. That’s been something that’s been at the heart of the work that you’ve been doing for the past few decades, Fraser, hasn’t it? 

Fraser:  Yeah, yeah. Decades is a long time for me, Becky, but it’s certainly been at the core of that work [laughter]. I think it’s important within the context, especially of a transition, that has involved previously maybe malign actors or fossil fuel-based companies and organisations doing damage in communities into now the shift towards the opportunity that we see ourselves as having from a net zero or a transition to combat the climate crisis. I think for that to be just, it’s crucial that the focus begins with people and with communities. Naomi, with Rights Community Action, it seems that there are a lot of connections with the environmental justice movement and those old movements where communities were standing up to demand better conditions in the face of developments that weren’t wanted or that were damaging. What are some of the campaigns that you’ve worked on that you’ve been particularly excited about? 

Naomi:  Yeah, I’ve worked on quite a few campaigns and, of course, a lot of the work that I previously did at Friends of the Earth was about tackling those really dirty developments that we just don’t want to see anymore. I’ve been so privileged to work with amazing communities. I’ve just been there to say, ‘This is how the system works. These are what the rules are.’ The minute those communities have got hold of those rules, they say, ‘Okay, fine. We can say this. We can go here. We can speak.’ I’ll say, ‘Yeah, you for it.’ They’ve been brilliant. It’s just that matter of unlocking that door and saying, ‘No, you have the right to be there. Your voice is so important in this discussion and this debate.’ That has been true for a massive, mega incinerator in Wales that would have taken a third of Wales’ waste and burnt it on top of a mountain next to an existing open-cast coalmine. That was the community of Merthyr Tydfil which is one of the most amazing and powerful communities that stand up, say what they want and are fighting grave injustices. You’ve, of course, got all the anti-fracking movement that came out. All of those people faced a threat in their communities and then they got involved. As they got involved, the big things that came out of their involvement were climate justice and democracy. They were the two really important things. They were saying, ‘Who is making the decisions here? Is it me or is it Cuadrilla?’ That’s a really important thing and once people move from thinking, ‘Okay, I’m facing down a threat to the community,’ you then move into thinking, ‘What do I want instead?’ That was actually sparked by a lot of the talk like ‘Oh, you need coal and you need energy.’ People were then thinking, ‘No, actually, I want to have renewables. I want solar. I want a different solution. That’s what I want in my place here.’ 

Fraser:  Something that I find interesting, Naomi, that you’ve picked up on there is... in our roles in our day jobs, we do a lot of work with communities directly and locally in our own spaces and something that I find comes up – in particular, I tend to work in more working-class areas or ‘deprived areas’ – and this seems contrary to what we talk about and what the prevailing narrative is but people care about things like climate justice in my experience and that sort of democratisation element. It sounds like it comes through strongly in your work too. 

Naomi:  Yeah, it’s really interesting because people say, ‘People don’t care about the big issues,’ but my experience is that the minute people get involved, they care much more about the planet than the government does or than the authority or regulator. They really care. When we were in Preston New Road and there was this big public enquiry about this application for fracking, 100 people spoke at the public enquiry. It was the most that the planning inspector had ever had at a public enquiry to speak. They ranged in age from 10 to over 80. Everyone spoke. They had their ten minutes and they spoke about different things. Farmers were speaking and children were speaking. That’s such a powerful moment because in that room, you have the table where you sit and say your piece, you have the inspector who is basically chairing the room and you have the developer and the council. You then have the public listening and that debate is being had in this incredibly powerful forum where everyone is listening. It’s the only time when the developer has to sit there and listen to what people have to say. That right is really, really important but lots of people would say, ‘I don’t belong there,’ so that encouragement and that support to get people into that place is what we try to do at Rights Community Action. We try to get people into that space. 

Rebecca:  I feel like you’ve hinted at it in a number of the answers around the benefits and the importance of bringing people to the fore but I’m just wondering if we can touch on this a little bit more about why focusing on places and working with communities is so important in this context. Is it about the social justice angle, hearing their voice and making sure developers are hearing them? Are there other elements? What are the benefits that you’ve seen working with communities bring that just means we’ve got to focus more strongly on moving forward? 

Naomi:  I think it’s two things really. One, I think it’s a principled approach. You live in your environment. You’re living in your community. Even if you’re a commuter out of that community, you’re living in that space and that’s the space that you feel responsible for and you feel connected to. That’s part of how we live as people in society. I think we have to recognise that as a principled approach. You care about the place in which you live even if our levels of care may differ. The second thing is that people know much more about their place than some officer who has got to cover a huge area sitting in a council or a developer who has never been there before, has possibly got access to land and has looked at that and said, ‘Okay, we’re going to put an application in for that there and that works for our business model.’ Everybody there is thinking, ‘That site floods every year,’ or ‘It’s not down on the Environment Agency records,’ or ‘Actually, we all use that for this recreational activity which hasn’t been recognised by somebody in authority.’ There’s all of that local knowledge and it comes out every time you have some sort of planning application coming in. You’ll have a load of people saying, ‘No, you can’t turn left onto that road. That road is like an endless stream of traffic and you can’t get a HGV around that corner.’ Of course, who else is going to know that? It’s only the people who live there who know that. If we ignore that and say, ‘That’s not important. We don’t value that. That’s just the public,’ it’s at our peril. You then make decisions and you lock people into places that just don’t work very well and then we all feel it. We all feel like, ‘This just doesn’t work. I feel like it’s broken.’ You then get that disengagement and people feeling really sad about places. Of course, the person who is making money out of it somewhere or the government that walks off and leaves that decision behind is not feeling that impact in the same way. 

Rebecca:  That’s such an interesting point. Thinking back a few years, I was involved on the periphery of a really exciting project actually. It was an amazing project where in one part of it, the project installed a large battery onto the National Grid. In fact, it was in your neck of the woods in Oxford. I think for all intents and purposes, the project did brilliantly and was a success but I remember that right at the outset when it was being planned, I was at a conference in Oxford and I had people coming up to me and saying, ‘What’s going on with this big battery that’s going on just over the hill from me? I don’t know anything about it. Why is it there? What is it doing?’ People really wanted to know more and get engaged and often, not from a negative perspective. This wasn’t like a new coal mine or anything toxic. It was actually quite a positive thing. I think sometimes the lack of early engagement astounds me. 

Naomi:  Yeah, I agree with you. If you look at the way a planning application is made, they put a little notice on the lamppost which tends to fall off and get water in it. The text is so small that you need a magnifying glass. You think, ‘Great! Thanks, that’s really useful and I now know what’s going on.’ They give us that statutory information as a requirement. That has been under attack by the government for years. Essentially, we’re fighting a losing battle there to get that information out there. The other thing is digitisation which you would have thought, ‘Does digital create better access for us? Can we find out more about it?’ I don’t know if you’ve ever had a go at looking at planning applications on a council website. There are all these responses and then it says 100 here and I don’t know what that means. What does ES stand for?’ Who knows? There’s this whole other world out there and it’s just really hard to find out what is going on but people are really interested like you say. I think we underestimate that and I think society underestimates that at its peril. Maybe it’s not society that underestimates it but really a government that doesn’t really want us to be involved and know what’s going on because we might be too interested or something [laughter]. 

Fraser:  Surely not, surely not [laughter]. Something that you mentioned and it ties to that last point, Naomi, was people feeling like that’s their space to be in, whether that’s in a town hall or just in the discussion generally and being able to get informed. On a practical level in the work that you do, how do you overcome that and how do you bring people comfortably up to speed and into those spaces to voice concerns or to capitalise on opportunities as is often the case? 

Naomi:  I think you have to come into it quite gently because planning has got a whole language and it’s quite complicated or it seems from the outset to be quite complicated. There are lots of different ways to get permission for development in England, for example. Wales is slightly simpler and I think Scotland is slightly simpler as well and has managed to keep the system a bit more simple. England is just very complicated. The first thing I like to do with people is just to ask them to tell me what’s going on in their area and what they’re concerned about. You then say, ‘Okay, you know where that decision was made. That decision was made over here.’ You can work your way into saying, ‘You’re really interested in this disused public building in the centre of town and you want to know what’s going on with it and you want to find out about it. These are places where you might be able to find that information. Somebody has submitted an application to change that or to put solar panels on the roof. This is how you get to an application. These are your rights. You have a right to be consulted. You are able to give your information. The officer will write a report and it will go to the committee.’ You go through that whole process and you can even just act out the different roles. What are the different roles that people are playing in that process? Who is doing what? As you do that, they’ll get into it and say, ‘I understand the steps now and then I can get involved. What do I say?’ You can say, ‘You just say what you think and give your view because that’s always valid.’ Pretty much anything is capable of being what we call a material consideration in planning, i.e. it’s relevant to planning. That’s the big advantage really is that it’s relevant and your information is valuable. For me, one of the most important things is confidence. It’s about saying you have a right to be there in that space and we need to be in this space. That’s what I then always say, ‘We have to be in there. If it’s just one man and his dog in the room, we’re not going to get a good decision because we’re not going to be doing the right thing as we haven’t understood what’s going on.’ 

Rebecca:  Let’s start to make this really real. Can you share some of the stories perhaps of some of the communities or the people that you’ve worked with and how, by working together, you’ve seen changes evolve and proliferate? 

Naomi:  Just as a health warning about planning [laughter], it takes a long time. For example, on the anti-fracking work that we did, from the starting point when we realised that the council had made a delegated decision and the officer had made a decision on the application and then we found out because the commission had run out and the applicant was applying again for permission. We said, ‘You never did an environmental assessment. You can’t approve that without an environmental assessment.’ They said, ‘Okay, we’ll do an environmental assessment and we’ll then give out the information on that.’ From when that happened to when it was a public enquiry, it was about three years. That’s one thing to just be aware of. The other thing is that we really concentrated on what was important to people and what planning reasons a local authority might give to refuse a development such as fracking where you have transport and water impacts. One of the things that came back to us, which was really interesting on fracking, is they said, ‘Climate change, really?’ We said, ‘Yeah, it’s really relevant. You have to talk about climate change and the impact on climate change.’ We pushed that through and we said, ‘That has to be in the public enquiry.’ That’s a really strong example of if the community hadn’t been there, one, we wouldn’t have been talking about climate change and, two, we wouldn’t have been talking about public health impacts. Those were two things that were absolutely brought in by the community to that discussion. They were hugely important issues which went to the heart of the principle of the development. 

Rebecca:  How did Rights Community Action get involved in that from the get-go? Did the community bring you on board? How did you get involved? 

Naomi:  I get contacted by people or people say, ‘Naomi can help you with that.’ It’s very much word of mouth. That is one of the big problems is how people get in contact. How do they know that there’s a resource out there? That’s how the network works at the moment. I would love to be able to tell everyone, ‘You can call this number,’ but then, of course, I would probably get three million calls which is a bit tricky. Communities get put in touch with different networks and then the network contacts me. I basically do what I call a planning surgery. I give people an hour and I basically say, ‘You bring everything. You bring your planning application. You bring your issues and you just talk me through it. Tell me what’s going on. Tell me what’s happening?’ They do that and then basically, I identify with them all of the points that they could raise and their opportunities to be involved. Planning is really political, so you always have a bit of a campaign on the side as well. You do those two things. Each case is different so you can’t really give standard advice. I have run training courses where I just gave standard advice. Actually, during Covid, that was really interesting. We did six weeks online. We met every Friday evening and every Saturday morning. Around a hundred people signed up. People must have been really bored [laughter]. We had Friday evenings and Saturday mornings to accommodate different people’s times and I just went through the planning system like how it works, the principles and the fact that in 1947, the government nationalised the right to develop land. Previously, if you were a landowner, you could do what you liked and they said, ‘No, the government said this is a public right. It’s about the public interest.’ I went through the process and said, ‘What’s the plan? What’s an environmental assessment? What’s a right to be heard? What does a public enquiry do?’ We went through everything and at the end of that, we had a hundred people who basically knew what they were doing on planning. Some of them have gone and set up their own networks with loads and loads of communities who are basically working on planning stuff in their area. I’d love to do more of that. I’ve probably trained a bit more than a thousand people but I would want to do more of that. 

Fraser:  Naomi, we talked a little bit, in preparation for this recording, about stopping malign developments or having your say within developments that might have adverse effects on a community. Is it the case that this has now shifted more with the net zero and just transition narrative? Is this now shifting more into capitalising on opportunities into shaping local areas into something better that the community wants to see? 

Naomi:  Yeah, absolutely. The project that I’m working on at the moment is called We Are Here. We Are Here is based in different communities. We’re in Taunton which is Somerset and Lowestoft which is Suffolk coastal. We’re in East Lindsey, so Skegness is part of that and we’re also in Hull. We’ve been working there for about a year and we’ve been doing lots of art engagement events. What’s climate change all about? What are the solutions? We’ve done lots of community mapping which is basically saying to people, ‘Where are we and what’s around you that you value? What used to be here? What’s been lost and what would you like to be here for the future?’ Through that community mapping, we’ve now discovered that basically, each of these areas is doing a new local plan. We are gearing up to get all of those communities and all of the people who have come to the sessions and have done lots of creative art with us to come along and to get totally powered up on how to get involved in their local plan. They’re not going to know what’s hit them in those areas when we have all these communities coming along and saying, ‘Actually, this is what I’d like to have in the plan. This is what I think we should be doing.’ I think planning is for people, so people should be planning and that means that you’re talking to everyone else and saying, ‘They want this and I would like this.’ The vision, inspiration and creativity that comes out when people get going mean you can’t hold back the flood really. It gets really, really exciting. By trying to locate that into an actual legal structure and a legal document, you’re basically saying, ‘This is not an exercise that’s going nowhere. This is not a vision that’s going to sit on somebody’s shelf and gather dust. We want to put it in something that’s a legal document which means that the next time you make a decision on the planning application, that matters. You have to look at that and see what that means.’ 

Rebecca:  I think this is absolutely amazing and it reminds me of a number of conversations that I’ve had in the work that I’ve been doing with community groups where oftentimes, you’ll hear that the challenges that they’re facing are not actually related to the topic of what they’re looking at. If they’re about renewable energy, sometimes the challenges are not at all related to renewable energy but they’re around setting up the right sort of legal structure to then allow them to do what they want to do in that space. So often, you hear how it’s just so hard to get that help and often, there’s not the funding there to be able to bring in what can often be quite costly help. I’ve often thought about some of these consultations. We’re moving towards an era where we’re seeing more and more happening at the local level from the planning space. In Scotland, we’ve got Local Heat and Energy Efficiency Strategies coming forward across all the local authorities. In the UK more widely, we’ve got loads of local authorities creating Local Area Energy Plans. It’s often struck me that these are real opportunities for people to get involved but it’s not clear how to create that involvement. You talked about the fact that you trained up over a thousand people. I think that’s absolutely phenomenal. Can you maybe tell us about some of the other success stories that you’ve seen along the way and what are some of the things that we might need to be thinking about if we want to try and replicate these successes, help them spread out across the UK and help people in communities all around the UK engage more strongly? 

Naomi:  I think we’re in a really difficult time. The UK Government for England is changing the rules dramatically through the Levelling-Up and Regeneration Bill. It specifically says on the regional strategies, which are a bit like the London plan and bringing lots of local authorities together... it specifically says in the bill that there is no right to be heard. At the moment, in a local plan, it says there is a right to be heard if you so object. They’re changing the rules completely and I’m really worried about that and that people don’t realise that they’re losing these rights to be involved. It’s something I feel like I’ve been banging the drum about for a very long time because I’m coming from the planning side and I’m just like, ‘Planning is where you make all the decisions on housing, energy and transport.’ In the three big sectors, we’re making those decisions mostly in local planning. That means they’ve got to be in the local plan and we’ve got to make local decisions on them. How do we tackle climate change? We do proper local planning. Just when we’re getting to that broad realisation across the sector where you’ve got people [36:13 – unclear] and the Committee on Climate Change getting all of that much more in the last five years I’d say, we’re suddenly pulling the rug out from underneath people and they’re saying, ‘I’m the Secretary of State, Mr Michael Gove, and I’m going to decide in the morning over breakfast exactly what our national policy will be and that will trump every single local plan in England. You don’t have a right to be heard. You don’t have a right to have say. I only have to consult you if I think it’s appropriate.’ I’m not sure what that means for people but I’m quite worried by what that all means. 

Rebecca:  What can we do about that? Surely, this is an opportunity to engage. 

Naomi:  There are obviously amendments that are going down on the bill at the moment. You’ve got the Lords that are desperately trying to put stuff back in but it’s a really difficult situation because no changes have been accepted so far. The thing is that once people get involved in the planning system, they think, ‘I really want that right,’ but people don’t know when those rights go. Defending those rights is such an important job to do but it’s really hard because it’s not something that’s front of mind for people but it’s so crucial in tackling things like net zero and doing net zero locally. 

Fraser:  It is. We talked at the top of the show about the Hydrogen Village Trial in Whitby where the community themselves came together and completely rejected the trial because it had been handled very poorly by the developer or the leading organisations in question. There was a sense that the people delivering the trial had already decided what was happening and this was a tick-box exercise. This was ‘We’re doing this to you and we’re here to get your sign-off on the least bad way of doing it.’ While that’s maybe not an extreme case, I’m sure you’ve had lots of experience of similar before and we hear it time and again across lots of other things. The build-out of transmission has been a big one in Scotland recently, particularly in rural Scotland. It feels so crucial to bear in mind that as we’re doing the transition while maybe people listening to this podcast and us involved in the conversation see the net-zero transition or the low-carbon transition as an inherently positive thing, if we fumble this side of it with communities, I’d really worry about our ability to deliver it and to really enable that opportunity. I guess the question is if you had to give a piece of advice to policymakers, developers or local authorities who are dealing with implementing this transition, what is that piece of advice around communities, engagement and empowerment? 

Naomi:  My piece of advice is don’t go in with a finished plan and expect to just be able to get everyone to agree with what you’ve proposed because that doesn’t show any humility about the fact that you don’t live there probably, you don’t know it very well and you’re basically saying you know what’s right. That is not going to go down well with any community I don’t think. I think there just needs to be a bit of humility in there. They need to be saying, ‘We recognise that you live here and you know what’s going on. We’d really like your help. We’d like your help to understand how we could make this work here because we want to make it work. We’re really keen on this. How can you help us make it work?’ That means that you just want to be open about it. There’s such a lot of defensiveness and I don’t understand that at all. Maybe I’m going slightly off-piste here but I feel that this government, over the last 12 years or however long it’s been, has been basically just very, very busy capitalising the private sector and making it easy for the private sector. It hasn’t capitalised communities. It hasn’t put money into communities. It hasn’t given them access to land and it’s not made it easy for them. That imbalance is just not going to help us deliver a transition which means that every single one of us is going to be living in a different space. Every single one of us will have to live in an energy-efficient home. Instead of just paying the energy bills, we actually don’t want to have energy bills. That’s the perfect solution. How do we get to that? We get to that because every householder, landowner and tenant in the UK is going to have to make some changes, so we all need to be part of that. I think it’s that thing about that imposition and that top-down approach or whether you generate those solutions in a spirit of collective placemaking. That’s crucial. If you want to have net zero be a success and you’re a developer or a company, you’ve got to take on board that you’re doing it with people and not to them. 

Fraser:  Naomi, we know the Nimby types can often be very vocal in planning meetings or are very mobilised. Do you ever meet any confrontation with the work that you’re doing? Do you ever meet any resistance to the type of work that you’re doing? 

Naomi:  I think there is a lot of conflict inherent in the type of development where some people want it and other people won’t. I basically just say, ‘Everyone has a voice. Are you trying to tell me that your voice is more important than the person who is sitting next to you?’ We’ve got to all recognise that there are lots of voices in this space. That’s one thing I’d say. We’ve got to be respectful of everybody’s views. The second thing is I think that a lot of it is a conversation. For example, I was thinking of bringing in Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. That’s a really fascinating issue because that is something where it is about improving air quality and reducing congestion. What you’re trying to do is say to people, ‘We’re going to make it nicer for you to walk so you don’t have to go in your car. You can walk that 20 minutes and it’s nicer because there are no cars and it’s much safer for your kids.’ When my kids were in the pushchair, I thought, ‘They’re at the height of the exhaust pipe when I’m going to school. What’s all that about? I don’t want that.’ That’s one person in the car and there are all of us trying to get to school. That gets really confusing because people say, ‘You’ve taken away my right to drive down the road.’ You then need to have a conversation. You don’t take away the right to drive down the road. Basically, what you’re saying is, ‘This is a public highway.’ The point about the public highway is that it’s a space that belongs to everyone and that’s why you need to have a conversation. I always look at a public highway and I see all the cars on it and think, ‘They’re taking up quite a lot of space. Actually, that space belongs to everyone.’ It’s come about that technology has changed and so the use of that space has changed and the majority of users are car users. They’re using up much more space than everyone else. Let’s start the conversation about who uses public space because it’s all about public access to space and I think that’s where the conversation should start about how we use the space around us. If you get back to that, then everyone can chip in and say what they want but nobody has more right to the space than anyone else. It’s a collective public space and I think that’s where the whole conversation about net zero should be. It’s about a collective issue that we’re all facing and we’ve got a collective solution to it. 

Rebecca:  For any of our listeners that are thinking, ‘This sounds great. I want to get involved. What can I do?’ What would be your one message for people who really want to drive change in their communities? What can they be doing? What should they be doing and how can they get involved? 

Naomi:  I think if you know what’s going on in your local area and if you know that there is, for example, a community energy scheme or a wind farm going up... people are trying to build cycle paths everywhere at the moment. So even if it’s something small or if it’s a nature reserve and all of those sorts of things to make our spaces greener, safer and more climate-friendly... if you see any of those things, then that is a way into supporting that development. I think my one message would be not to be scared of planning. Get involved in planning because you’re really powerful when it comes to the planning system. Put that objection in or write down and suggest, ‘I’d really like to see this in the local plan.’ It would be great if everyone did that. It would be really, really brilliant. I’m not sure a lot of planning officers would thank me for that but I really think that everyone can be a planner [laughter]. 

Rebecca:  Pull your neighbours together and write to your local planning officer. I love it. Fraser, have you got your pen out? 

Fraser:  Yeah, I’m writing an objection right now. That’s me inspired and mobilised. 

Rebecca:  What a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for joining us, Naomi. I really, really enjoyed talking to you. 

Naomi:  Thank you and goodbye. 

Rebecca:  Thank you to everybody that’s been listening. You’ve been listening to Local Zero. Please do take two seconds to hit the follow or subscribe button wherever you do listen to us. If you know anyone who might enjoy it, word of mouth is a powerful tool, so please do suggest our podcast to them. 

Fraser:  Also, find and follow us on Twitter @LocalZeroPod to get involved with the discussions there and if Twitter isn’t long enough for you, you can email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you want to share those longer thoughts. We’re open to suggestions as always for your potential future episodes but for now, thank you very much and goodbye. 

[Music flourish] 

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