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Challenging Colchester Council's Climate Emergency |
In July 2019, the City Council declared a Climate Emergency. The City Council’s all-party Scrutiny Panel recently reviewed the Council's progress on this Emergency over the past 5 years.
Cllr Darius Laws, (Conservative, Rural North Ward) Chairman of the Panel announced the results at its meeting on 12th November: “We recognised commendable efforts such as tree planting, developing safe cycling routes and other efforts to reduce the carbon footprint and the Council's impact on the environment. We also discovered the very significant costs to retrofit our housing stock and estate to consume less CO2. Also there was little progress on reducing tail-pipe CO2 emissions from the Council’s vehicle fleet. This was attributable to the high cost and difficult technological realities around Electric Vehicles and their infrastructure that can't be overcome without significant investment.”
The definition of the word ‘emergency’ dictates that the Council should have allocated considerable resources and funds to address the major issues of a Climate Emergency. After 5 years, it faces missing its own self-imposed objective unless significant capital budgets are identified to assist with major carbon reduction schemes.”
Cllr Tom Rowe, Conservative member of the Scrutiny Panel, added “We were scrutinising the Council’s performance following the original motion declaring a Climate Emergency.
The message from Scrutiny Panel report is very clear. The Council has successfully undertaken a wide range of small projects that are a positive on the balance sheet, but has avoided the larger more-complex and expensive projects that would make a real difference in a Climate Emergency.
I fully support the recommendation of the panel to ask the Council whether it wishes to fund the Climate Emergency properly, or alternatively to remove the alarmist language of an “Emergency”. This would set out for Council Taxpayers a position of honesty and financial prudence.
The report admits that, with the restricted allocation of resources, the Council can't deliver on many of the Emergency objectives. It would be better to be straight with the people of Colchester and make the objectives more realistic".
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