Tory-led administration's Environmental Strategy failure and Lib Dem proposal for Hounslow climate change investment fund

Speech by Cllr Dakers delivered to Hounslow Borough Full Council on Tue 30th Oct 2007

Mr Mayor, fellow members of Council and members of the public in the gallery and online. When I tabled the motion last June calling for Hounslow to start a rapid transition to a one planet economy the statistics I set out illustrated how our global eco-system is collapsing.

Since then the Stern report has confirmed the business case for rapid investment today in decarbonising our economy…and last week the UN GEO 4 report highlighted that if politicians have upped the rhetoric in the 20 years post-the 1987 Brundtland report, we have done little to change the reality; despite a plethora of good intentions, global society is less sustainable than ever.

I would be the first to acknowledge the past 18 months has seen some progress in Hounslow:

• Carbon neutrality and reducing our ecological footprint is more embedded in council policy than at any time before. In fact the policy commitments have been strong enough that the Lib Dem group felt able to support both the Community Strategy and Hounslow Plan that came before full council.

• We have continued to collaborate on a local cross-party campaign to block Heathrow expansion.

• A successful funding application to the LDA will ensure our Local Area Agreement is as sustainable as possible

• Earlier this year the Council organised our first Sustainable Schools Conference …our schools' travel planner Mark Frost won "school travel advisor of the year"

• The planning department has got more robust in checking that applicants for planning permission are thinking and acting on sustainability issues

• And an officers' sustainability working group has been established for the first time. Their work has been commendable and gives us the best snap shot in a decade of the state of the urgent work that must be done by the Council.

So there is much to be proud of. But for all these initiatives CO2 emissions wont have moved substantially in the past 18 months.

So what's gone wrong?

We've witnessed the planning department allow plans for educational buildings that did not use our own sustainable construction framework slip through the so-called "Sustainable Development" Committee. This is far from the leadership that we as an Education Authority and Council should be providing.

In my own ward a planning application for a solar hot water installation was recently turned down under delegated powers.

Running through all of this stream of work and the report before us tonight is a lack of urgency.

At this year's budget my group challenged the Executive to appoint a sustainable food officer, a cycling officer and an energy manager. We stand by our view that these roles could be transformative and cost neutral. But more to the point these roles are an essential part of delivering on the Community and Hounslow Plan environmental objectives ….and Hounslow becoming a national beacon.

Environmental sustainability should be embedded in the work practice of all staff and the Performance Improvement Programme, but it will still need dedicated resource in new work areas.

As far as I am aware none of these roles have thus far been established and extraordinarily - despite Cllr Reid waving a report at the Labour group last year that they had commissioned - which outlining the case for an energy manager - no action has been taken. Instead this role has seemingly been kicked into the long grass of the Performance Improvement Programme. Is this really the streamlined decision making and commitment to environmental sustainability we've been promised?

But tonight I'm going to raise the bar higher than these three enabling posts.

In Woking - with cross party support - the local authority established an Energy Services Company. This has made Woking a global leader in transitioning to a low carbon economy. In Richmond and Camden, under Lib Dem leadership, multi-million pound climate change investment funds have been established in the past 12 months. Hounslow must now gear up to do the same in the year ahead and we will bring forward proposals to achieve this in the next budget. Ours remains an open door for discussion with other groups as we develop these plans.

In conclusion the report before us is not yet ambitious enough and misses the point that if we are to become a beacon council - and make a substantial contribution to protecting our planet - it is not enough to simply to catch up with current best practice. We must demonstrate the political will and vision to go beyond.

So continue to step up to the challenge Cllr Reid and keep putting your foot down on the zero carbon accelerator.