85: Is your local council a climate leader?
In January this year, Hannah Jewell, then of Climate Emergency UK, joined us to discuss their Council Climate Plan scorecards.
Months later, the results are in, and Isaac Beevor joins the pod to discuss how the roll-out went and discuss the key findings.
Before this, Matt and Fraser break down a busy month of climate news...
Episode Transcript:
Matt: Hello, it’s Matt and Becky here from Local Zero. Just a quick note to say, before the episode starts, that from April 2024, Local Zero will be looking for some new funding to keep it going.
Rebecca: We never imagined, when we started three years ago, that we’d rack up tens of thousands of listens across 130 countries and with a website hosting over 80 episodes.
Matt: We’ve also met and worked with some incredible people including Chris Stark, Hannah Ritchie, Jim Skea, Hugo Tagholm and so many more. We’ve been able to showcase so many amazing local climate initiatives from all over the UK and far beyond.
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Rebecca: So please help us continue the fight against climate change and bring local climate action to doorsteps across the world. Thanks for listening and now back to the pod.
[Music flourish]
Matt: Hello and welcome to Local Zero with Matt and Fraser. Sadly, Becky has lost her voice which makes podcasting a little trickier. We wish her a very speedy return.
Fraser: Now if you cast your mind back to January, our first episode of 2023 was a chat with Hannah Jewell who worked for Climate Emergency UK to talk about their innovative Council Climate Action Scorecards. We said we’d love to get them back on to hear how the launch went and so here we are.
Matt: Yeah, so today, we’ll be joined by Isaac Beevor, Co-director of Climate Emergency UK to hear about the results of the scorecards and how this might impact and influence future climate action.
Fraser: As always, we strongly encourage listeners to get involved in the conversation, whether that’s via... [sound of baby crying]
Matt: [Laughter] Crack on. That’s life.
Fraser: Ah, this is life now. As ever, we strongly encourage listeners to get involved in the conversation, whether that’s via X (Twitter) @LocalZeroPod or you can email in episode suggestions and queries to LocalZeroPod@gmail.com
Matt: And, as you’ll have heard at the very beginning, Local Zero is looking for new funding to keep it going. Now if the pod has helped you with your work or studies, please, please do get in touch to let us know. This really helps us more than you ever might think.
[Music flourish]
Okay, Fraser, you’ve got your hands full. The baby is in the background [laughter]. How have you been? How are things?
Fraser: Things have been good; just the constant hum of life working from home with a Springer Spaniel and a three-month-old baby. It’s a lot of fun, to be honest. How are things with you?
Matt: Good. I’ve taken a bold step today. It’s got so cold in my upstairs’ study that I have donned fingerless gloves. They weren’t fingerless this morning [laughter]. I took an old pair and chopped the tops off them [laughter]. I actually took them off out of sheer embarrassment for this pod and they’re currently sitting next to me. My wife doesn’t appreciate the new look but I feel more comfortable. It is brutally cold and we’ve got another cold week. As we said, I think, in the last pod, confirmation just in the last few days that energy bills are on the up again. You’re probably feeling the pinch too as a result.
Fraser: Yeah, they are and I think there’s an interesting thing here, Matt, actually because what we didn’t know last time... we knew roughly what the number was going to be going up to and energy bills are now slightly over £1,900 but what we didn’t pick up on, that people like Citizens Advice have picked up on since, is that Ofgem has slightly changed the assumptions that they make when calculating the average two to three-bedroom household.
Matt: Yeah, I know.
Fraser: So previously, even as late as the beginning of this year, they were calculated based on about 2,900 kilowatt hours of electricity and about 12,000 kilowatt hours of gas. They’re now calculated on – let me get the number right – 2,700 kilowatt hours of electricity and 11,500 kilowatt hours of gas. The price cap for that average household that we keep talking about has gone up a little bit but if we take the old assumptions – the assumptions we’ve been using throughout the whole energy crisis – actually, it’s a little bit more. Maybe that’s a reflection that people have cut back on their energy use to try and deal with these bills. Maybe that’s what is feeding these figures.
Matt: Yeah, that is interesting. On the cost of living, actually, there was another interesting piece I saw in the paper. Again, I think this was covered by The Guardian but it was work undertaken by the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (otherwise known as ECIU) that pointed to food bills. Obviously, we know food has gone through the roof, unfortunately, and that weekly shop is, for us anyway, eye-watering and we’ve certainly looked to cut it where we can. That has been connected not only to energy prices, as you can imagine, and not only the growing, transportation, storage and all of that but also climate change effects. Going back over the last two years (2022 and 2023), roughly £200 a year of your overall food bill over the course of that time is attributed to climate effects.
Fraser: Wow!
Matt: If you say, and I think this is the piece they run with, the average weekly shop is around £100 mark, that’s two shops a year that you’re making – the equivalent cost – that are just down to climate change effects. I think this goes back to a broader point that we come back to time and time again which is how do we make these messages land? I think that language there saying, ‘Two shops, a fortnight of shopping – the equivalent cost is just down to the cost of climate change.’
Fraser: Yeah, it’s such an important point. I think it’s one of these things where this issue, in particular, of climate driving up costs makes it really, really easy to knock back and say, ‘People aren’t worried about climate as the main thing in their life just now because the cost of living is through the roof.’ But it’s fundamentally impossible to disentangle these things and making that land I think can be really challenging because a lot of it still seems a little bit abstract. It’s because of these changing climate patterns that have increased drought and heatwaves, which makes it harder to grow stuff, which makes things in lower supply, which means our prices then go up. That’s quite a few steps in the chain but they’re really, really directly, directly connected. Invariably, as we always know, it affects those who are already struggling the most, particularly as energy bills are cranked up as well.
Matt: Absolutely. There’s another interesting piece by The Ferret and I want to give them a shoutout. They’re a relatively small outfit that does a lot of investigative journalism and really picks up issues that maybe haven’t been under the spotlight. There’s a really interesting point here about the legacy of mining in Scotland, particularly coal mining. Fraser, I’ve probably bored you with this before but if you overlay a map of Scotland’s past coal mines, it’s pretty much, postcode for postcode, a map of the Central Belt and where most people reside and where those centres of population are. It’s the same with the UK. There’s a crazy stat which I don’t have to hand but it’s an incredible proportion and the vast majority of people in the UK live within two or three miles of a coal mine. The legacy of this, whilst we might not be working these, is that they’re still polluting our rivers with toxic metals. The water quality of these rivers is terrible as a result and this is impacting dramatically not only on maybe our recreational use of these and also the quality of our drinking water but also wildlife and the health of these ecosystems. I just thought it was really interesting this point about industrial heritage and history where we think often that coal mining is in the past but its legacy will last for many decades more. As somebody who is interested in transitions, I was really taken with that story.
Fraser: Yeah, that’s really, really interesting actually. I had no idea that the knock-on of that could still be felt today. We talk a lot about the social and economic impacts of that sort of industrial transition but, again, that’s another part of the thread that we’re weaving right now as we’re taking that future look to try and stimulate new cleaner industries across the board. I think the framing of how we talk about the legacy versus the future look I think is a really important one. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with this point other than to say...
Matt: It’s bad [laughter].
Fraser: Yeah [laughter]. I’m trying to make it good and positive.
Matt: Maybe we’re going to have to go on to another piece of bad news but we want to also discuss how we stop talking about bad news and...
Fraser: I remember when this segment of the show used to be a mix. We used to deliberately try and get good and bad news.
Matt: We’ll talk about good news in a moment, hopefully, because I think it’s about how you maybe turn – this awful adage of making lemonade from lemons and trying to take a bad news story and repurpose it. As we speak, the BBC News is covering on its front page the issue of COP28. The United Arab Emirates is hosting this. There’s a suggestion from leaked documents that they’ve had hold of that the UAE and other countries are using COP28 potentially as a platform for securing more hydrocarbon contracts and they’re basically hawking for business. Now, this won’t be the first time somebody has asked the question about whether it’s the most appropriate place to hold a climate conference in one of the world’s centres of oil and gas and hydrocarbon capitals of the world. The hope, if one were to spin this in a positive light, is that if you can bring climate action there, you can bring it anywhere. But this is a real hammer blow to the whole process of COPs and we’ve kind of touched upon this before. What’s your take on this? Turning this from a bad news story into a good news story, what do we do about this? For me, we’ve got to call it out what it is, assuming the information stands to scrutiny.
Fraser: Yeah, it’s incredibly frustrating but it’s not necessarily new. There was a lot of controversy, I guess, with COP being where it is this year but when we were on the inside of it when it came to Glasgow two years ago, COP26, at that point and I’m fairly confident at various COPs before, the fossil fuel lobby, writ large, are by far and away the most represented contingent of delegates at just about any COP. That’s because it’s a direct threat to the industry that they lead and work in and make a ton of money from. It’s to be expected to some degree.
Matt: [Laughter] I’m giggling because I’m thinking are you picking up the mantle of turning this into a good news story by saying it’s not as bad as it sounds because we’ve done it at the other COPs? [Laughter]
Fraser: No, don’t worry. Yeah, this is what we always do. It’s fine.
Matt: It’s just what we do [laughter].
Fraser: No, it’s not that but rather I think it’s being sure that we’re going into this eyes open. This isn’t necessarily shocking and scandalous. However, I think in terms of spinning it and the framing of this, people who pay attention to COPs and people who hear about COPs in passing in the news, in that couple of weeks a year while it’s on, understand the scandal of that and the hypocrisy of that in the same way that you’re inclined to understand the scandal of Shell and BP recording that they’re making more money than ever before while you can’t afford your energy bills. So while I think it’s inherently a bad thing when you’re trying to negotiate quite radical climate action as the clock ticks and ticks faster and faster it feels like, for the public perception of that and the people who actually pay attention – how many people that is is another question – I think understand the issue with that. It’s important to turn any sort of anger or frustration with it into something more positive I guess. What do you think, Matt?
Matt: Well, I agree with everything you’ve said. I think also buried here is a good news story in that it is such a big bad news story. It’s on the front page of the BBC News. This has been deemed in the public interest. This is an objective perspective or, at least, I’m assuming that’s the editorial stance on this. The BBC News, and we know this, is not just read across Britain but this is a global news platform and here we are. This is effectively being presented as a morally objective sense of outrage and that, for me, is a good news story, particularly where we’re coming from in the last couple of months in the UK. We’ve had a government which, in certain circumstances and if we take oil and gas as an example of licensing, has been stepping back. Yet here we are. We have a mirror being held to the nation’s psyche and own moral compass and I do think that’s important.
Fraser: Yeah, that holding up a mirror I think is an important one and I think holding COP organisers and the entire process to account in a way that probably hasn’t happened before, I agree, I think that’s really, really important. On the one hand, there will be frustration that the big event that’s designed to fix all our climate problems and come to these new agreements is being dominated by fossil fuel companies who are just trying to serve their own interests. If that outrage can be leveraged into something more positive, i.e. this can’t go on at future COPs and this can’t be the way that we do climate decision-making and convening, then maybe that’s a...
Matt: The danger is apathy, I guess. People read it and say, ‘Well, here we go again.’ Again, that’s in the context of what we’re hearing in the Covid enquiry about corruption, whether it be contracts for PPE... these are things we’re hearing and I think there’s a sense where people just look at this and say, ‘Of course they’re doing it. That’s to be expected.’ I think there then comes a disconnect between your everyday citizen and the powers that be and this fuels a distrust. We’re actually going to talk about councils in a minute. We’ve touched upon this before and if you look at various polling from different sources, public faith in government at different levels... I don’t just meet national. I go all the way down to local but I also go up to intergovernmental parties. Certainly, in the UK, this is low and I do worry about that. We heard this from Chris Stark on one of the earlier episodes; we need leadership. You can’t be primed and ready to be led unless you trust in that leader and that leadership. We do have an issue here.
Fraser: We do. We definitely do. Again, it’s not necessarily new but it’s certainly snowballed in the last two years I would say. I am someone who, in my occasional free time, frequents the old-man pubs around my area and the outrage and putting the world to rights is certainly hotter than it has been before. In that instance where trust is so low in government, you still need leadership as a catalyst. Step one to building back that trust is saying, ‘We’re going to do something,’ and then get on and actually do it. I think it also means, and no pressure to you or to listeners, that our role in this and the role of people who care about this but aren’t government is more important than it has been before. That’s not a grandiose ‘we’re going to save the planet’ but we need to get sleeves rolled up because the people who are supposed to be doing this aren’t necessarily trusted to get it done.
Matt: Hear, hear and the reason I say that is I think it’s a really important point. People need to see the future and they need to be presented with a positive vision of what to do. Again, I think I mentioned before we started recording, that my daughter who is only six years old is now acutely aware of climate change and will often be looking to me to make her feel better about the actions that we’re taking and that we’re not just giving up. Really, she’s looking to me for leadership and whilst I try and deal with the facts, I don’t want to freak her out and scare her. Part of those facts is that I am doing something and there are other people out there who I know are working very hard on this. So your point about leadership at various different levels is absolutely spot on. That’s why I think today’s episode about local councils is so critical. Climate Action Scorecards; you and I have had a little look and we’ll hear more but it does feel like some councils are doing more than others and there are quite a lot in the category of C- [laughter] if you’re being optimistic. I’m not sure anybody is coming away with an A* yet and there are a lot of contravening reasons for that. You and I have talked about council funding and support. It’s a really murky picture but they need to be supported to do this. As I said, the work that Climate Emergency UK is doing is really important to flag not only where work needs to be done but also success stories and there are some success stories here. What I would like to hear a bit more is about where the successes lie and how we can see those replicated across the UK. So I think it would be a good time to bring him in.
Fraser: Let’s do it.
[Music flourish]
Isaac: My name is Isaac Beevor and I’m the Co-director of Climate Emergency UK.
Matt: Welcome, Isaac. I think this is one of the few times we’ve done this where we’ve had the same organisation back to update us on a really, really interesting project which is about the Climate Emergency UK’s Climate Action, or Plan, Scorecards. We heard from Hannah Jewell, then the group’s Campaigns & Policy Officer and we heard all about the Climate Plan Scorecards. All of these councils are looking forward to the types of changes they want to make to their respective council areas. Now, you’ve crunched the data but before we get into that, just a few words for our listeners about who Climate Emergency UK is and what it’s set up to do.
Isaac: Yeah, thanks so much, Matt and Fraser as well, for having us back. We really appreciate being on the podcast. It’s really great to be here and to share the update with your listeners as well. So who is Climate Emergency UK and what do we do? We were founded in 2019 and we were founded by Councillor Kevin Frea who, at the time, was looking to encourage councils to declare climate emergencies. We did that by publishing a model motion on climate emergencies and also collating all those councils that had done it and sharing those councils that had done it. We then went on to work with My Society who are our key partners and continue to be our key partners to create the Climate Action Plan Explorer which is a database of all Climate Action Plans from across the UK and also includes information such as the net-zero targets as well. Obviously, we moved on to create the Scorecards Project which is what I’m here to talk a bit about today. Our tagline that we’ve kind of developed as we’ve developed a strategy over this period of time is that we’re looking to equip the council climate movement with the information and guidance needed for structural change and accelerating the work of local campaigns for climate action. So we really see ourselves as sitting at the intersection between councils and residents and collating that information on councils and local climate action and making it easier for both councils and residents to understand and then push for the adoption of that best practice.
Fraser: So on that, Isaac, why is it so important for us to be focusing at the local level and on this council action?
Isaac: We have numerous different resources and data points as to why we think the local level and council action is the most important thing or one of the most important things to focus on. It’s partly because the Climate Change Committee said that local authorities have powers of influence over a third of UK emissions in their locality and actually, further studies from then have said that it could be up to 80% of emissions are under the powers of influence of local authorities in the UK. Without local authorities doing their utmost to help create the kind of low-carbon communities that we need to create, we’re not going to get there without local authorities all pushing in the same direction. We’re not going to be able to meet our national net-zero targets and we’re not going to be able to have a liveable planet to live on. The other thing is that 83% of UK councils have declared a climate emergency since 2019 and that shows that there is some movement towards councils being interested in taking this action and they are interested in basically taking local climate action. There is motivation for them to do that. There’s also the fact that change can happen locally faster and so local authorities are at the coalface (pardon the pun) [laughter] of pushing forward the most progressive planning policies in this country. That’s councils like Leeds City Council, Lancaster, Bath & Northeast Somerset and Cornwall who are adopting higher efficiency standards and stronger net-zero operational standards in new builds than the government is doing. That change can happen locally and faster than the government which can then lead to national change. It’s the influence and power that local authorities have to drive down emissions in their area and the fact that they’ve already shown that motivation. Finally, the Skidmore Review quoted this and said ‘There is plenty of regional, local and community will to act on net zero but too often, the national government gets in the way.’ That’s one of the key things that we think and that often, to unlock local climate action across the UK, we need also the UK Government to get on board with pushing this forward.
Matt: Is the mantra here a little bit... you can’t fix what you don’t measure? Maybe just a quick note before I go to the Skidmore Review, a big systematic review of policies and their fitness for net zero... so to hear the importance of local authorities was important. So is it measurements to fix the mantra?
Isaac: Absolutely. That’s exactly what we think. Yeah, you can’t change what you don’t measure basically and what we’re trying to do with the scorecards is provide that best practice and that compilation of best practices while also providing the accountability so that councils are held accountable to try and adopt that best practice which other councils are already leading and pushing forward. That’s exactly what we think, yeah.
Matt: Like any good sequel, this follows on from an absolute blockbuster [laughter] which was the Climate Plan Scorecards. Have I got that right?
Isaac: That’s right, yeah.
Matt: Again, I’m trying to rack my brains because we’re going back, basically, two years to COP26. I know that because we’re on COP28 and it’s quite helpful. Back at COP26, with the focus on it being in Glasgow and in the UK, many of these councils came out. You mentioned 80% plus of councils and many of them came out during that window to say, ‘Yeah, we’re committed to net zero.’ Your initial study was about asking which councils have delivered robust plans in terms of tackling net zero. We won’t rehash that because it’s all in the episode I mentioned. Really, this process is different because you’re looking at the progress they’ve made up to this date. From when? What’s your time horizon here?
Isaac: Yeah, it’s funny that you said it’s like all good sequels and that immediately made me think of Shrek 2 being better than Shrek [laughter].
Matt: It is true, yeah [laughter].
Isaac: Hopefully, the Action Scorecards are building on the Plan Scorecards as you said. What we have looked at in the Action Scorecards is from 2019 onwards. Some of our questions don’t quite fit into that. Nottingham introduced their workplace parking levy over a decade ago. They still have a workplace parking levy so when we marked them in the Action Scorecards, one of the questions says, ‘Does the council have a workplace parking levy?’ Nottingham scored positively even though they’ve obviously had it longer than before 2019. That was like a current thing of whether they had one. What we were looking at and what we were asking for was have they retrofitted significant council buildings from 2019 up until 2023; so recognising that some of these projects are quite big projects and take a few years. Yeah, over that four-year period for the first Action Scorecards.
Matt: So that would be, I guess, towards the back end of Theresa May’s premiership. I’m trying to remember whether it was probably from the 2019... I get confused about which General Election [laughter] but this was in the last year of her premiership, so pre-Boris Johnson. I say that because that’s important context I think for the types of policy environment that these councils were in then versus where they are four years later.
Isaac: Yeah, a hundred per cent and that is really important context. I was struggling as well to think that far back given how many prime ministers and different leaders we’ve had over the past four years [laughter]. It’s also important to recognise that Bristol was the first council to declare a climate emergency in late 2018. So we chose the start of 2019 being from when the majority of councils actually declared climate emergencies. That was when the big bulk happened in 2019 so that’s why we went from that date.
Fraser: What’s the method for actually going out and bringing all that information together? What data do you use and how do you then compile those ratings?
Isaac: We use the same three-stage process that we created during the Plan Scorecards. That is the first mark, the right of reply and then the audit. What’s special about the scorecards is that it’s probably one of the largest citizen data projects in the UK. It’s definitely one of the largest climate citizen data projects in the UK. We actually go out and we ask volunteers to come in the first mark and help us collate all the information on the volunteer-marked questions and also process all the Freedom of Information Requests we also send to the councils. I’ll go through this three-stage bit and then I’ll talk about where we got the data from. We had over 200 volunteers actually help us process that information in the first mark and help us process the Freedom of Information Requests as well. It blows us away because, in the Plan Scorecards, we had about 125 volunteers and this time, we thought we needed 200 but we didn’t think we would actually get there. We actually got over 200 people who were willing to do the very unsexy, desktop research work of trawling council websites, minutes, meetings and documents to try and collate this information. That first mark is effectively a huge almost crowd-funder way of pulling all that data together for the questions that we’re asking. We then send the first mark to councils with a right of reply. We give them the ability to provide feedback or challenge any of those first marks. Again, we were blown away by the interaction that we had with councils this year. Just to give some context in the Plan Scorecards, almost 50% of councils with Climate Action Plans responded. Obviously, we didn’t expect councils that didn’t have Climate Action Plans to respond to us but this year, we actually had 74% of all UK councils respond in the right of reply which is unbelievable to think that three-quarters of councils were actually filling this information in and coming back to us.
Matt: It’s a positive sign.
Fraser: That’s quite incredible actually.
Isaac: Yeah, a really positive sign for us and we couldn’t believe it. We had a target of 50% and a goal in a few years’ time of 80%. When we saw this, we just said, ‘This is incredible for us.’ We go through the audit where it’s a much smaller team of already experienced volunteers and staff who look at that first mark, look at the right of reply and actually award the final marks based on that. The audit is where the final marks are given. We go through that three-stage process to ensure accuracy and consistency of marking as well. Where do we get the data from? There are 91 questions in the Action Scorecards across seven different sections. We get that data from three different sources. Two-thirds of those 91 questions, roughly about 66 questions, are answered via volunteer research. So it’s the vast majority of questions that are answered by volunteer research and then of the final third, we have two major data sources. As I said, one of those data sources is Freedom of Information Requests. We sent close to 4,000 Freedom of Information Requests to councils all across the UK and obviously, had to process all of those responses as well. The final way we get information is what we call national data and that is either from the national government, the UK Government and some of the devolved governments, whether that’s day-to-day published work such as recycling rates, or the average EPC rating of homes in the area, or it’s from national campaign organisations that already collate that data such as 20’s Plenty who already collate the information on local authorities that have 20 mph speed limits as their default or Pesticide Action Network who collate the data on which local authorities have stopped using pesticides across their whole area and not just in their parks. For example, UK Divest collates all the information on which councils have passed divestment motions and which pension funds have actually divested from fossil fuels. Those are the three major data sources that we use in the Action Scorecards.
Matt: Very good. So you’ve crunched the data and a lot of it. Wow! 4,000 Freedom of Information Requests. That deserves some kind of a medal.
Isaac: Thank you [laughter].
Matt: The results are all out there. We’ll put them in the show notes. They’re all there to be accessed. I think you said that maybe a report might be forthcoming that synthesises some of these results. They’re pretty fresh. What, to your eyes, are some of the key findings? I guess there are some things you might have expected and some things which were unexpected but also maybe we can dig in a little bit into some of the good news stories and maybe not-so-good news stories and things we need to fix.
Isaac: There is so much data available. Yeah, I would encourage people to go out and look at CouncilClimateScorecards.uk and follow that link in the podcast notes. Look at your own council and find the individual questions where they do score positively and obviously, don’t score positively as well. The key headlines were that councils generally score quite low. The average score across all different council types was 32%. That is quite low in terms of their overall score.
Matt: I’m going to just pause you there, and this is me being a pedantic academic, but when you say per cent, the way that I found it intuitive was to think, ‘If I’m sitting a test and of those 91 questions... if I was doing something climate-positive, I would get a mark or in the methodology, we’d have weightings for those marks.’ In effect, if I’m scoring 33% out of 100, two-thirds of the things I could be doing I’m not as a council but a third of the things I am doing. Is that about right?
Isaac: Yeah, exactly. That is a good summary. That is exactly it. To back that up, only 41 councils across our different lists – I’ll explain about the different lists in a second – actually scored above 50%. You can see that a lot of councils are scoring around that third mark and that average. What we found was there were councils that scored above 80% in certain sections. While a council like Leeds may have scored below 50% overall, actually, they had one of the strongest local plans in the country for their planning policies and they scored 92% in the planning section because their local plan was so strong. As we were going through the marking process, we thought this might be the case that councils would generally score low because they weren’t getting the points across the board but in certain sections, councils were scoring really high. So there are areas across every single section where councils are scoring pretty high but across the board, when you add up all of those percentage scores in all of those different sections, they’re generally scoring low. Just to say about our different lists, we split councils out by council type. There is single tier, district council, county council, Northern Ireland and combined authorities. We do that because, obviously, a county council has different powers compared to a district council. A district council is not marked against so many questions in transport and the county council is not marked against so many questions in planning because a district council is a planning authority and a county council is a transport one in the two-tier system of England. That’s the overall picture of councils generally scoring quite low but there are also some really interesting developments when you dig a little deeper in terms of some of the trends around political control and also in terms of their scores in the Plan Scorecards. Of the 41 councils that scored 50% or above in the councils’ Climate Action Scorecards, the average score in the Plan Scorecards was 54%. If you looked at the councils that scored 20% or below, which was 60 councils, 32 of those 60 did not have a Climate Action Plan in the Plan Scorecards and 16 of those 60 scored below 33% in the Plan Scorecards. You can see that 48 of the 60 councils that scored 20% or below in the Action Scorecards didn’t have a Climate Action Plan or score below one-third in the Plan Scorecards. There was a strong correlation between their scores in the Plan Scorecards and how well they had scored in the Action Scorecards.
Matt: Plans mean prizes in essence. That’s good news. I bet you were relieved to have seen that result actually.
Isaac: Yeah, a little bit. We genuinely didn’t know this until we got the results and we said, ‘Maybe we should do some analysis of the top and bottom-scoring councils.’ We then said, ‘Okay, this is really good to see.’ It’s also really heartening as well for campaigners and residents who have pushed councils and said, ‘We need a climate plan. We need a strategy. We need it to be as strong as possible.’ It’s really heartening that those things are really important and also for the officers who have put a lot of time and effort into making some of those plans as strong as possible. There’s a lot of time and effort that goes into creating those plans and it is worthwhile. It is good to have a strong climate plan because the general trend is that it translates into stronger action. The other thing, just to talk a little about political control of councils, is that of the councils that got 50% or more in the Action Scorecards, 26 of the 41 councils are currently Labour-run councils, six are in no overall control, five are Conservative, two are Lib Dem and two of those councils are run by Independents. Of the 60 that scored below 20%, 16 are currently Conservative-run councils, 31 are in no overall control, eight are Labour, one is Lib Dem and three are run by Independents. The final one is the Northeast Combined Authority which actually is a non-mayoral authority so it fits in a weird space in terms of political control.
Matt: Isaac, just to summarise that in clear terms, are you saying there are clear political dividing lines between councils that basically have delivered more or less action?
Isaac: I don’t know if I’d say there are really clear political dividing lines because there are councils from across the political spectrum that are high-scoring as well as low-scoring but there is a general trend that if they are Labour-run councils or no overall control councils, then they’re more likely to be a higher-scoring council and there’s a general trend, again, that if they’re a lower-scoring council, then they are a Conservative-run council. There is a trend but there are Conservative-run councils that have scored over 50% which is really good to see and there are Labour-run councils that have also scored below 20% as well which is obviously unfortunate.
Fraser: That’s a positive sign. Beyond the political trends, Isaac, I wonder whether there were any social or economic ones that you identified.
Isaac: Yeah, that’s something that we’re actually looking to pull out in our report next year that Matt referenced. We’re going to release a research report with our research partners, Anthesis, next year looking at things like these overall general trends including political control. It will also include things like if the council has a Cabinet Lead for net zero and for climate, do they score better overall? It will be looking at things like the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) and whether there’s a general trend towards a higher-scoring council and then being less deprived. I’ll have to wait until next year and that research report coming out. Maybe there will be part three...
Matt: A trilogy.
Fraser: There needs to be, yeah. We’ll hold you to it.
Matt: Go full Rocky [laughter].
Isaac: It would be really interesting to look at some of that information. Because there was a trend and Lancaster University and I think Blackpool Council looked at the IMD scores. So if a community was more deprived, they were scoring lower in the Plan Scorecards. There was a trend identified in the Plan Scorecards that showed that. It is likely that that trend will reappear in the Action Scorecards too because if you look at the regional trends in England, the lowest-scoring region is the Northeast at 26% and the highest-scoring regions are actually London and the Southwest.
Matt: Just on that, we gave a little preview of the highest and lowest scoring before we came in here because I know you kindly shared some of these numbers. I did note that Northern Ireland was actually lower than the Northeast or is that a different type?
Isaac: Yeah.
Matt: Okay, so within England, the Northeast was the lowest-scoring council?
Isaac: Yeah, exactly.
Matt: I’m going to maybe look back to Fraser here as well as a lot of Fraser’s research has looked at how lower-income communities are tackling the climate-change issue. Fraser has been very vocal, and eloquently so I might add, about saying it’s not just a kind of middle-class issue. Climate change affects everybody and it affects the poorest the most. So it is a little frustrating to hear that the more deprived council boroughs were maybe performing less well but it also scans that maybe they’ve got more issues that they’ve got to channel their resources into. That’s just fundamentally about doing more with less and we know with less because, depending on your source, we know these councils have, in real terms, been cut year on year since 2010. It might be a bit early and it might be for the trilogy but is there anything you might be able to say to that or is it watch this space?
Isaac: Yeah, it’s a bit watch this space but there is a really interesting example of this I think. It’s not just about the tax base of the residents but it’s also about the amount of development that councils can afford to have and how much they can charge developers to bring money into the council to be able to fill the coffers and, therefore, run these projects. It also then depends on how many staff they are able to hire because one of the biggest blockers to climate action is the government’s funding pots and the fact that they’re competitive, they’re short-term and they’re limited. One way this is really highlighted... this is great work and I’m not saying this isn’t but it shows the disparity. Manchester City Council has an average EPC rating of their council homes of EPC C or above.
Matt: That’s Energy Performance Certificates for the uninitiated.
Isaac: That’s right. Their council homes have Energy Performance Certificates of C or above which shows that there’s a decent level of energy efficiency. Of their council homes, Manchester City Council are at 97% of their council homes reached an Energy Performance Certificate of C or above which is really good. However, not that far away, Mansfield... which is a smaller district council had only 2% of their council homes which reached EPC C or above.
Matt: Wow!
Isaac: Manchester City Council obviously will have areas of deprivation within it but is generally a richer and bigger council because of the number of residents as well but also because of the amount of money they might be able to pull in from new developments compared to Mansfield which is going to be a much smaller council and have a much smaller tax base, maybe in terms of businesses as well and also in terms of development. What this ends up leading to is that some councils are able to bid better for the competitive funding rounds. Once you win a competitive funding bid, you are more likely to win it again because you have the team in place that’s able to refund itself. That’s how it plays out. So these areas which are more deprived and have these issues ongoing just continue to see that partly because the government’s competitive funding process actually enforces it in a sense I think.
Fraser: I think we had a lot of these conversations around Prospering From the Energy Revolution when we were thinking about how you make it so that local authorities can lead their own big ambitious energy projects. It’s one thing to do it in a Bristol or an Oxford but it’s another thing to do it in the smaller and more deprived areas where austerity has hammered them maybe that bit more over the years and where the capacity and resource isn’t there. I guess, Isaac, that cumulative inequity between local authorities is definitely something that plays out.
Isaac: A hundred per cent, yeah. It’s a major, major problem and, unfortunately, the UK Government at least, which obviously deals with English authorities, isn’t looking to resolve that in any way and isn’t looking to deal with that. They talk about levelling up but it’s looking like they’re going to continue to cut councils’ budgets given the Autumn statement.
Matt: In real terms, yeah.
Isaac: They talk about the funding situation and yet, honestly, I’ve been working in this sector now for about three years and in that three years, in the UK at least, everyone has said that we need to end short-term, competitive funding allocations that entrench inequality, that stop councils taking this action and stop sharing of best practice because it’s basically competition between councils. We’re still in the process where new funding pots are just there and it’s really frustrating.
Matt: A lot of it is to build stuff and not for people to operationalise what you build. This is something we come up against all the time. I wanted to just move on to a slightly different question about trends with regard to not just geography but sectoral trends. I just wanted to get your sense of where maybe progress is happening, where it isn’t and why.
Isaac: Just to say for the benefit of the listeners, there are seven sections that we have in the Action Scorecards and it’s actually one of the really special things about the scorecards is that we don’t just mark the really simple things like the actions. We look at the governance structures. We look at whether net zero is a priority within the corporate plan, for example. We’re not just looking at if they have X number of School Streets. It’s a holistic assessment of everything the council is doing. Those seven sections are transport, buildings and heatings, waste reduction and food, biodiversity, collaboration, engagement and planning, governance and finance. That is actually the first time I’ve said all seven directly without having to pause and think about [laughter] which ones they were. Of those sections, there are councils that score above 80% in all of those sections bar government and finance and transport. The areas where they are performing generally worse across all UK councils are governance and finance and transport. In every other section, some councils score above 80%. Some of those reasons might be because transport actually includes some negatively-scored questions. This is another thing that’s new in the Action Scorecards. We have some questions which are negatively scored because they have a negative effect on emissions. For example, we negatively scored councils if they had expanded their local airport because they’re the planning authority, or they had built new roads if they’re the transport authority, or they had approved new coal mines or oil drillings such as Surrey County Council. In transport, we have some negatively-scored questions around air quality but also around road building. There were a lot of councils that actually have continued to expand and build road capacity which will have a negative effect on emissions. Why they’re scoring lower in transport is probably one of the areas where they’re most likely to continue to take action which is actually sending emissions up and harming the environment. In terms of governance and finance, I’m not actually sure why that is one of the lowest-scoring questions. It’s potentially one of the harder ones but it’s also one of the areas where councils have generally looked to create some of the impacts. Councils that are really committed are putting it in their corporate plan but maybe we’re not seeing enough of that. We’re not seeing enough councils that are looking at their net-zero target and saying, ‘This has to go in our corporate priorities.’ In the procurement questions in the Plan Scorecards, loads of councils said, ‘We are going to embed climate within our procurement strategies because it’s one of the areas we can have the biggest impact.’ Again, it seems that we’re not seeing that translate into actual action. Obviously, there are quite a few councils that are doing that procurement stuff. On the website, you can see which council scored full marks. It’s a really interesting trend. Why is transport scoring low? Probably because of those negatively-scored questions. Why governance is scoring low is less clear because I think that’s the area where councils can sort themselves out the quickest. They can implement new decision-making processes. They can list sustainability implications or climate implications within all of their meeting minutes and have them there listed so at least councillors know the impact of the decisions they’re making. They should be putting it in their corporate plan and in their medium-term financial plans. If councils are serious about embedding climate across their functions, that’s where they’re putting it in these areas because they realise it’s one of their priorities. Unfortunately, we’re not seeing enough of that.
Fraser: That’s really useful actually, Isaac, because it’s very tangible. It’s a very specific thing that could be implemented and a really clear way to go about it. On some of those lessons, have you had feedback from councils about how these scorecards are helping or might help them going forward?
Isaac: Yeah, we’re starting to have feedback from councils. We’ve obviously had a lot of engagement in the past month with campaigners and councils contacting us about what the scorecards mean and whether we can come and talk to them. It shows some of the impact as well. We’ve been invited not just to speak on podcasts like this, which is a really amazing opportunity, but also at the County Council Network Conference, the Independent Councillors Annual Conference and other webinars. People seem to be really interested in these scores and that’s great.
Matt: We’re fast running out of time, Isaac. You might get the impression that Fraser and I could chat about this at length, almost indefinitely, but I do want to end on this one question. If you had one ask, on the basis of the work that you’ve done and the findings you’re seeing, what would it be?
Isaac: Can I do one ask to different types of people? [Laughter] Would that be okay?
Matt: Ask the same thing in a different way by all means [laughter]. I like that.
Isaac: I’ve talked about this before but to the UK and Scottish Governments, it would be ending the short-term, competitive funding pots and also the disparate funding pots. There are currently around 10-13 funding pots that are somehow linked to local climate action that local authorities have to individually bid for if they want to get that. That would be to the central governments. To campaigners and to councils, it would be to look at the scorecards, try and understand some of the things where your councils aren’t performing as highly and look at those councils that are performing better in those areas and just copy and paste. Leeds planning policies around energy efficiency are good. Cornwall’s planning policies are good. You do not need to reinvent the wheel. Just look at what they’re doing and transfer it over. We know School Streets work. We know they have a positive impact on people walking to school.
Matt: This is about making them safer and quieter streets for kids, basically.
Isaac: Yeah, exactly. We know those projects work so why does Manchester only have seven? We can do better. We can look at the impact it’s having in places like London and take that to our other urban cities but also let’s go further. In our market towns like Luton, my home town, School Streets can easily work there.
Matt: Yeah, there’s something here about saying, ‘Look, this can be done. You should be doing this.’ On the other hand, it’s like, ‘Why are you not doing this?’ I feel this data is critical to beginning both of those discussions. Isaac, I’m afraid we’re going to have to leave it there. Thank you so much and before we let you go, I have a plea. There will be various people who listen to this who are data bods and like to crunch numerical qualitative data. I noted on your website that you can provide access to that data. I think there’s a cost associated with that but I’m guessing the more brains on this the better.
Isaac: Yeah, a hundred per cent.
Matt: We’ll make sure we put a link into that too but until then, Isaac, thank you for your time. Very interesting. We’ll have you back soon.
Isaac: Thank you very much, guys. I really appreciate it.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: You’ve been listening to Local Zero. The number one way you can help this pod is to share it with someone you think might like it. So if there are any other climate change or energy geeks out there that you think would like Local Zero, why don’t you recommend us? If you’re still listening right now, first of all, well done but please take two seconds to rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. This helps us reach new listeners and climb the podcast charts. Let’s keep local energy firmly on the public agenda.
Matt: Yeah, and if you are still on X (Twitter), which I must admit I’m not, you can tweet your thoughts to us @LocalZeroPod which I do monitor so I guess I am on it. We also love our emails from listeners at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com and soon, we will be on Bluesky and we’ll get the info to you for that shortly.
Fraser: But for now, thank you and goodbye.
[Music flourish]
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