The pre-consultation session at the SSN Annual Conference will focus around three questions. Question One is concerned with area wide emissions
What measures can your local authority introduce to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in your local communities (besides your own corporate emissions) or adapt them to climate change? What will these measures achieve (i.e. their potential)? Are there any legal changes required to enable these measures to be taken forward?

Examples of legal changes needed to take action are: charges, regulations, powers, duties, current legal barriers, statutory targets, statutory guidance, cross compliance

Group 2; Facillitator: Gery McLaughlin

Key issue – Value this
Externalities – try to measure displacement
To avoid it becoming the cheap (rational) response

• Revise planning i.e. new housing, LA buildings
- Take account of CC targets
- Contractor, architects

• Must include industry, not just domestic emissions
• Include air travel (vital)
• Need carbon accounting
• Building standards must consider % reduction
• Carbon appraisal of spatial planning
• Address relative cost of public and private transport

• Car parking charges
- Linked to vehicle emission
• Park & Ride
• Focus on small, achievable targets
- City transport
• Address attitudes to car ownership and personal costs of owing a car
• Demand for behavioural change is hampered by costs / convenience of public transport
• Social attitude to public transport

Adaptation – What can LAs do?

• Revisit building standards
- To address heat, wind and flooding
• Education – working with public and business
• Incentives –
• Simplify and consolidate climate change advisory bodies, forums, businesses…
• Ban poor carbon choices (e.g. normal light bulbs)
• Require supermarkets to source x% locally
• Consider production impacts
-> Sustainable consumption rather than sustainable growth
• ‘Waste’ as a resource
- Waste charging
- Improved household recycling
- composting
- Business waste addressed
-> Be smart with targets! Need to encourage reduction of waste
• Planning to accommodate fast track microrenewables
• Need consistent advice on feasibility
• Improve energy efficiency of existing buildings
- Retrospective energy efficiency targets for housing

Potential impacts

• Sectoral contributions
• Retrofitting housing
• Aviation

What happens if we don’t meet targets?

• Issues in measuring targets
- 3 year moving average
- Annual targets encourages focus on achievement and validity
• Obligation to introduce extra measures if targets not met
• Beware percentages!
- Need to measure absolutes

Legal changes:
• Will a fining system take resources away from good work (e.g. L.A.’s)?
• Proportionate fines – consider effort

Group 1 (question 1; Facilitator: Gillian McDonald


Community Planning Process:• Working with partners to add value

Mainstream CC across Local Government.• Action should be fundamental to each department
• LAs need to have a clear and consistent message
• Positive CC action in LAs needs to be top down
- Driven by Chief Execs and Elected Members

Education and provision of resources for local communities• Be clear about the opportunities
- What can we do? A lot!
- Not just scary messages
• Need to have evidence to support action (measure how effective policies are)
- Needs to be appropriate and Local

LA training resources
- Education for employees (both how to change personal behaviour and incorporate CC thinking into their policymaking/delivery)
- Make it easier to develop good personal behaviours
- Feeds back into better policymaking (need to measure effectiveness)

Remember that Local decision makers / activists, not always typical / representative of community

Better procurement (eg. supply chain partnership in Perth and Kinross)

Need to promote message that energy efficiency is a lucrative alternative to simple capital generation

Variable Community Charging (incentivise and eliminate perverse incentives) – examples:
- Incentivise insulating houses for example
- Link to energy certification
- Car parking charges
- Council tax
- Waste charges
- “Nasty trash” disposal free while compost uplift is charged for!

Opportunities for Decentralised Energy
- Excess can be sold back to grid
• Planning
- Merton Rule: 10% of energy must come from sustainable sources (new builds)
- Scottish Bill could put such targets in statute or outcome agreements
- More than just one high level target

• Make Chief Execs accountable for meeting targets
- Explain failure to Parliament?
- Publish ways to get back on track
- Accountable Officers for Finance should also be accountable for climate change mitigation
- Give carbon financial value

• Is employment law restrictive?
- Value in employing only local people

Can we take embedded carbon into account when procuring?

Better integrated and much better incentivised public transport• Subsidies
• Restrict car use!
• Deregulated public transport (current system makes it difficult for LAs to incentivise public transport or integrate it)
- More efficient to place duties on LAs for this?
- Conditions in contracts?
-> Option for all LA contracts?

Relax heritage restrictions on visible energy generation technology on listed buildings
• Not just listed buildings, also conservation areas

Mechanism to aid LA and community investment in renewables
• Has to be transparent and timely sustainable

Group 4

Overview
Our discussion focused on measures. Difficult to quantify potential effect – but measures that have wider system effects likely to be more effective overall. I pushed the group for legal changes required – but collectively we seem to have taken a leaf from Roy Morgan’s book (Woking Borough Council CEO) – who spoke in the morning and emphasized that the main barrier is cultural and behavioural. Perhaps the main function of the Bill is to give politicians the security they need to just get on with it – and signal that local authorities will not be penalised for adopting low-C pathways when they are held to account.

We discussed a number of general issues that will need to be clarified through the development of the Bill:

· Measures may need to be sufficiently flexible to accommodate Scotland’s diverse geography and social needs (a one-size-fits-all approach may be simple but could lead to unexpected and undesired outcomes) – this may be overcome by making sure that the ‘bottom line’ is net carbon saving

· Consideration required to allocate Scotland’s national target and associated ghg budgets to 32 local authorities. Care not to double count and there will be UK, Scottish and local dimensions to this (e.g. does a windfarm show on the UK account via the national grid and multinational generating companies, the Scottish account or the local authority?)

Measures

Strengthen Strategic Environmental Assessment to include life cycle analysis of emissions (direct and indirect – in building infrastrucure, its use and decommissioning) – and apply this to alternative options

STAG – also to include LCA for carbon emissions

Should CO2 and other ghg be classified as pollutants and thereby subject to IPPC regulation? Would this accelerate the emission reduction pathway? Legal changes here may involve UK and EU legislation.

Planning and building regulations. A number of measures here, as buildings account for around 50% of emissions, and because the nature of the built environment is key to a low carbon (and health promoting) economy versus a carbon-intensive (and unhealthy) economy. So need to consider buildings themselves and the built environment (place making agenda).
· Mandate best practice. A key point is that there is lots of good guidance already available on this, from not building on flood plains to highly energy efficient building design and sustainable built environments. But it’s only guidance. So it’s ignored. Choice edit. Make it mandatory.
· Microgeneration – make it easier! GPDO
· Walkable environments, high density housing, multiple land use (residential, service, business mix).
· Link to adaptation in the built environment (SUDS that enhance greenspace and restorative environments) and in the wider catchment – soft engineering – sustainable flood management (link sustainable flood management bill and climate change bill)
· Tighten building regulations – follow (or improve on) England’s Code for Sustainable Homes – using the code to signal rapid improvements to the building regs in 5-yearly intervals – so developers know where the regulatory environment is going and give them an incentive to go beyond current regs to invest in the long term)
· Energy rating for all buildings (e.g. extension of EU energy performance in buildings directive)
· Use the new phase of council house building (with no right to buy) as an opportunity for the public sector to lead by example and build homes fit for the 21st Century
· Change role of building inspectors to advise on how to better the regs – not just to implement the lowest standard available. And enforce the regs.
· Energy conservation is much more important than energy efficiency – give incentives for reductions in energy use.
· An aspiration (or requirement?) for local authorities to procure state of the art low energy buildings. Likewise when renting – to provide an incentive for the private sector
· Spatial planning to align transport, housing, health (e.g. use the health impact assessment for transport) etc etc – and require developers to embrace this scale to demonstrate the direct and indirect carbon intensity of the development
· The emissions arising from new housing can be offset through investment in energy efficiency measures in 5 existing homes. Use the Bill to provide incentives for this to happen. Or require it.

Follow the Woking model – make sure local authorities reinvest the money saved through energy saving and energy conservation measures to invest in the next phase of carbon reduction and so on to create a virtuous circle

Use council tax rebates as a way to encourage uptake of energy efficiency measures (a London borough tried this with vastly more success than EEC)

Use the Bill to accelerate waste reduction, reuse and recycling. Mandate the latter as a minimum requirement. Microchip bins. Less frequent collections. Kirb-side recycling.

(Congratulations!). Use the Commonwealth Games as an opportunity to establish a sustainable low carbon games – go for gold and be a world-beater!

Transport. Again several measures here:
· Insist that local authorities and public bodies (and Government!) develop and implement staff travel plans
· Use local powers as widely as possible to reduce speed limits (20 mph throughout towns – help to reclaim safe walkable environments) and 50 mph as as extensively as possible elsewhere. Helps to ease congestion so counter-intuitive effects such as getting there more quickly. Politically difficult (who said this would be easy?) - start with 20 mph in all towns then tackle trunk roads etc.
· Graduated parking charges for more carbon-intensive vehicles (Woking)

Barriers

Procurement. Despite ‘best value’ many procurement officers are still driven to lowest cost by legal officials etc. Many councils still feel vulnerable in selecting a higher cost but more sustainable option. The Bill might provide some reassurance that scrutiny processes will come down hard if on a life cycle basis a more carbon intensive option has been procured.

Councils might be encouraged to establish partnerships for procurement to strengthen their purchasing power for low carbon goods and services. This may also help them to set up ESCos (e.g. following the Woking model)

Don’t forget behaviour change. The cheapest and least carbon intensive way to keep warm is to put a jumper on rather than turn up the heating.