The UK’s local elections saw the Green Party gain 440 councillors across England and win its first two elected mayors. They will join many councillors from all parties who will have to confront the same question: what can any one local authority actually do about climate change?
If they ask what they are required to do, the answer is: surprisingly little. In the UK’s highly centralised system, most responsibility lies with central government. Local authorities in England have no specific climate duties or targets – even though they have asked for them.
Ask instead what councils can do, and the answer is very different. Powers over things such as planning, business development, transport and social care, open up a huge range of opportunities to contribute to climate action. There are hundreds of initiatives driven or supported by local politicians which could provide vital inspiration to newly elected councillors.
Global problem, local action
For instance, local authorities across Cambridgeshire have worked together on a plan to boost home energy efficiency, providing help and funding to householders to fit heat pumps, cut energy use and bills, and creating green jobs.
The Robin is a new transport service in rural Gloucestershire that can be booked on demand, to fill in gaps in formal transport provision and reduce isolation for rural dwellers who don’t have access to a car. Leeds City Council has partnered with private energy companies to develop Pipes, a city-wide district heating network. Some local authorities, including North Somerset and Sheffield, have even banned advertising of high-carbon products and services such as petrol cars and flights.
In Lawrence Weston, a relatively low-income area of Bristol, local government and a community organisation worked together to build the UK’s largest onshore wind turbine, which ploughs its revenues back into the community.
In Hull, an area prone to flooding, the council is working closely with local residents to protect them from increasingly extreme weather, through sustainable urban drainage systems, and a “floodmobile” which engages with local communities to discuss how best to protect households and gains vital feedback from people’s experiences.
People want more action
My local town council, Kendal, held a citizens’ jury in 2020, to ask residents what Kendal should be doing about climate change. It was one of the first of many local assemblies and juries to involve a randomly selected group of ordinary people in climate decision-making.
My research group has pulled together the findings of over 30 of these processes. It found that people want more action on climate and support more ambitious policies on transport, home energy and green space. They want the opportunity to be more involved in the decisions that affect them.
Since Kendal’s jury, the town council has used its very limited budget to create more allotments, set up a bike maintenance hub, and support a community-run café that uses surplus food from supermarkets to serve pay-as-you-can meals.
These examples, from cities, towns and rural areas, involving councillors of all political persuasions, show what can be done by a determined local authority. What they have in common is they connect climate goals to immediate local benefits: lower bills, better transport, more green space and help for families struggling to make ends meet.
But there are limits
While it’s important to celebrate these successes, there’s a need to attach a substantial health warning. Each initiative has relied on a determined council officials, elected members, and community and business support. Nearly all need external funding, which is increasingly hard to come by. Local councils’ own budgets are under constant pressure, and there are fewer staff in post. Funding per person has decreased by 18% since the 2010s. Remember that councils have no formal duties to reduce emissions – and it’s easy to understand why many feel they need to prioritise elsewhere.
It’s also an uncomfortable, rarely discussed, truth that some things local councils do actually make it harder to meet our climate objectives. Examples include planning policies which increase car dependence through low-density housing and out-of-town developments, poor transport planning which makes walking and cycling more dangerous, and support for high-carbon industrial development. We may have a climate crisis on our hands, but with limited budgets and an increasingly fraught political arena, there is a huge temptation for local councillors to look the other way.
Given this mixed and confusing picture, one of the things a new councillor could do to have the most impact would be to lobby for clear climate-related responsibilities, targets and funding for local areas. This would provide firmer foundations for local areas to act, would raise the floor, to ensure that all local areas were playing their part, and would standardise reporting so that we could compare and learn what results in the best outcomes for climate, people and nature.
Perhaps targets, funding and reporting is not the best rallying cry for climate action, but it would be the best way to make sure that these exceptional initiatives that have sprung up across England could become the norm – not the exception.
