Greening Actually

greening actually environmental action through the local perspective david boyle

greening actually

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acknowledgements Some Liberal Democrat councillors and councils have led the way on the environment - when it wasn’t just fashion or a government target. I’d like to thank the London Boroughs of Sutton and Kingston-upon-Thames, Eastleigh District Council and Kirklees Borough Council - their political leadership has been a model for many. This book hopefully provides more.

Cllr Richard Kemp (Church Ward, Liverpool) Leader of the Liberal Democrat Group Local Government Association

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contents Forewood

introduction

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Simon Hughes MP

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David Boyle

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one

recycling

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two

food

21

three

building

29

four

energy

39

five

transport

47

money

55

conclusion

65

appendix

72

six seven

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Amey plc

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Amey is one of today’s leading public services providers, managing the vital infrastructure and business services that practically everyone, everywhere relies on.

About Amey If you’ve driven on a motorway, travelled on the Tube, been into a local school or used council services, there is a good chance you’ve benefited from the work that Amey does. As one of the leading integrated public service providers in the country, the extensive scope of our work means that day in, day out, we touch the lives of millions.

Our purpose is to support organisations, both public and private, that serve the public and meet the needs of the 21st Century citizen. Our approach is based on true partnership, supporting the delivery of the highest public policy objectives, in education and transport, social cohesion and community development.

11,000 people work for Amey, who are at the heart of everything we do. We also bring the strength and additional capabilities of Ferrovial, one of Europe’s most successful infrastructure and services companies.

Amey.

A passion for the very best service, delivered by the very best people.

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The Liberal Democrats have long recognised the importance of acting on climate change. We see that although going green can seem hard, it is something that must be done in order to preserve the planet for future generations.

This Labour government has never matched its record to its rhetoric when it comes to tackling climate change; it is up to Liberal Democrats to show that when we achieve power we don’t do the same. As the party that pioneered green initiatives well before their time we have a duty to implement green change when we have the chance.

This is why Green Actually is so important: it is account of the work done and being done by Liberal Democrat councils to tackle environmental issues, and a blueprint for further improvement. Having popularised and campaigned on environmental issues it is now vital to see what local councillors can do to meet the challenges of climate change. I feel that this is all the more important with a general election in the near future. It is vital that the electorate sees that green campaigning on the part of the Liberal Democrats will be matched by decisive action. It is up to us to provide leadership in tackling climate change in the hope that action at a local level can also encourage a truly national environmental effort.

I welcome the publication of this report and congratulate the Local Government Association team on their work.

With best wishes, Simon Hughes Liberal Democrat Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change

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introduction

“No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.”

John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, 1873 “We are capable of shutting off the sun and stars because they pay no dividend.”

John Maynard Keynes, National Self-sufficiency, 1933

the front line of the planet

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“They tend to have ill-fitting jeans, and they have shoes which look like Cornish pasties,” wrote Simon Hoggart about the Liberal Party in 1981 in the Guardian. “They have briefcases stuffed with documents, chiefly about community politics, nuclear power and ecology. They drink real ale.”

This caricature was, of course, true. Now that ecology and real ale are seriously big business, it goes to show just how prescient Liberals and Liberal Democrats have been over the years, pioneering causes and ideas long before they became mainstream – indeed, assisting them along in that process.

There is no doubt that Liberal Democrats have played an important role in popularising green ideas, and developing them in practice in the UK. They have done so not just in their lonely critique of nuclear reprocessing in 1978, when the Liberal parliamentary party went into the lobby alone against the combined weight of all their opponents. Nor just in their pioneering critique of economic growth the following year, but in painstakingly making things happen at local level.

Nor was this something which just emerged in the alternative hothouse of the 1970s. My great-grandmother – a lifelong Liberal – held me at my christening with a copy of Liberal News in her handbag, along with her usual tracts about the dangers of radiation emissions to the food chain. For many years, she hosted one of the pioneering names of the green movement, who camped under her dining room table in Chelsea in the 1930s.

Stretching even further back, the great Liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill imagined a ‘stationary state’ economy which could provide for human needs without going beyond environmental limits. For Mill and those that followed him, green issues – though he never used the phrase himself – were issues of liberty. Clean air, unpolluted water, were part of the basic pre-requisites of life. Those who suffer from asthma, because of the traffic outside their door, are suffering under a yoke of tyranny as potent as any prison with real bars.

The big problem is what you can do about it, given that Liberal Democrats do not yet control the nation, still less the world, and this is the question that lies behind this short book. There is a global crisis, and those who run the world are reacting slowly and lazily, and we have to use what tools are before us. In short, local government finds itself on the front line.

Under Liberal Democrat influence, very tentatively and carefully – borrowing a little from the rhetoric of Local Agenda 21 in the 1990s – UK local authorities have begun to tiptoe lightly in a greener direction. Never quite creating a revolution. Always wondering exactly how it all connects together, or how it connects with the mainstream – or to the raft of largely irrelevant 8

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targets which Whitehall uses to judge success. But even so, progress is being made.

Among the real pioneers were Lib Dem Sutton, where Liberals brought a motion to council back in 1985, setting out how to make the council greener.

It was voted down by the ruling Conservatives, but they were thrown out by the voters the following year, and Graham Tope and his Liberal team were set the task of putting it in practice. They were eventually awarded certificate number 0001 in the European Union’s eco-management auditing system. The next seven certificates went to Lib Dem local authorities too.

Another pioneer was Woking, then a joint administration between Liberal Democrats and Conservatives, which also began with a Lib Dem motion to subject the council to an environmental audit. It led to the council becoming a world leader in generating off-grid renewable energy.

Lib Dem councils like Eastleigh, Devon and Chesterfield have all, in their own way, pushed forward the boundaries of what is possible for a UK local authorities. The difficulty is that our own councils still have a very long way to go to catch up with some of their Scandinavian or German counterparts – even American ones, when Portland, Oregon is famously wrestling with its own Peak Oil plan.

Like Reykjavik in Iceland, which has takes all its heat and electricity from hydro and geothermal power sources.

Or Curitiba in Brazil, with its innovative currency paid out for collecting litter which can be used on the buses (it also has a flock of municipal sheep for keeping the grass mown).

Or Freiburg in Germany with its car-free neighbourhoods.

Or Bogata in Columbia, which has cut rush hour traffic by 40 per cent.

Or Malmo in Sweden, where all the new municipal housing is self-sufficient in energy and where the bus fleet runs entirely on biogas generated from the city’s sewage. Even Istanbul manages to have public litter bins across the city that are divided into paper, metal and glass and the rest.

“I want Liberal Democrats to aspire to that kind of structural re-thinking,” says Richard Kemp, Liverpool councillor and Lib Dem leader in the Local Government Association. “That should be our role and that is our challenge.”

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What makes Lib Dem local government different, asks Richard Kemp. His answer is: i) ii)

Devolution, involvement and participation.

Tackling long term environmental issues.

That puts the green agenda absolutely at the heart of the purpose of getting elected as a Liberal Democrat, and it is the reason for this book.

“Traditionally, we have always been good at the immediate things, like getting elected, making our areas clean and well-managed,” he says. “But we still need to up our game for the long-term.”

Nor is this just something that can only be pursued by Lib Dem councillors in power and in cabinet. There are examples on the pages that follow about projects successfully pursued by back bench councillors, even back bench councillors with other parties in power.

“It needs to be in our DNA,” says Richard. “This is too big a problem to leave to leaders. There is a role to play for everyone. Wherever we are, we need to be setting an example.”

That is the political reason, but there is a more urgent reason too. The argument known as Peak Oil – that oil will quickly become ruinously expensive the moment that global oil production peaks – is not yet received wisdom, but it needs to be addressed. Any city or rural area that does not face up to the possibility that – climate change or no climate change – life is going to be organised very differently in the near future, is risking a serious crisis they have not prepared for.

The book that follows sets out a few examples of how Liberal Democrat councillors have risen to meet this challenge, and how they did it.

David Boyle September 2009

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one :: recycling

“I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things we could use.”

Mother Teresa of Calcutta “To what purpose is this waste?”

Matthew 26 v7

hidden gold

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If you sometimes wonder whether progress towards sustainability is really possible, and we all do, then cast your mind back to the early 1980s, when recycling was a peculiar maverick idea. Rubbish was collected every week and flung into the nearest hole in the ground and very occasionally burned.

Old newspapers were occasionally collected by voluntary groups. There was the occasional bottle bank, a symbol of radical municipal greenery.

The idea that local authorities might one day send separate lorries out to collect people’s bottles and – heaven knows, food scraps and plastic – was a bizarre dream, ridiculed by the staid old Labour and Conservative administrations that used to run things in those days. Some of them would claim to have tried it once without success. Most regarded it as anathema.

Now of course, there are regular collections all over the country, there is a tax on landfill enforced by the European Union and most of the landfill sites around London are owned by American hedge funds, who know about a bit about cornering scarce resources. It isn’t where we need to be, by any means, and change has been achingly slow over the last three decades, but it is change at least.

It is also a change that has been driven largely by Liberal Democrats, and nowhere earlier than in Bath. In fact, the story of how Liberal Democrats in Bath have continued to innovate to push recycling forwards, despite local government re-organisation and merger, despite gaining and losing outright control, and through the political vicissitudes of the past two decades, is a fascinating study in determination and vision.

One of the councillors most involved in this has been Roger Symonds, who went from being a teacher back in 1991 when he was first elected, to be environment portfolio holder, and mayor and various other positions, both inside and outside the administration. Throughout that time, he was using what influence he had to make Bath and the surrounding area the jewel in the crown of British recycling.

In fact, the story began some years before his first election, with a small recycling collection service run by Avon Friends of the Earth. It was only piles of old newspapers in those days, sold on to the handful of emerging recycled paper dealers. Similar packs of newspapers were appearing at that time outside homes in many trendy corners of university towns, a sop towards the recycling dream.

But Bath was also becoming a hotbed of Liberal Democrat activity by the end of the 1980s, and recycling was high on their agenda. Bath had employed a recycling officer in 1991. As a result of this, they were soon using their influence to launch a council recycling service. Initially it was voluntary and patchy, and run by enthusiasts, but it made sense to contract the experts to run it. It made sense to take on Avon Friends of the Earth, 12

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which had by then transformed themselves into a not-for-profit social enterprise.

They carried on using the Avon Friends of the Earth name, and the new enterprise also occasionally used a horse and cart – partly as a symbol of sustainability – but they were the right people for the job. From a service, carried out partly by volunteers and partly by paid staff, Avon FoE became a well-run ‘not for profit’ company. The neighbourhoods of Bath were gradually added to the contract until they were collecting paper, bottles, cans, aluminium foil and old clothes weekly from all over the city.

Progress was such that, by 1994, when the Lib Dems were briefly in control of the council, Bath met its recycling target of 25 per cent, which they were supposed to reach by the year 2000. Lib Dems on the council voted through a pilot programme recycling plastic in 1994, a good decade ahead of most of the local authorities in the UK. Then the Major administration’s local government re-organisation followed, and Bath merged with Wansdyke Council next door to create the Bath and North East Somerset unitary authority. Wansdyke had been dominated for decades by the most Conservative and Labour council regimes – “the land that time forgot,” according to one Lib Dem councillor. Not only did this leave the new council with no overall control, but it meant that Bath was merging with an area that only managed to recycle two per cent of its rubbish. So it was in some ways back to square one.

Except that the progress carried on. Avon Friends of the Earth extended their coverage and the figures began to rise again. Liberal Democrat influence meant that the resources to extend recycling were put into the budget every year and, by the time the party was back in minority control in 2003, the rate had been pushed up to 33 per cent. But there was a constant drag on progress. The reluctance of the Labour and Conservative groups on the new council meant that it took seven years to get to this level. Pressure from the Lib Dems, and from people in the old Wansdyke area demanding the same recycling service as Bath, was what moved things along.

Recycling was by then among Roger’s responsibilities, and he had been following the story from the beginning. In 2001, he had proposed the controversial idea that Bath and North East Somerset should be a ‘Zero Waste council’. As well as being a visionary shift – B&NES became the first council in the UK to adopt a Zero Waste strategy – it was a political move designed to head off the idea of burning rubbish instead of recycling, which was not at that time ruled out by either Labour or Tory groups. The Zero waste proposal was passed by the council. Two years later and again in 2008, when incineration was back on the agenda, Roger was able to argue that Zero Waste was incompatible with burning the stuff. greening actually

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Zero Waste isn’t just strategic, of course. It is a long-term aspiration to design out waste and to buy products which last and which can be recycled.

The council has been using the slogan ‘Rethink Rubbish’ since 2003, and the idea of minimising waste was at the heart of their philosophy.

By then, Roger was executive member in charge of the environment and used the year of Lib Dem control to force through ambitious plans to extend recycling. There were plans to roll out plastics recycling, for cardboard recycling, and fortnightly collection garden waste for composting locally. But it wasn’t going to be easy, partly because outright control only lasted a year.

“We got £750,000 from the government to pilot this,” says Roger. “But it was incredibly hard to get the council to accept it.”

In the years that followed, the council administration was Lib Dem, Conservative and Independent. Other Lib Dem councillors Rosemary Todd and then Gerry Curran took charge of the environment portfolio, and managed to implement schemes to recycle spectacles, batteries and mobile phones. The launch of a plan to recycle kitchen waste was also scheduled for 2008. Unfortunately, with the change to a Conservative/Independent administration after the 2007 elections, the kitchen waste plan has now been put back to 2011, when it will be more expensive to send it to landfill.

“It is very frustrating,” says Roger. “If we had followed the principle of only doing the cheapest option, that we would only recycle when it was more expensive to do otherwise, then none of this progress would have happened. It was only in 2004 that recycling became less expensive than landfill. Food waste collection is very important to meeting our climate change targets, and it would help in the city with the seagull problem too, by removing food waste from the black bags.”

The result is that B&NES has dropped from being the top unitary authority recycler in the country in 2004, when Lib Dems were running the council, to being the fourth. Local authority marketing departments have little institutional memory, and put out an excited press release hailing their fourth position this year as a great achievement. “I had to put them right on that,” says Roger.

Even so, the recycling rate is still rising. It reached 43 per cent in 2007 and should now have passed the magic 50 per cent mark. It still means half of the area’s rubbish is going into the ground, but it is an achievement nonetheless.

But that is to jump ahead in the story because, back in 2004, the social enterprise that had made the success possible, Avon Friends of the Earth, found itself owing £500,000 and was forced into liquidation. Roger tried to get the council to bail them out – it wasn’t a huge debt after all – but it was too late.

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The council stuck with the social enterprise solution. Lib Dems in Liverpool were also contracting social enterprises for recycling, and were getting admiring publicity for it, especially with the success of the furniture recycler Bulky Bob’s (see Power Actually). B&NES instead contracted one of the biggest social enterprises in the country, Ealing Community Transport (ECT).

ECT is a fascinating example of how social enterprises can move quickly to fill in the gaps which public and private sectors are too slow to tackle. They started life in 1995 doing door to door recycling in Ealing and soon emerged as Ealing Community Transport, growing year by year to run community bus services for local authorities all over the country. They now run one London bus route and, for a while, a community rail service in Devon.

ECT had originally borrowed the recycling methods and philosophy of Avon Friends of the Earth back when they started in 1995, so they were keen to develop similar ideas in Bath. Roger’s pilot kitchen waste collection project may not have survived the political machinations in B&NES, but ECT went on to roll out the same idea across Lib Dem Somerset.

By 2008, ECT Recycling was organising the recycling for 16 local authorities across the UK, and was then sold to a company called May Gurney, while ECT concentrates on transport. But the same principles and methods continue to apply: it has come to be known as ‘community recycling’ or ‘kerbside recycling’.

In fact, the involvement of social enterprises in recycling in Bath explains one of the pioneering aspects of the story, and explains why it remains so different from the recycling now going on in most of the UK. When recycling began to take off in Britain in the mid-1990s, and the plans for big incinerator plants were largely cancelled, the efforts of those who believe in big solutions shifted to selling councils the idea of big automated separator plants – and of course the even more profitable business of providing the loans for them.

Most local authorities in the UK now send their recycled rubbish to these; Bath doesn’t and never has. They still separate by hand. In fact, the rubbish is separated on the lorries as they collect it and plastic bottles, tin and aluminium cans on conveyor belts at the depot. At the depot in Bath, section of the van lifts off – one with paper, one with bottles and one with plastic and cans.

The system is hugely more efficient, in the sense that it does not lose the usual 15-20 per cent of waste which the big plants are unable to separate.

Most recycled paper collected in the UK can’t be sold in the UK, because it has glass in it. Bath’s recycled paper doesn’t. It makes its way into the recycled paper we use here. greening actually

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“Right from the beginning, we wanted to go for high-quality kerbside recycling,” says Roger. “Other local authorities like Eastleigh had gone for fortnightly alternating wheeled bin collections, and we went to see it in action in the 1990s, but decided to stick with our kerbside separation scheme. The Labour group, now down from 23 to five on the council, wanted to bring the operation back in-house and to incinerate, but we managed to keep the system as it was.”

But, of course, none of this makes sense without an over-arching policy – which Bath and North East Somerset still has – to work towards Zero Waste in the first place. This is what Roger had been working towards since he was first elected in 1991. “I joined the environment committee from the start and this was always the area I wanted to be involved in,” he says. “We achieved a lot when we were the biggest group and had control of the budget. It was hard work persuading the other groups to support us, but we believed in trying to avert climate change by implementing a Local Agenda 21 Strategy. The more recycling and reduction of waste we achieve, the more we can help the survival of the planet, by reducing the waste of scarce resources.”

Liberal Democrats also adopted Zero Waste at their conference in September 2003, the first and only one of the three main UK parties to take this radical step.

Lib Dem Liverpool’s environment portfolio holder Berni Turner has been an environmental champion for the city since becoming the executive member in 2005. With inspiration drawn from projects like Bette Midler’s vegetable plots in community gardens all over New York, she was determined to create something like that in Liverpool too. To do that she needed some kind of local social enterprise partner, and she knew immediately where she should go: Rotters Community Composting.

Like Bath, Lib Dems in Liverpool have pioneered contracting local social enterprises to carry out vital but innovative tasks. They employ local people, and channel innovation into new fields in a way that the other sectors can’t always match. Rotters is a community organisation in Garston, Liverpool.

As a social enterprise they had already started work collecting green waste from schools, homes and private businesses in their immediate area, with considerable success. Rotters had already taken one small step, but Berni recognised that the city council could help them take things to the next level.

Berni is a ferocious advocate of all things green. It was the Year of the Environment in 2009, and it was Berni’s job to push forward this sustainability agenda. Her work with Rotters has seen this social business develop from a small scale community team into a business providing support to the long term unemployed by by creating a small scale growing project ‘Fork to Fork’.

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Her partnership with them goes back to 2007 when they first asked to see her, in her role of executive member for the environment. Rotters had brought in a proposal for food composting. They were aware that vast amounts of food were going into landfill in the city, just as it is all over the country, and wanted to extend their experiment with re-using it. The idea was to start with taking food waste from Liverpool Airport, and from other parts of the south of Liverpool, then compost it on a site near Speke, one of the most deprived areas of the city.

“They were extremely passionate about what they were doing,” says Berni now. “We had looked at the possibility of collecting food waste before, but the business case didn’t really stack up. Many people also have four foot entryways, which is barely enough for a wheelie bin, let alone space for another bin for food. But this was different.”

Eighteen months on, the project is an enormous success. The council is buying an anaerobic digester to tackle the sheer scale of the wasted food, and the compost is ploughed back into food growing in the surrounding community. That is the source of Liverpool’s local food in chapter 3. It derives directly from resources gleaned from food thrown away from the airport and other parts of the south of Liverpool. It is an inspiring example of using waste as the raw material for production.

Rotters wouldn’t take no for an answer – and all credit to them,” says Berni.

“We decided we would do some trials with food waste from the airport, composted on the corner of a Dutch Farm Site near Speke. Then we took it into Sure Start, which was the beginning of the Fork to Fork scheme.”

The Fork to Fork scheme is described in the next chapter. But the Rotters project follows the enormous success of Berni’s big push to get Liverpool recycling. From the laggard of the big British cities, Liverpool became one of the most successful recyclers, leaping from just seven per cent to over 30 per cent in a year.

The secret, she says, was to do it gently. The council provided blue boxes where everything could go in, ready to be sorted later. It was intended to be simple. “Bins are sensitive in Liverpool, ever since Derek Hatton’s Militant failed to empty them,” says Berni. “You don’t mess with Scousers’ bins. So we didn’t impose it on anyone. We said you could have half-size boxes, three blue boxes or a blue bin. We tried to make it as easy as possible.

Liverpool was at pains to make sure it wasn’t one size fits all.”

But it worked, and the reason it worked was that Berni and her council colleagues constantly emphasised the link between wasted rubbish and wasted money. That was the message in leaflets, roadshows, exhibitions in supermarkets, and special days in schools. People understood the reasons for recycling were also practical and economic. Nobody wants their council greening actually

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tax to be higher because they don’t recycle. Nobody likes waste anyway.

The question, which the Rotters scheme began to answer, is: what do you do with all the recycled waste? That is the key issue of the future.

“The key aim is a greener cleaner city,” says Berni. “Recycling fits with everything we believe as Liberal Democrats, including – with the Rotters scheme – helping young mums learn how to cook fresh fruit and vegetables.”

What the Rotters project has achieved is, in some ways, the holy grail of green economics. They are using their waste as a raw material for something else. They are completing the circle which economics ought to facilitate, but so rarely does. We are only in the earliest stages of this, and it has profound implications for the way things are made and for the future shape of cities. After all, the kind of businesses that will transform what we throw away into raw materials and products will need space; a recycling and re-use economy doesn’t really fit into New Labour high-density neighbourhoods.

But there is another, even more fundamental principle at stake: the idea that we should minimise what we throw away in the first place. Lib Dem Eastleigh has doorstep collections along the lines of so many other Lib Dem councils, but – like Bath’s zero-waste policy – they are also concentrating on minimising waste. They have given away 16,000 home composters and back that up with a paid-for garden waste collection service, which reduces waste at the cost of bringing down their league table standing in the recycling league. But, after all, what is the point of slavishly following targets if they distract you from something even more fundamental? Eastleigh also restricts people’s bin sizes.

These are all politically risky. So is their bi-weekly bin collection. They achieve this not without complaint, but without political backlash, by resolutely communicating what the objective is and why. That is the bottom line: we are not recycling as an end in itself, after all. We are doing so, as one way – and not the most fundamental way either – of cutting down the amount we throw away and conserving resources. Not just because it helps the planet but because, in the long run, it is going to be very much cheaper, in every sense of the word.

That is the main lesson of Lib Dem recycling: Use recycled waste as raw material: This can be done most obviously using the council’s procurement budget. Buying products that are made from local recycled waste is the obvious way forward; there just isn’t much of it around. It requires innovation, like using insulation made from recycled paper (Cardiff) or running municipal vehicles on biomethane made from food waste (Camden). The future lies in squaring the economic circle, so that as 18

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little leaks out as possible – and what does get thrown away is transformed by new local industries into products and raw materials.

Push forward the boundaries: Small innovations don’t make much difference, but the lessons of Bath and Liverpool is that lots of small innovations can. Lib Dem councils are pushing forward the boundaries, by getting their street sweepers to separate litter (Liverpool), or phasing out bottled water in council offices (Oldham). Liverpool now has glass and paper bins in all their shopping areas too. The next boundary is clearly going to be collecting kitchen waste. This is expensive, but can have a huge potential impact – and not just on the rats and seagulls – which is why Lib Dem Cardiff is pushing ahead with a £6 million processing plant for organic waste. Fortnightly bin collections in Liverpool are off the Lib Dem political agenda.

Go with the zeitgeist: A generation or more ago, town centres were full of small businesses that repaired shoes, white goods or televisions. The fact that it is now often now cheaper to buy a new one and throw the old one away is part of the huge sustainability problem we face. But there the rise of eBay and freecycle shows that there is energy behind a different way forward. Lib Dem Islington has launched an online SwapXchange on the councils website, which gets 12,000 visitors a year and exchanged about 10 tonnes which would otherwise have ended up in landfill.

Involve young people: Young people can be recycling and repair enthusiasts in a way that their world weary parents sometimes fail to manage. Many Lib Dem local authorities have been experimenting with ecoschools. As many as 80 per cent of the eco-schools in Liverpool take part in the recycling service, and the council’s recycling team visits schools to encourage them. Their Park Rangers also support environmental education, and their Watt Watchers project takes on six primary schools a year to explain about energy saving.

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two :: food

“And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the while race of politicians put together.”

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels “While we have land to labour, then let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a workbench or twirling a distaff.”

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia

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The great American social critic Jane Jacobs used to execrate the planning and architectural professions in her own country for their obsession with urban motorways, out of town malls and their horror of human clutter and life. But British planners were not perfect either, she said, because of their obsession with large tracts of grass “so that Christopher Robin can go hoppity-hop”.

There certainly is a lot of neglected mown acres of grass in British cities.

There is a story, sometimes attributed to Mother Theresa on a rare visit to the UK, when she was confronted with the peculiar reality of one of those ubiquitous high rise estates, denying that those who live there could possibly be poor because of the acres of municipal grass lying fallow. Other visitors from Latin America have said the same: how can these people be needy if they don’t even use the land around them to grow food?

Mother Teresa and the others were, perhaps, unfamiliar with the tyrannical health and safety regimes run by some local authorities, the purpose of which seems to be to prevent any spontaneous popular activity whatever.

But imagine for a moment if you were able to grow fruit and vegetables around those tower blocks, or on the rock hard spaces between, or even the wasted land full of litter known by the technical term ‘SLOAP’, or Space Left Over After Planning. Not only would that provide some alternative to monopolistic supermarkets and food deserts, but they would bring life back to some of those dead places people are expected to live.

That was the dream of Lambeth Liberal Democrat councillor Steve Bradley, originally from Northern Ireland, who has been green-minded since the days when he was collecting cans for recycling in his home town at the age of 13.

It is a dream he has been pursuing relentlessly since he was elected. The main difficulty has been that the south London borough of Lambeth is not, at the moment, controlled by Liberal Democrats. Worse, he is a relatively new backbench opposition councillor, elected only in March 2008, in the first byelection the party has won in Lambeth for twelve years, winning over half the vote in a previously safe Labour ward. Worse still, his fellow ward councillors are political opponents, one of whom he describes as ‘frosty’ and the other he has hardly even met. How in these circumstances could he possibly put into effect such a simple but potentially revolutionary idea?

The answer was by using what resources are available, and it happened to be the first year that ward ‘purses’ were being promised for local projects nominated by ward councillors. If the councillors could agree, there would be as much as £12,000. If they couldn’t agree, there would be nothing.

That was the stick with which they might get the carrot, if he could get them around a table. And after some negotiation and a great deal of compromise, they did.

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The grant was enough to help two local estates start growing their own food, if he could find a group of people living there who were interested enough.

The first tenants association he tried immediately ran into trouble because the growing area they identified was being used for football, after the playing fields had been sold off by previous administrations. Steve moved on.

Luckily, there was clear interest in two other estates. He had already intervened in one of them to defend one local resident who took it upon himself to dig up an ugly litter-strewn corner of the estate to grow things there. The council had noticed, told him to dig it up and Steve had been able to persuade them to let him, at least wait until he could harvest the crop.

Within a few weeks, the tenants associations of two estates in Camberwell – Calais Gate and Caldwell Gardens – were very keen to get started. Soon the sections of underused scrub in Calais Gate were being transformed into raised beds, designed in symmetrical shapes with fruit trees in between.

Most of the work was done by people who lived there, but the budget stretched to some extra work by the Brutish Trust for Conservation Volunteers. Soon there were also plum trees, apple trees, herbs spices, potatoes and a selection of other vegetables waiting for the spring. As I write, Caldwell Gardens is preparing to turn their bare land into something similar. They have other plans for vines up the walls later.

Steve came over from Ireland to study in 1991 and has been in London ever since. “I am quite passionate about urban food growing,” he says. “It is absurd how much energy is wasted shopping for food expensively, flying it in from distant locations, when you can grow probably just as well in this country.”

As a Liberal Democrat, he also sees the idea of growing food locally as a way that local people can make things happen for themselves. “It is an example of how people can be a bit more independent of the supermarkets,” he says. “There is a hugely important education angle to it too, especially in south London where you meet kids who find the whole idea of growing strawberries very weird.”

Steve was very influenced by the lorry drivers blockade in 2000, when it became clear that – without petrol – the nation was in danger of running out of fuel within a few days, which would have undermined the Just-In-Time delivery systems that supply most of us with food. Growing food locally is the potential antidote to that kind of unsustainable dependence. It inspired him to get involved in regeneration and to embark on his current masters degree, and his dissertation on sustainable regeneration. The main obstacle he faced was dealing with council officials worrying about health and safety and whether the raised beds would need planning permission. greening actually

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“The council always thinks the worst is going to happen,” he says. “Maybe they have to. But if everyone had to apply for planning permission to grow a few vegetables, pay £150 and wait for eight weeks, then nothing is going to happen.”

Steve persuaded the officers that there really was no change of use, but then they wanted detailed agreements with the tenants association and maps of where the beds would be. “I’m a little bit cavalier about the rules sometimes,” he says now. “But I did agree that the people involved needed insurance, which they have arranged themselves.”

The real issues – what to grow and how the produce should be divided – is going to be up to those doing the work. Calais Gate also plans a summer barbecue and other communal events. Caldwell Gardens is opposite a primary school which has its own growing areas, and it looks as though the two will link up. Steve now aims to get people growing vegetables in all eight estates in his ward, and he is eyeing a local car park which nobody uses because they fear it is too dangerous. He is also looking ahead to when Liberal Democrats take control of Lambeth again.

“I hope we can change the planning rules so that we can insist that new build housing units all have growing spaces,” he says. “If people choose not to use it, that’s fine, but it means there is space if they want to. It means a change in how we look at land. If people can look after these small patches of land, then it will save the council money.”

It was during the sweltering summer of 2005 that Alexis Rowell, then a BBC journalist, experienced his Road to Damascus moment or, as he puts it, his ‘eco-epiphany’. It was not so much discovering the fact that the North Pole was going to melt in our lifetime; it was confronting the reality of it – imagining it – for the first time. It only took a few minutes, but afterwards he was a different person. He persuaded his partner to give up their car. He abandoned holidays that involved flying anywhere, and he began to go foraging on Hampstead Heath for wild food at weekends.

In fact, it was the future of food, and the way that the giant multinationals who dominate the world’s food supplies are exacerbating the greenhouse effect, which most enraged him – from deforestation to make way for cattle ranches to the trucking of vegetables across Europe and the grubbing up of British orchards.

It happened that Alexis had dropped out of formal party politics at the time.

He had resigned from the Labour Party after the invasion of Iraq, and his new commitment to planet-friendly food brought him in contact with the pioneering founder of Somerset Food Links, former council leader and Liberal Democrat peer Sue Miller (see Power Actually). That led him to read Lib Dem policy in detail. He was convinced, joined the party, and 24

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immediately became involved in local politics where he lives in Camden, the London borough that stretches from the estates of Euston up to Hampstead.

Unlike many local politicians, who find themselves committed to green politics because of the problems they encounter in their local wards, Alexis did it the other way around. “I was slightly unique as a politician,” he says.

“I went into local politics because I was concerned about climate change.”

Luckily, he soon carved out a role for himself in the council because the Liberal Democrats became the biggest party at the elections in 2006 and found themselves, in alliance with the Conservatives, running a borough which had been Labour for a generation. He was soon Camden’s ecochampion, chairing the borough’s all-party eco-task force, which soon became an energetic source of green ideas and challenges.

Alexis’ period as a councillor happened to coincide with the rise of the Transition Towns, the grassroots movement committed to re-organising the local economy to make it possible to survive the energy and climate crunch.

Beginning in Kinsale in Ireland, there are now over 170 Transition Towns around the world, many of them Liberal Democrat, including Lewes, Bristol, Dorchester, Cambridge and York. Transition Town thinking has fed into the practicalities promoted by Alexis’ eco-task force.

Their agenda covers decentralising Camden’s energy, running their vehicle fleet on food waste, bringing London’s lost rivers into the daylight, green roofs and food growing. Their third report covered food and the idea was to encourage people to grow food wherever they could, as Steve Bradley was trying to achieve south of the Thames in Lambeth.

It was relatively easy to persuade officers that housing estates might get more allotments where there was space. Fruit trees proved much more difficult. There is something about fruit trees and the local authorities which do not mix well. Children can climb them. Fruit can fall on the ground and people slip on them. Alexis found he had to compromise on the idea of planting fruit trees in the street, though local people can now get fruit trees from the council if they can find a spot that works. You can see some already near Belsize Park.

Urban salad starter kits are being distributed and Alexis has been around some of his local council estates – again like Steve Bradley in Lambeth – banging on doors, glancing at what he calls the ‘green concrete’, the combination of impenetrable abandoned soil and signs warning about the consequences of playing ball games. Some fruit trees are now in, and Transition Belsize are now increasing the scale of the local allotments.

People are increasingly involved, and now the local Budgens says it will sell local produce. greening actually

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Alexis has no garden himself, like so many people in Camden, but he has three balconies and this – plus his regular visits to Hampstead Heath – produces between five and ten per cent of the vegetables he needs. Not everyone can forage in Hampstead Heath, and it would be disastrous if they did, but what this approach emphasises is that there are assets around – undervalued patches of land, even fire escapes – where food can be grown or provided. There is also a powerful symbolic element to growing food in cities, a kind of political antidote to Tesco culture.

“We’re clearly not going to be able to supply all Camden’s food from balconies and back gardens,” says Alexis. “It is more about getting people to understand the food chain, and why the way it is now organised is killing us. It is about getting people to start relearning some of the skills their grandparents had, so that not every box of salad has been trucked here from Italy in plastic bags.”

The urban food movement has been growing slowly for decades, but with little impact on what local authorities do, apart from a handful of pioneers like Sue Miller. That began to change when it was clear what was happening in Cuba, which had faced their own energy crisis in 1990 when the Soviet Union disappeared and stopped providing them with oil. They have solved the food crisis rather as Steve Bradley and Alexis Rowell are proposing in London. Half the food consumed in Havana is now grown in the city’s gardens and urban gardens provide 60 per cent of the vegetables eaten in Cuba.

But the Cuban experience demonstrates some unexpected knock-on effects of this. The proportion of physically active adults more than doubled and obesity halved. Between 1997 and 2002, deaths from diabetes fell by half, coronary heart disease by 35 per cent, strokes and all other causes by around one fifth. Local food means that the NHS should cost less to run.

The case for councils intervening in food is not just about climate. It is about providing healthy local food to children, or old people in care, and about building an equally healthy small business sector, employing local people, building local skills and trading with each other – the basis of local economic independence.

“The trouble is that officers tend to say that food isn’t a priority in carbon terms, and in a sense they are right,” says Alexis. “Politicians don’t see it as something which is going to win them votes. Actually, people are hugely interested in it, partly because of the recession, but not just because of that.”

Something is in the air. Growing your own vegetables is suddenly very trendy. Even in parts of eastern Europe, the space between blocks of public housing are being ploughed up and planted. Suttons Seeds reported last year that, for the first time since the Second World War, they sold more 26

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vegetable seeds than flower seeds. The waiting lists for allotments are huge: in Lib Dem Islington they stretch now for ten years and are closed, which is why the council is looking for ways of providing more. Gardening and food growing is on almost every television channel.

There is also new evidence that gardening is enormously beneficial to people’s well-being. Even green surroundings has a proven effect on people’s health and especially their mental health, according new research in the Netherlands. It also has an impact on antisocial behaviour. “It is no coincidence that gardening has such an impact on mental health,” says Alexis Rowell. “In the end, this is about making people happier.”

That is certainly the way other Lib Dem councillors see it. Another of those inspired by the achievements in Cuba, producing food from every urban nook and cranny, is Liverpool’s Berni Turner. It reminded her of the Restoration Project in New York City, the scheme founded by the comedian Bette Midler to turn small derelict sites across the city into gardens producing food and vegetables.

Berni’s involvement with the Rotters composting scheme has led to a new project, launched in 2009, called Fork to Fork – her own idea – which uses the compost from the food waste to grow food. It is part of a wider push in Lib Dem Liverpool to find small plots of land where food can be grown. One of the reasons local authorities find it so hard to use some of their collected recycled materials is that councils tend to operate in silos. But when they are involved in food growing, for example, it is suddenly obvious what wasted food can be used for.

One of these projects was a new orchard, an idea borrowed from a Groundwork scheme in Warrington, which was planted in Berni’s ward with the help of excluded young people. There were also some raised beds to keep producing food.

Berni defends the involvement of the city council. “We are providing a service to residents,” she says. “There are many people who struggle with healthy eating, for whom low cost fruit and veg is a real help. I remember meeting people who didn’t know that potatoes come out of the ground. Lots of people don’t have access to the supermarkets. Give them the chance to grow their own and they can see how easy it is.”

Once again, this is about putting forgotten assets to use. “Local authorities are big landowners,” says Berni. “They have a lot of bits of land they can’t do anything with. They might not have the capacity to grow things there themselves, but if you give people some of that land, you can say ‘there you are – get on with it!’”

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Some of the lessons from all this include: Start small: That is one of the lessons preached by Alexis Rowell. For the time being, no local authority is going to make food their number one priority.

You don’t have to start by planting a whole new urban forest, as Lib Dem Liverpool is doing. The systems that make our food arrangements so unsustainable are too entrenched for that. But there are things that can be done immediately, with the help of local people, even if it is just greening the most concrete blighted neighbourhoods. But food is part of the new zeitgeist and the idea of growing it, and bypassing the supermarkets, seems – just at the moment – to thrill people in every class and condition.

Go with the energy and help people negotiate: It makes sense to start where people are most excited about growing their own, where the waiting list for allotments is longest. But Alexis Rowell found that often those who have been frustrated for so long, especially in public housing, find it hard dealing with officialdom. They either want everything agreed immediately or they tend to give up in rage. That is a vital new role for local councillors, as the interface between the neighbourhood and the local bureaucracy to find new sources of food. Lib Dem Liverpool is backing neighbourhoods who are excited by the idea of guerrilla gardening.

Buy local: This is harder in urban areas, of course. But there are economic rewards from tracking down local food suppliers and contracting them for school food or all the other food needs that a local authority has, if at all possible. Not only does it mean less trucking, it also means that more local earnings stay circulating locally, all of which makes the local economy more independent (see chapter 7).

Find more allotments: The original allotments were provided under Liberal legislation a century ago, because Edwardian Liberals saw how important it was to provide some measure of independence to the urban poor. Big tracts of land are hard to come by, but Lib Dem Islington is looking for smaller public spaces on public housing areas which can be used effectively. The evidence is also that people don’t, generally speaking, vandalise the kinds of food projects if they are involved in it, or know other people who are.

Re-build diversity: There is increasing evidence that access to green space improves your health. Research in prison hospitals suggest that people who could see trees recovered faster. We already know that green space in cities improves people’s mental health. The days when architects considered that brutal concrete somehow suited the poor have gone for good, but too many people are still trapped in those environments. There are other kinds of diversity too, which is why Lib Dem Liverpool is working to protect dwindling local bees, by encouraging people to go on bee-keeping courses and learn how to make their own honey.

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three :: building

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

John Quincy Adams, fourth President of the USA “Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’”

George Bernard Shaw

the value of straw

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Making things that happen in local government can sometimes seem to be a matter of sheer willpower in the face of administrative inertia, achieved by the intelligent wielding of brute fact. Perhaps more accurately, it is a mixture of determination, interpersonal skills and luck.

But before you give up in the face of the Sissiphean school of local government, think what confronted York Liberal Democrat councillor Christian Vassie from the moment he decided he wanted his council to build a landmark sustainable building out of straw. Not only had he been a councillor for a matter of weeks, but the new council depot had already been planned and designed, the contracts had been signed for the usual run of the mill unsustainable building, and work was due to start on site within months. Yet somehow, by never quite giving up the struggle, he succeeded and York’s new ecoDepot is now open, famous and revolutionary.

What Christian did have in his favour was supportive senior officials, and a brand new Liberal Democrat administration in York, elected in 2003. He also had a strong sense of how it might be possible. He is a film and TV composer in the rest of his life, and absolutely committed to sustainability, and this experience gave him a template for a way of working that might just create the shift he wanted.

When he was first elected, that same year – he agreed to stand on condition he would never have to wear a suit and tie – he began to look around for a sustainable project where he might have some impact, and he quickly realised that none of the council’s buildings were what you might call ‘green’.

“It is extraordinary that local authorities are very good at telling people what to do, and how to make new building sustainable, but not very good at actually putting it into practice themselves,” he says. “They print millions of pieces of paper castigating people for not being green, when they are not actually doing it. I decided that my first project would be to make sure the next council building to go out would be an exemplar of sustainable construction. Then when councillors and planning officers are being told by businesses that they can’t build more sustainably because it is too expensive, they can say ‘we know it can be done, because we’ve done it!’”

Christian soon found that the next council building project was to be a new maintenance depot in the Foss Islands Road area, which would house everything from the council’s stonemasons to its road repair teams. He also found that nothing was quite as straightforward as it seems: the plans had already been signed off. Describing himself as a ‘hapless innocent’, he went to see the chief planning officer and told her what he wanted. “I was given a withering look and told that it would probably be best if I chose a project that was six years away from being built.”

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This was the first of many moments when Christian might have given up and done it the way he was supposed to. One reason he didn’t, and the reason York now has Britain’s first ecoDepot, is that he borrowed from some of the working method in the film industry. He managed to identify a team of other people in the council who were both interested in sustainability and were even more frustrated than he was.

“Local government tends to be full of people so much of the time just rehearsing answers,” says Christian. “So much so that many of them have forgotten what the question was – they have lost sight of the fact that the world has changed.” But he had the good fortune to come up against an open-minded council leader and an open-minded chief planning officer. “To his credit, the leader said we could do what we liked, as long as it didn’t cost any more money,” he says. “That gave me the green light to try to re-open things.”

Having identified the team of six or so officers who understood what he was trying to do, and shared his enthusiasm, it was clear that there was really only one way of shifting the plans. They had to raise the funding for an alternative structure.

But funding is never quite straightforward. There turned out to be a sustainability officer at the regional development agency, but it soon became clear that he was also frustratingly elusive. For the next three months, Christian tried to get him on the phone without success. After some weeks, he began phoning every day, but could only ever get through to the sustainability officer’s secretary. After three months, he warned the secretary that he would start phoning every three hours. Shortly afterwards, he was finally given an appointment.

Armed with a digital microphone to record the meeting, Christian arrived to discover that – despite the difficulty getting through, or perhaps because of it – theirs was only the second programme in the region to apply for funding that year. Within an hour, they had raised a promise of £650,000, if they could prove that this was a practical project and not some vanity project that would never represent value for money. The funding allowed Christian to go ahead and find someone to design a sustainable building.

That wasn’t straightforward either. After some false starts, he tracked down the council’s former environment officer, who had left in some despair under the previous administration. It was he that urged the idea of building the depot out of straw.

The crunch point came in a meeting with the contractors who said that the straw depot was unbuildable. “Luckily, I had the presence of mind to ask them how they knew this,” says Christian. “They said they had talked to one of the key gurus of straw building.” greening actually

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The Kirklees warmer homes scheme has rolled out a significant number of home improvements.

Residents have consistently commented that they didn’t realise what changes needed to be made to their own homes to save energy. The evidence is that the decision of councillors has significantly reduced the energy loss from the homes that have been insulated.

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Kirklees estimate that 50,000 tonnes of carbon will be saved every year as a result of the insulation - over 70,000 carbon monoxide detectors have been fitted, 10,000 people given debt and benefits advice and 14,000 fire safety checks have been carried out.

Warm Zone now employs 80 people and the overall economic benefit to the area is about ÂŁ50 million.

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The Kirklees scheme has been going for nearly three years, and the impact is clearly huge. By the end of January 2009, Warm Zone had knocked on 111,000 doors in the Huddersfield and Dewsbury areas, and carried out over 77,000 assessments and - thanks to the time lag involved - had insulated nearly 30,000 homes.

As a result, the average saving on heat for every household was ÂŁ200 a year, potentially enormous for anyone on the state pension.

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Cllr Stuart Bodsworth (left) and Leader Cllr Dave Goddard (right) write “Stockport has now extended our meet the buyer events to include our public sector partners and some of the larger private sector employers in the borough too.“

Coombe Down councillors Roger Symonds and Cherry Beath (Bath and North East Somerset) are active environmentalists in their area - a recent initiative achieved a 3 day ‘deep clean, keep clean’ campaign that saw tons of rubbish collected and recycled.

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Few people have any understanding of the scale of recycling and the volume of cans and bottles produced.

Councillors (often responsible for the collection service) often have not visited the centre they commission to handle their waste and yet are stunned when they see the associated piles - this being one week in one local authority. greening actually

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Cllr Berni Turner (Liverpool) used 2009 Year of the Environment to push the sustainability agenda.

A local scheme of Rotters created as small scale growing project called ‘Fork to Fork’. Rotters brought in a proposal for food composting. Liverpool was aware that vast amounts of food going into landfill in the city and they wanted to experiment with re-using it.

The idea to start with was to take food waste from Liverpool Airport and other parts of south of Liverpool to compost it elsewhere. Eighteen months on the project is an enormous success. The council is buying an anaerobic digester to tackle the sheer scale of the wasted food and the and the compost is ploughed back into food growing in the surrounding community.

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One of the main observations of recycling schemes has been how few councillors have actually been out with the trucks undertaking the collections - understanding what was involved was a key part of achieving the step change in Liverpool’s record.

From the laggard city of recycling Liverpool is now one of the most successful recyclers, leaping from seven per cent to over 30 per cent in a year. It’s a trajectory that Portfolio Holder Cllr Berni Turner is determined to continue to push upwards. greening actually

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Richmond upon Thames showing off their photovoltaics on the Civic Centre: Cllr Martin Elengorn (Cabinet member for Environment); Cllr Malcolm Eady (Cabinet Member for Children) Sarah Ludford MEP; Cllr Jerry Elloy and Cllr Stephen Knight (Deputy Leader)

Former Mayor of Richmond upon Thames Cllr Bill Treble with the old Daimler formerly owned by the Queen Mother, traded in for a more environmentally friendly Prius. Richmond have consistently led the way on initiatives that protect the local environment.

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Camden councillor Tom Simon (Belsize ward) was elected in a by-election on the back of a strong local environmental message that has sought to bring together residents and shopkeepers - Budgen’s have agreed to sell locally grown produce.

Local food growing has been a major component of the drive in Belsize and Transition Belsize has been a key driver in getting things to happen. The campaign has been actively supported by the ward councillors and the potential for food growing on estates is still vast. greening actually

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As the front bench Shadow Minister, Simon Hughes MP is a great campaigner and champion for the environment and against climate change.

He is keen to ensure that Liberal Democrats continue to lead the way but that we achieve a step change in both ambition and achievements. Councils and councillors must be in the front line of fighting climate change and protecting the environment.

You can contact Simon and his team on simon@simonhughes.org.uk

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Christian hesitated for an hour or so, nervous about whether he ought really to do so, but then tracked down the guru, called him up and asked him directly what kind of building would be possible – and eventually asked him to act as a consultant on the project. At this point the straw plan was saved again by the director of strategy, who agreed to a delay of three months – even though the new depot was part of a much larger development site and another three months would take him right up to the wire. But it was enough, and the ecoDepot opened just before Christmas 2006, just six months after the original plan said it should.

Christian explained the basic idea in his regular BBC blog about the building: “If I am organising a day trip and want to have access to a hot drink at any point through the day I take a thermos flask,” he wrote just after the opening.

“By insulating my drink, I have hot coffee all day. Taking a stack of solar panels or wind turbines with me in order to boil hot water for my coffee whenever I need it, instead of taking a thermos flask, doesn’t make me an environmental green guru – it makes me an idiot. The straw walls of the ecoDepot, discussed in previous blogs, are the building’s thermos flask.

Without them most of what follows would be of little value.”

The building saves £30,000 a year just by re-using rainwater to clean their trucks. On the coldest days of the year, the building only needs its heating on for two hours to keep it warm for the rest of the day.

The blog was part of the process of engendering enthusiasm for the project, which Christian says was one of the main reasons it succeeded. He insisted that it should be called an ecoDepot from the beginning, which had a ring to it. It is, he says, part of the practical politics of going green. He describes visiting a sustainable housing development recently with the scrutiny committee he was on. “The council issued a press release under the heading 'Scrutiny Board visits sustainable housing development' and felt aggrieved when, after a week, no local media had taken up the story,” he says. “I changed the title to 'Electricity bills - £1 per week' and the local press gave the story a two-page spread the next day. I’m convinced that, if you don’t communicate what you’re doing, you might as well not do anything at all.”

Milton Keynes is one of those places which really welcomes plans for new housing developments. The last new town to be designated, back in 1967, Milton Keynes has been both a recurring joke (the concrete cows), an architectural theme park (the first energy saving homes exhibition was held there) and a huge economic success story. Its rate of business growth is higher than the highest UK region, and it is set to double in size again – to make it bigger than Newcastle – by 2031.

It is also Liberal Democrat and, as such, it is Liberal Democrat councillors – and it has been since 2002 – who are responsible for making sure all those greening actually

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new homes are sustainable. As many as 3,000 new homes are built in the Milton Keynes every year so, if the council lays down stringent conditions on house builders which actually work, the chances are they will be put in place elsewhere. At least, that was one of the motivations behind the determination of Liberal Democrat councillor Douglas McCall to do just that, so that the new homes in Milton Keynes would be the greenest anywhere in the country.

Douglas happened also to be married to the council leader, which meant that a word in the ear of the leadership was usually possible, but he was also the cabinet member responsible for the environment for seven years. When they took control of the new town, largely on a green platform, tackling the sustainability of new homes was near the top of their agenda. “We wanted a policy requirement of zero carbon construction,” says Douglas. “We wanted them to be low energy and to use less water. We were determined to force through carbon neutrality.”

The idea that no new home would add to the total carbon emissions of Milton Keynes was enormously ambitious. It was also hardly surprising that some of the biggest volume housebuilders regarded the idea with horror.

Milton Keynes is one of the jewels in their crowns, and this looked like a slippery slope.

Even so, carbon neutrality was inserted in the new local plan, which was negotiated during 2004 and 2005 with little or no opposition from the other parties. Douglas and his team of officers were then responsible for taking the local plan through the public inquiry that these things demand. Right until the end, the housebuilders were expected to appear to challenge the plan. Then they were rumoured to be preparing to take it to court under judicial review. But they were the dog that didn’t bark. By December 2005, the local plan was in force, along with the carbon neutrality regulations, known as D4, and the local developers had accepted the situation.

There is some healthy rivalry with Labour-controlled Merton Borough Council in London, which has similar sustainable building policies, known as the ‘Merton Rule’. Largely because it is in London, Merton has managed to gather the lion’s share of publicity – Douglas’ carbon-neutrality regulations are not known as the ‘Milton Keynes Rule’, though they go further than Merton’s policy by covering commercial buildings as well as domestic ones.

It was all very well setting out stringent conditions for every new home in a council area, but it was clear right from the start that there would have to be exceptions. What if the site was unsuitable for generating renewable energy – no wind or sun – what if it was not financially viable or some other reason why carbon neutrality would be impossible? What then? Here Douglas was beginning to outline something along the lines of another of the innovations developed in Lib Dem Milton Keynes. The so-called Roof Tariff.

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In most parts of the country, at least since the demise of Labour’s Community Land Act in 1975, developers have to haggle with councillors about what kind of community facilities they are going to offer, or how many affordable homes, as set out in what is known as Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act. It is an exhausting process and dispiriting sometimes, for both sides, more like legalised bribery than planning.

In Milton Keynes, there is now simply a set price, and the money goes to fund whatever is necessary to cover the impact on social facilities, school or roads. The developers liked it; for the first time, both sides knew where they were.

So here was an idea that could be adapted if your new building had some good reason why it couldn’t quite manage to be carbon neutral. The council asks you to contribute instead towards a local carbon offset fund. Not one which goes towards vague projects that might or might not be happening on the other side of the world, but directly towards making older buildings cut carbon emissions across Milton Keynes. It was an elegant solution.

“I think this helped give us a closer working relationship with the local developers,” says Douglas. “They bought into what were doing.” It meant they also responded to policy D5, which sets out what the council expects from sustainable energy development, which helps builders plan ahead without all the uncertainty of a political scrap about wind turbines at the last moment.

The rules about carbon neutrality, and the local carbon offset fund together have been enormously successful. Council officers reckon that it will save up to 12,000 tonnes of carbon emissions every year. Some of the new developments in Milton Keynes to be covered by the new guidelines include: i) ii) iii)

Nampak: a site for 280 eco-friendly homes many built with solar panels.

Octel: 45 industrial units with wind turbines on their roof.

Knowlhill: warehouse and offices with ground source heating.

Look anywhere across the town, and you will find examples of innovative new housing, built to the highest green standards and sprouting the latest examples of genuinely futuristic energy technology.

The main problem came from the government, which began by encouraging local authorities to follow the lead of Milton Keynes, but then seemed to change their mind. In 2007, the housebuilders persuaded Whitehall that different construction rules in different parts of the country were inhibiting their ability to build. Suddenly, one of the best building policies in the country looked in doubt. greening actually

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“It means developers can't build the same bog-standard houses all over the country,” complained the then council leader, Isobel McCall. “The government is clearly putting the profits of house builders before the environment, in spite of all their fine words about the urgency of tackling climate change."

The next thing they knew, the new government policy document – outlawing the new rules in Milton Keynes and Merton – had been leaked to the press, and Whitehall was being bombarded by environmentalists urging them to re-think. Because of this, the Milton Keynes Rule remains in place, and so does the local carbon offset fund, currently bringing in around £400,000 a year to pay for improvements like insulation, in itself cutting another 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide every year.

Douglas McCall had been interested in green issues for years before he was elected to represent Newport Pagnell South 13 years ago. When he joined the cabinet in 2002, he had recently started a job as an IT project manager in Milton Keynes. Working locally left him with time to get to grips with the environment of Milton Keynes in a serious way. Even before that, he had been involved in Local Agenda 21 in the days after the ground-breaking Earth Summit in 1992, and campaigned for the council to buy fair trade products, which he eventually introduced when he became a cabinet member.

His main effort at the start went into increasing recycling, and he managed to treble the rate locally in six years. This year (2009), they will be collecting kitchen waste for the first time. There has been no meaningful opposition to this, or the stringent policy of carbon-neutrality, but Douglas emphasises the importance of thinking politically about the message. That is why they have linked their ambitious green changes to care of the very local environment, using their litter busters and graffiti busters to clean up.

“Some of our local Conservatives don’t even accept global warming is happening,” he says. “We have to show that doing a bit to save the planet also makes economic sense. That’s why we are doing a carbon audit of all our buildings, changing the boilers, making sure computers are switched off when people go home at night. We have reduced the energy consumption of the council – and now we are doing the same in the schools. It is about investing to save.”

The latest figures show only a one per cent cut, but this is just the beginning.

The council now has a small team dedicated to pushing the idea further under Carbon Manager Martin Davies. Watch this space.

Both the ecoDepot in York and the carbon-neutrality of Milton Keynes have something important in common. They are both about setting the framework for spectacular buildings, both in the way they look and in their exciting use 46

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of technology and conservation knowhow. They are not about using regulation to make everything dull and the same – these are not lowest common denominator targets – but about setting out visions and systems that encourage people to innovate, whether they are council officers, architects or builders.

The Milton Keynes Rule and the ecoDepot are visible symbols of Liberal Democrat green policy in action. You only have to look at them to know things are changing. As such, they are major generators of change themselves.

It is the same with Lib Dem Camden’s Eco House, a refurbished Victorian building where carbon emissions and energy bills have been reduced by 80 per cent, which was opened to the public and attracted nearly 2,000 people to see it during four months of Sunday afternoons. Camden is also a building innovator: their new Powerperfector, in the Swiss Cottage library, regulates the energy supply to the building and should reduce the amount of electricity it uses by 11.5 per cent.

There are other aspects to greening buildings. If new housing is built too far apart, then people have to drive further. If it is built too close together so that people are living too densely, it perversely has the same effect – and it means there is less space for growing food or recycling and the small industry that truly sustainable places need.

If it is too inclusive, it risks building communities that look inwards against the outside world. If it is too exclusive, it leads to fractured neighbourhoods that are more dependent on the world outside. That is one reason why Liberal Democrats are increasingly involved in community land trusts (CLTs), a proven American system of tenure controlled by those who live there, managing their own land and assets themselves. CLTs are one way of providing affordable housing, by separating the ownership of the buildings from the community ownership of the land underneath them. Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts is chaired by former Lib Dem councillor Jock Coats.

Lib Dem Cornwall has been persuaded to create a revolving loan fund to kick start CLT projects, though this has involved Conservative councillors as much as Liberal Democrat ones – one area where the search for innovation among Conservatives has occasionally stolen a march on Liberal Democrats.

The lessons of these ideas is that – when you take a step in the dark and it doesn’t work, you can learn from it. When you take a step in the dark and it works after all, then others will follow your lead. Other lessons and green possibilities for building include the following: Make sure you communicate: Christian Vassie’s experience with the ecoDepot and other projects is that the right phrase, and the right level of greening actually

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excitement in the outside world, is almost as important as getting the commitment of the council itself. If it is described in the right way, and people are able to share some pride and excitement in the project, it can be a symbol of so many other green policies that can’t always generate the headlines.

Be innovative about ownership: People want to own their own homes, and it underpins their sense of freedom and responsibility when they do so. But in a climate where the government regards endlessly rising house prices as their touchstone of economic success, then other ideas are needed to make it possible, whether it is using the council’s financial resources to help with lending, or separating the ownership of the buildings from the land underneath – and experimenting with new kinds of community trusts, as they have so successfully in the USA. Don’t be afraid to set standards: The Milton Keynes rule for zero-carbon homes is a perfect example of smart regulation that is able to kick-start real innovation by the house-builders. It also has a knock on effect on the reputation of the town. It means that Milton Keynes will now host some of the best examples of sustainable housing in the UK. The world’s experts and green planners will beat a path there, and so will those who want to live in green homes, which – in an era of galloping energy prices – is going to be many more of us. The same applies to the experience of Uttlesford in Essex under Lib Dem rule about building extensions. Planning permission depends on a plan to make sure the carbon emissions of the whole house do not rise, which is a way to encourage energy-saving innovation in the rest of the house. It also applies to Lib Dem Cardiff’s target of a 60 per cent carbon reduction in emissions from council buildings and municipal waste by 2018. And to Camden’s insistence that all new developments have a plan to re-use grey water or rainwater.

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four :: energy

“Energy is an eternal delight, and he who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.”

William Blake “All the grand sources, in short, of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely conquerable by human care and effort.”

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism

the new politics of heat

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It is cold in Yorkshire. Just how cold came home to Kirklees Liberal Democrat councillor John Smithson six years ago when he happened to see the statistics for deaths from hypothermia among the old. Nor is it just a Yorkshire problem: there are about 30,000 deaths from cold across the UK every year, the vast majority of them older people in their own homes, and the Yorkshire figures were bad in 2003. “The problem is that older people especially are frightened to put their central heating on for more than a few minutes a day because they were afraid they couldn’t afford it,” says John.

Not being able to heat your homes was and is a serious issue, so when the Lib Dems took control of Kirklees Council around the same time, John began to look around for some way in which they could tackle fuel poverty.

The green agenda has made energy conservation mainstream, especially after the successful private members bill steered through Parliament by the then Lib Dem MP for Christchurch, Diana Maddock. But it has only been since her Home Energy Conservation Act 1995 gave extra responsibilities to local authorities that they have found much of a role in heating. That kind of ambition had disappeared with the days of Joseph Chamberlain, certainly the days of Margaret Thatcher.

Kirklees covers Huddersfield and the surrounding district, and it gained an innovative track record for thinking green even before Liberal Democrats took control. They already had their own environmental team, and it was this that John asked to look around to see what ideas were out there.

These days, of course, there are a whole range of government approved and funded schemes to retrofit roof or cavity wall insulation into homes, but they are often frustrating systems constrained by too many government targets. The insulation is often sold door to door, but it often turns out you don’t qualify because you are just outside the right boundary or aren’t receiving benefits, or don’t have the right kind of house, or already have an inch of minimal insulation already. Maybe the people who really need it live in private housing, as most older people do, and are not eligible for the council scheme. To avoid all those pitfalls, and to go for something with much more chance of making real change happen, the team tracked down an idea that was being piloted in Lib Dem Newcastle, called Warm Zone.

“John went to Newcastle to see it in action,” says the then Lib Dem council leader Kath Pinnock, a former history teacher who has represented the ward around the junction 26 of the M62 now for 22 years. “He came back enthused and he enthused the rest of us.”

That was how Kirklees committed itself, with some modifications, to a project that would systematically go through the borough and insulate all the houses, big, small, public, private, rich and poor. There would be no fiddling about with application forms and eligibility criteria, no irritating estimates of greening actually

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cost, and no compromise on the depth of insulation – it was going to be 30 centimetres throughout.

By 2006, the scheme had been pushed through what was still a council under minority Lib Dem control. But the original scheme was not going to be free. Every household was going to be asked for £70 as the only way that Warm Zone was going to stack up financially. Even so, this was an extra complication. Kath had already persuaded the council to fund a fifth of the cost out of Kirklees’ share of the sale of Leeds Bradford Airport. Then Scottish Power agreed to invest part of the cost too, and suddenly it was possible to run the scheme for free.

It also meant that nobody would be turned away because they couldn’t afford £70. Then the council encouraged the Fire Service to get involved.

They were keen to do so following the tragic death in Huddersfield of a young boy from carbon monoxide poisoning. That in turn meant that they could fit every home with carbon monoxide detectors and smoke alarms too.

It meant the possibility of a quick set of questionnaires to every household, to make sure – if they needed it – that they were getting all the money they were eligible for.

This proved both a massive advantage and a possible pitfall. The problem was that many people were naturally suspicious of anything that was offered to them for nothing. There is now a major effort going on to get back in touch with everyone who said no, to tell them about the benefits, in the hope that they will change their mind once they see what their neighbours have got.

The scheme has now been going for nearly three years, and the impact is clearly huge. By the end of January 2009, Warm Zone had knocked on 111,000 doors in the Huddersfield and Dewsbury areas, and carried out over 77,000 assessments and – thanks to the time lag involved – had insulated nearly 30,000 homes. As a result, the average saving on heat for every household was £200 a year, potentially enormous for anyone on the state pension.

The economic benefits are wider than that. Warm Zone now employs 80 people and the overall economic benefit to the area is about £50 million.

Other knock on benefits have been massive too. Over 70,000 carbon monoxide detectors have been fitted. Over 10,000 people have been given benefits or debt advice during the visit. As many as 14,000 fire safety checks have been carried out. By the end of this year, Kirklees will be a good deal warmer in the cold weather, and about 50,000 tonnes of carbon will be saved every year.

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What is fascinating is that the party lost overall control of Kirklees in 2007, but the Warm Zone scheme carried on. It was too good to shut down, yet it is also distinctively Liberal Democrat.

Nobody could accuse of John Smithson of only being interested in running the council better. As one of the pioneers of community politics, and a former editor of the pioneering Radical Bulletin in the 1960s and 70s, he was fascinated in the idea also because of how it put Lib Dem ideas into action.

“It is absolutely a Liberal Democrat scheme,” he says. “We started off because we were interested in fuel poverty, but of course it not only saves money but it also means a great reduction carbon impact. It was one of the really good things we did, and when the Tories took over they left it as it was.”

The Tories no longer run the council and Kath Pinnock’s Lib Dems have for a short time shared control of the council, with Kath as deputy leader, and – despite all the political turmoil – the Warm Zone project continues.

We were helping people out of poverty in a very practical way, but also cutting carbon. This is a Liberal future for councils, taking practical action to help people, no matter what kind of housing tenure they have. I think it is probably the best thing we have ever done.”

Terry Stacy found himself interested in green policies because he was involved in regenerating housing. But it was when he was leading on housing for the Liberal Democrat administration in Islington that he found himself wrestling with a fascinating conundrum.

Many of the council estates built in Islington from the 1950s onwards were heated communally, with heat provided by a single central boiler room rather than separate boilers in individual flats. Elsewhere in London, a scheme was developed where blocks of flats in Pimlico, opposite the River Thames, were warmed by waste heat from Battersea Power Station, pumped under the river.

Most of the communal heating schemes of Islington are still working now but, although the idea was sound in principle, the lack of individual control made them both wasteful and unpopular. Residents couldn’t switch them off. Often radiators carried on pumping out heat at the height of the summer heat waves.

So here was Terry’s conundrum – and it was one which has been shared by green-minded people for some time. Would it be possible to re-invent communal heating schemes that were much more efficient? There was at least the potential for supplying housing estates together, and by generating energy off the grid so that you could use the waste heat as well as the electricity. greening actually

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Luckily, there is a technology which has been developed for decades which makes this possible, and which massively increases its efficiency not just by generating electricity but using the by-product heat as well. It is known as Combined Heat and Power or CHP. Building a huge new power station in the middle of the city is not really practical, but CHP comes in all sizes. This was a case for mini-CHP. “The old communal heating schemes gave poor value for money and no personal control,” said Terry. “But we wanted to look at how to turn communal heating into something more sustainable and efficient.”

An early move was to get a £3m grant from the Mayor of London to test out the idea, but there was an immediate problem. The Conservative legislation 30 years ago which forced councils to sell council houses to their tenants had produced a peculiar anomaly in some of our biggest estates. In Islington, at least, a good third of those living in what used to be known as ‘council estates’ were actually owners – or to be more precise, leaseholders.

What if they refused to join in the new energy schemes? Could they block them if they refused to pay a contribution towards it? Would it be illegal if they were given it for free?

With 13,000 leaseholders out of 36,000 flats, this last issue was a massive potential stumbling block. What Terry and his team did was to get the best legal advice on this subject which clearly showed that the council could go ahead without incurring charges for leaseholders. As a result, CHP plants linked to heating schemes are now being made a reality across the borough.

One of the first is being built into the old Victorian Ironmonger Row Baths, which will pump waste heat out to the neighbouring housing estates. CHP is also at the heart of the regeneration of the Packington Estate, and it will also generate electricity to power the shops, community facilities, youth centre and workshop, and use the waste heat to heat the homes.

Looking at energy in this way continues to build on the pioneering work by Woking Borough Council in Surrey, which began with a motion by a Lib Dem councillor for an environmental audit. The council was then run by a minority administration led by the Conservatives, but the parties worked together, thanks partly to the innovative leadership of one council officer who became the standard-bearer for local authority involvement in energy, Allan Jones.

Lib Dem and Tory councillors gave him the space to make Woking a world leader in electricity generation without using the national grid (see Power, Actually).

You will now find new mini-power stations there, communal heating schemes and thousands of electricity-generating cells on roofs, making the town centre a net energy exporter to the town – and generating it cheaper than the national grid, saving the council £5.4m a year just on water bills 54

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(because water is another by-product of energy generation). The rubbish lorries run on liquefied natural gas, the parking ticket machines run on solar energy and even the public toilets are designed to do without water.

As a former housing and regeneration professional, Terry Stacy is excited about the possibilities in Islington of generating your own green energy. He visited Woking in 2002 to see what was being done there, and has been looking at how to roll out ambitious projects in Islington ever since. Islington is one of the highest density councils in the country. Its pre-war housing, and even its Georgian squares, are ripe for energy generation projects – though there are clearly legal issues that need to be solved there as well.

Liberal Democrats have controlled Islington now for ten years, and energy is increasingly important to the administration. There are wind turbines on council buildings to power the electric fleet, communal lighting and lifts.

There are solar panels on churches and schools. They are one of the leading councils which are installing energy generation into social housing.

Terry Stacy is, in fact, the new leader of the council, and green energy is high on his list of priorities. “One of the things which we are very clear about is that the environment has to be at the heart of the message,” he says.

Fresh from a referendum which voted against the expansion of nuclear energy two decades ago, it was Sweden where cities found themselves suddenly in the energy front line. The energy had to come from somewhere and, in the end, they were best placed to deliver it. As a result, cities like Vaxjo have more than a decade’s investment behind them in CHP plants – the latest powered by waste straw – and they are bound to be further ahead than their colleagues in the UK. But it has often been Lib Dem councils which have been in the lead. Lib Dem Aberdeen set up a not-for-profit company to develop CHP schemes, Southampton linked up with a French energy utility to run district heating systems to 40 buildings, Eastleigh and Kirklees are leading the way on photovoltaic cells on schools, homes and civic buildings. Lib Dem Bristol developed a wind farm at Avonmouth Docks. Lib Dem Cambridge and North Norfolk have led the way on saving energy in their housing stock. Others have pioneered low energy homes (like Newcastle or Sutton’s Bedzed), or they have pioneered new technology that gives them instant real-time information about where the energy is going in their buildings, as Lib Dem Liverpool has. Knowledge is power, after all.

Other lessons include: Don’t forget the little things: Even replacing old bulbs with modern energy saving ones will make a difference: new bulbs in Lib Dem Camden’s Bloomsbury Square Car Park alone will save £24,000 and 100 tonnes of greening actually

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carbon dioxide a year. Birmingham, where Lib Dems share power, has been giving away low energy bulbs to spread the benefits further. These are all tiny pinpricks in the great scale of things, but pinprick plus pinprick begins to turn itself into a serious set of holes.

Make way for quag-generation: It makes environmental and economic sense to make use of the waste heat that comes from generating electricity.

But after co-generation comes tri-generation: heating, electricity and cooling, and beyond that, there is the idea of quag-generation, because one byproduct of hydrogen fuel cells is water. In the future, local authorities will find themselves – not just in the energy business – but in the cooling and water business too. They will do so because these are potential assets which need to be used for the benefit of the people they represent, and when Lib Dem Sutton is pioneering the use of grey water in their parks – and when Eastleigh’s leisure centre is also providing hot water for the Civic Centre next door – you know something is going on.

Start a fund: Energy service companies (or ESCOs) were invented in Eastern Europe as a way that power companies could invest in energysaving, in such a way that the savings could be shared out. That was what Woking pioneered in the UK, and the idea has now spread to London. But all you really need is a revolving loan fund, like the £250,000 launched by Lib Dem Camden, which is used to test out green ideas and cut the amount of energy the council uses in its buildings, and pays the savings back to the fund. Islington’s £3m climate change fund has meant that they can also access £1.1m in match funding from central government programmes.

Build local capacity: Devon has been trying to build the energy sector in the county under the Lib Dems, aware that this will have enormous knock-on effects on the local environment. There are now more than 60 small and medium-sized businesses in the energy sector in Devon. Their Devon Renewable Energy Skills and Training Project has helped achieve this, and they reckon there are 154 new renewable energy generators in place because of the project – mainly solar, but with wind, hydro, wood fuel and photovoltaic cells coming up behind. They also replaced the boiler at County Hall in 2009 with one which uses sustainable woodchip fuel supplied from just ten miles away, and which cuts carbon emissions by 60 per cent and costs by £20,000 a year.

Back renewables: At its sharpest, this means giving the technology away, as Birmingham’s administration has done. They have fitted wind turbines and solar panels in 300 homes, both as a way of tackling emissions and cutting fuel poverty, in one ‘eco neighbourhood’, where people can generate their own power and sell any surplus onto the national grid. The project has been paid for by the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. In Liverpool, this has meant buying all the electricity for street lights from renewable sources and putting in solar panels, wind turbines and rain water capture for toilets in the 56

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new Liverpool Echo Convention Centre (the next stage is to investigate using hydro-power from the River Mersey). In Lib Dem Chesterfield, it has meant putting photovoltaic cells on the leisure centre and coach station (see Power Actually). In Eastleigh, it has meant making planning applications free for renewables.

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five :: transport

“The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air – it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men have a right to be in this world, and others no right.”

Henry George, Progress and Poverty “Our travel plan is a living document. This is only the beginning.”

The Travel Plan of Fair Oak Infant School, Eastleigh

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It was a trip in Bamber Gascoigne’s electric car which first sowed the seeds of what was to be one of the best-publicised green initiatives of any Liberal Democrats anywhere. Gascoigne lives in Liberal Democrat Richmond-uponThames and he offered to take council leader Serge Lourie for a ride in his G-Wiz, the trendy Indian brand of electric car.

“It was like a lawnmower,” says Serge, but there was a purpose behind the trip. Gascoigne wanted to point out that he could park his G-Wiz for free in Westminster, in the centre of London, but not for some reason where he lived in the western suburbs. Serge mentioned the idea to some council officers and councillor colleagues, and the idea filtered down in such a way that – when they met to work out whether a green strategy for parking meters was possible – nobody at the meeting could agree who had actually dreamed up the big idea: to charge the most polluting cars more in the controlled parking zones (CPZs).

Richmond is one of those few places in the country to have enjoyed Liberal Democrat administration for getting on for a generation. But the party lost power to the Conservatives in 2002 and spent the next four years re-thinking everything. So when they were swept back to power in May 2006, the new team of controlling councillors had four key objectives: prioritising the secondary schools, helping young people, sorting out the council’s finances and – top of the list – putting the environment at the centre. The idea of charging against pollution was bold and exciting, and it might make a real difference.

“We really felt the environment was going to be our big issue,” says Serge.

“We made a pledge to extend the recycling to cover cardboard and plastic bottles and to employ an energy manager – though, in the event, that became a whole sustainability team.”

These ideas were the headline green objectives when Serge and his environment portfolio holder Martin Ellengorn met a team of officers met in Serge’s office in a room in the Civic Centre at the end of September 2006.

“We all claim credit for the idea,” he says now. “But we were asked about changes to the CPZs and one of us said: ‘Well, if we really want to be green, why don’t we relate the car parking charges to the level of emissions?’”

Local authorities are well-known to find new ideas difficult to deal with. This book is full of bright sparks that drag on for years before they are fully implemented. But in this case, the whole business of putting the new green idea into practice took just five months.

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which need to be solved – not the least of which was how to avoid making a profit. One of the legal duties on local authorities is that they are not allowed to make a surplus on their parking charges.

Even without these complications, nothing could have prepared Serge and his team for the media storm that would overwhelm them when they announced the idea. Serge was on the Today programme and, from that moment, he and two colleagues were doing continuous media interviews for the rest of the day, to news outlets all over the world. He had calls early in the day from friends who had heard him in Brussels and the south of France.

By the end of 24 hours, it was clear that news of Richmond Council’s new residential parking charges had been broadcast around New Zealand and Canada. It was reported in no less than 130 different newspapers in the USA. Anyone involved in climate change campaigning will tell you that, once a story like this circulates in the American media, there is an avalanche of outraged emails as soon as Eastern Standard Time reaches dawn, and the climate change deniers reach for their keyboards. There was also a great deal of opposition in the UK, especially from organisations like the AA and other car-owner organisations. A few local people were also extremely angry, and vented this during a meeting of the overview and scrutiny committee later in the process.

But a survey about parking charges of about 2,000 local peoples found that around two thirds were broadly in favour of the idea. Even more, up to 80 per cent, agreed that global warming was a problem and that people ought to do something in their own lives to tackle it. Even opponents of the scheme agreed with that.

“By the time we actually introduced the idea, in April and May the following year, we were pretty confident it would work,” says Serge. “It is a tribute to the council that they managed to make it happen in the short space of time between the meeting in my room and implementation.”

Serge Lourie is an accountant by profession, and was originally a member of the Labour Party. In fact, on the second day of his accountancy exams in 1971, he was elected as Labour councillor in Westminster. By the time he had joined the Liberal Democrats, many years later, his interest in housing and insulation – which developed during his years on the Greater London Council – had blossomed into an enthusiasm for renewable energy.

“Even without global warming, it seems a shame not to make use of such an inexpensive resources as wind, waves, tide and solar energy,” he says now.

Richmond’s energy team are now putting this enthusiasm into concrete form.

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Civic Centre, and the next project is to investigate a combined heat and power plant, burning wood pellets from the council’s woodlands, to cover half of the council’s electricity needs. Meanwhile the weekly recycling rate is now over 42 per cent, one of the highest in London.

But nothing quite caught the imagination like charging 4x4s extra to park.

There was a radical element about it, a revolutionary sense of a shift in what was possible, which crystallised the great frustration people have about the vast four-wheel drive vehicles, like armoured cars, that move around London’s narrow streets.

In some ways, that symbolism was its main importance. Serge and his team certainly aimed at a symbolic quick green win, once they had taken office, to show they were serious. Their first act was therefore to pension off the mayor’s gas-guzzling Bentley, once owned by the Queen Mother, and replace it with a Prius. Symbolism is vital, and so it was with the parking charges.

“It was a marker,” says Serge now. “I don’t mind people having 4x4s. I just want them to think about whether they really need them and, if people can answer that question themselves honestly, I’m quite happy.”

The most obvious success of the policy has been that, almost from the moment it was in place, it stopped being controversial. Even so, the surveys about whether it was really changing behaviour remain ambiguous. People are clearly swapping to lower emission cars in some wards; other wards, they don’t seem to be. Even where there is clearly a shift away from the ubiquitous 4x4s, it isn’t clear why and how much Richmond’s parking charges are having an effect. What the surveys do reveal is that people now know what pollution bracket their car comes in, and that is the beginning of awareness.

There is a kind of world-weary cynicism at most levels of British government, and not very far below the surface, that our political masters must be humoured, the motions must be gone through, but we all know it won’t actually make any difference, don’t we.

Green initiatives often fall into this category, especially the symbolic ones – and especially when it comes to getting people to stop driving or flying or any of our other modern addictions. The business of persuading parents not to drive their children to school falls into that category too. It all seems very worthy, and the money is available so it has to be done, but let’s not pretend it isn’t a little bit hopeless. That’s what they say, but in Liberal Democrat Eastleigh, at least, it hasn’t been hopeless at all. Far from it.

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much the nitty-gritty of making it happen, which inevitably lies in the details.

It is the amazing success they have achieved: as many as 54 per cent of state school pupils now shun the car when it comes to travelling to school, which is well above the UK average and above surrounding Hampshire as well.

Former teacher David Airey, the cabinet member for transport and streetscene, has led the project right from the beginning. So all-embracing has the whole project been that he can’t remember when he first determined to do something about the fumes and congestion that are the inevitable result of a motorised school run. He was certainly involved in the idea when he was teaching in a junior school in Gosport. But the impact of traffic in his own ward of Netley Abbey became increasingly clear to him.

Five years after the sustainable travel to school plan began in Eastleigh, every single school in the borough, primary and secondary, has their own travel pan, complete with graphs, cartoons, facts and practicalities. The plans are colourful and include pictures by the children as well as maps.

Some of the facts are revealing too: the Toynbee School Travel Plan reveals that, when they began, 70 per cent of all those travelling to school by car had a journey of less than one mile.

Over the years, David and the council officer in charge, Sarah Wallbridge, and their team, have developed a pattern which is repeated in one form or another in every school. It involves recruiting enthusiastic teachers and governors onto a steering group for each school. It means assemblies and surveys run by pupils, parents, teachers and other staff. It involves getting the children to create the graphs and bar charts to go in each booklet, which – for each school – is submitted as a formal document to the highways authority. But long before that, it is usually apparent that the children at least are responding with imagination. The reports start coming back from the teachers. The surveys come back to be added up, the ideas start coming out.

Once the cycle rack is installed, you can see immediately if there has been any effect, just by looking at the number of bikes in it. Then there is the launch day, and there are prizes of bikes or lamps, reflectors or key-rings to be won. Then the hooks appear for cycle helmets and children start bringing scooters to school.

What makes Eastleigh’s approach so successful, says David, is that it is flexible. Car-sharing might suit some schools, but for others it is a matter of organising walking buses. David tells the story about the Netley Abbey Junior School, in his own ward, with the local mayor giving out prizes in their hall, and there was a delay while one little girl arrived from a music lesson, only to discover that she had won the bike. “The mayor helped her up and 62

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sat her on it and she gave a shout of joy,” he says. “That little girl on a big bike; that’s how you know these things are important.”

But making the plans work is also about politics. It means finding ways of knitting the different council services together. If dog mess is a problem for mothers walking their children, then the street officers will have to be involved. So will the animal welfare officer, who can give talks at school assemblies and educate the child dog-owners, and through them, their parents. “It’s about thinking outside the box,” says David.

Politics is also involved when it comes to being innovative. Some schools are so rural that a complete shift from cars is much more difficult. In these cases, they use their Park and Stride scheme, borrowing parish council car parks, so that people can walk at least the last ten or 15 minutes of the journey. That means people get the exercise and it is a safer environment in the traditional accident black spots outside the school gates.

Then you need some quick wins. There are banners in the car parks and ‘I Park and Stride’ badges. But there has to be something obviously changing that people can see before they will respond. “We’ve found that direct services are very co-operative about it,” says David. “If we say it’s a walking route to school, they tend to sort it out pretty quickly.”

There is a sense that this is worthwhile thing to do. It is clear that action has to happen fast. If the school entrance is hidden by trees and branches, then people drive faster past it because they don’t realise it’s a school – then again, you need to do something quickly. In Hamble, children designed new bollards to show where the school was. “We insisted that this was done quickly, and because we wanted it to be seen by the parents that the school travel plan was delivering something quickly,” says David. “That type of approach has made the project successful.”

Right from the start they have emphasised that just producing the school action plan – even just putting it into practice – isn’t the end. After three years, most of the children in the school will have changed and it needs another look. That is why the plans are regularly re-visited, just as the whole policy is going through a review at the moment to keep it up to date with the latest ideas.

The next stage is to roll out the same programme to all the private schools in the area. They tend to have a much larger catchment area, part of which is sometimes outside the borough, so this is an even bigger challenge. Watch this space.

There is no doubt that transport can be the graveyard of green ambitions. If Richmond had misjudged their policy on gas guzzlers, the whole story might have been very different. There are certainly enough corporate greening actually

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communicators with an agenda to undermine any such initiative. Their success with a ground-breaking charging policy, and Eastleigh’s success with their travel to school projects, both come down to much the same thing: brilliant communication.

Serge Lourie and his team in Richmond used the media with great energy and verve, and rode the wave of publicity that hit them rather than drowning under it. They explained the purpose: not just climate change but why people need clean air, not just for themselves but for their asthmatic children. At the other end of the scale, David Airey and his team in Eastleigh communicate to narrow audiences of the pupils, staff and parents of individual schools, but they convince them that the objective is right and – most important – that something will happen, and that people can make a difference.

Some of the other lessons derive from this: Make a difference fast: If there is public cynicism about the political process, that nothing ever changes, then that is even stronger when it comes to transport projects. Traffic expands to fill the roads space available, as we now know. Decades of road ‘improvements’ have only served to increase the amount of traffic. What the team at Eastleigh knew was that enthusiasm for school travel plans would only continue if people could see a difference very quickly.

Back the pedestrians: Whatever the tabloids might tell you, there are more journeys by foot than there are using any other form of transport. Walking matters, and it particularly matters for the local economy. If people find walking dirty and dangerous, then they will stop using the local shops. That is why Lib Dem Islington is creating new pedestrian areas by removing an unsightly roundabout at Highbury Corner and working towards a new pedestrian area at the Angel. It is why Lib Dem Cardiff is doing the same in their city centre. It is why Lib Dem Portsmouth has introduced a 20 mph limit on their residential roads, which has succeeding in reducing speeds by about 4 mph – and despite some difficulty getting the police to enforce it – has made the roads there safer.

Back the cyclists: No UK city has yet followed the example of Paris and provided cycles all over the city centre, though London has shown signs of planning to. Certainly no UK city has come anywhere near the kind of family cycle use that you find in the Dutch or Scandinavian cities. But Lib Dem councils are beginning to see their role as encouraging cycling. Islington has been restoring two-way cycle access in all those places where complex traffic management schemes have undermined it. They have identified about 50 places across the borough where there are barriers to cycling that could be removed.

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Back the car sharers: The great benefit of car sharing is that it means people don’t have to own their own cars. It cuts traffic, and therefore pollution and carbon emissions, but it also provides a way that poorer households can get access to a car if they need to. Lib Dem Islington’s Car Club now has 100 shared vehicles on the road and they are now aiming for 500. It also means they have some means of encouraging council staff to give up their own cars, because the Car Club is available as an alternative.

Tackle the council’s vehicles: It is more than a decade since Lib Dem South Somerset led the way by converting their vehicles, and the possibilities are now endless. Electricity, LPG, oxygen, methane, hydrogen have all been tried by one local authority or other. Probably the only real option now is to end the experiments and review the whole vehicle fleet, as Lib Dem Oldham is now doing. But it still means giving a lead by testing out the latest technology, like the stop-start mechanism in the much-publicised Prius, which cuts emission and shuts down the engine at traffic lights (Islington). It also means finding incentives to get people to give up cars, like bike vouchers or Car Club membership or organising a workplace travel plan for staff (Sutton).

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six :: money

“Progress is the law of the world; and Liberalism is the expression of this law in politics.”

Joseph Chamberlain, Why I am a Liberal, 1885 “Do anything, however small. Save one out of a hundred shops. Save one croft out of a hundred crofts. Keep one door open out of a hundred doors; for so long as one door is open, we are not in prison.”

G.K. Chesterton, An Outline of Sanity, 1926

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The summer of 1916 marked both the biggest naval battle in British history and the biggest military disaster. It is hard to associate those months between May and September with anything else. Yet while the Dreadnoughts were slugging it out off the coast of Jutland, and hundreds of thousands of British and empire troops were going over the top in the Battle of the Somme, perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that a small financial revolution in the city of Birmingham was going largely unnoticed.

The mayor and future Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, son of the great Liberal pioneer of city government Joseph Chamberlain, had chosen that summer to steer a local act of parliament through Westminster and to launch what became the Birmingham Municipal Bank.

Birmingham had been pushing forward the boundaries of what local government could do for nearly half a century, and it was clear then – as it is now – that there was a problem with banking. Six sevenths of the banks across the country had disappeared since 1880, and the Big Five dominated the financial landscape in the peculiar way that they do today, in their various slightly different forms. The strange British banking centralisation was already in place, and with serious consequences for poor people: there were over 200 million things taken to pawnbrokers every year to raise money. What people desperately needed, then as now, was local banks.

The Birmingham Municipal Bank opened at the end of September, after furious opposition from the big banks and the Treasury. By the end of 1917, it had 30,000 investors. By 1950, it had as many as 66 branches across the city and had become a trusted and influential player in the life of Birmingham. Then it was swallowed up by the Trustee Savings Bank, which in turn was swallowed by Lloyds Bank, which in turn lives on in the belly of the vast and government-owned Lloyd’s Group. Its branches have long gone and, apart from lingering on in the memories of a few of Birmingham’s older inhabitants, it has been forgotten.

But not quite everyone. Its story has been an inspiration for years for Liberal Democrat councillor Michael Wilkes, the new Lord Mayor of the city. Nor is this just business nostalgia: Michael is a former dean of the commerce and social science faculty at Birmingham University Business School. He knows about banks and he is very angry about them.

The tale of the Birmingham Municipal Bank had excited him since being shown a battered old savings book, still lovingly kept by one of his local voters. He had formed the ambition to revive it as part of his campaign for proper banking services some years ago. Birmingham is still a banking innovator, after all. The Aston Reinvestment Trust is, even now, bucking the trend by investing in local enterprise. But Michael wanted to go further.

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Then, in the autumn of 2008, the banking crisis struck. During the Liberal Democrat conference, the collapse of the investment bank Lehmann Brothers in the New York ushered in a few terrifying weeks when it became clear than many of the biggest banks in the world were broke.

Financial crises tend to happen in October, for no obvious reason, and this one was no exception. This one, perhaps even more than any other, was also demonstrably self-inflicted. Huge bonuses and a culture of speculation had removed the banking elite even further from the real world, and the fact that so few of them understood the implications of the obscure financial derivatives they were buying and selling made the situation even more precarious.

That same month, Michael joined forces with his fellow Lib Dem councillor, and deputy council leader, Paul Tilsley. Together they amended a Conservative motion about the crisis during the full council meeting, committing Birmingham to investigate re-launching the Birmingham Municipal Bank. It passed with all-party support.

One year on, it was clear that the business of starting a new bank was no simple matter. The council set up a scrutiny panel, the council’s chief officers advised against the idea, and huge sums were quoted to them by banking experts of £200 million for a banking licence.

There is a less expensive way. Conservative-controlled Essex County Council led the way, launching its own bank on the basis of what they call ‘white labelling’, but whatever it says on the letterhead, it is in fact run by Banco Santander. In the same way, Post Office financial products are actually managed by the Bank of Ireland.

But simply white labelling a new bank wasn’t what Michael wanted. “I want something that doesn’t have the sharp practice behind it of the banking industry,” he says. “The Birmingham Municipal Bank encouraged thrift.

These days when there are so many predatory systems encouraged by the banking industry, I wanted to do something separate from the established banks. The problem is that banks have abandoned their principles and I believe there would be substantial support in the general population for a new Birmingham bank.”

Michael was discovering just how much the established banking industry is buttressed by the high costs of entry. This is one of the main reasons local business in the UK is in such a weaker position than their American or German competitors, and potential competitors. There are only 170 branches per million people in the UK, compared to 520 in Germany and 960 in France.

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The question is what local government can do to help. The argument continues in Birmingham, as it does in other places. But Michael is increasingly aware of the problem, now that a small oligopoly of large and frightened banks – now mainly in government ownership – have been withdrawing from the local economy. Of 12 new projects in his ward, 11 of them have had their finance removed by their lenders. Meanwhile, his wife was offered a loan of £20,000 which she didn’t need and didn’t ask for.

Something has to change, and the search for a local government solution to the collapse of local banking continues in Birmingham and elsewhere. But the argument is far from clear-cut. Many Lib Dem councils have invested in credit unions, but these remain small and under-capitalised. There are only a handful of community development financial institutions like the Aston Reinvestment Trust in the UK. These are difficult questions. What Lib Dem councils have is the ambition to do something about it.

But local authorities do have something else which might be brought to bear.

They have huge cashflows, and an urgent need for medium-term savings and somewhere to put their money which isn’t a dodgy Icelandic bank. Only a quarter of a century ago, many local authorities were still putting their money into local mortgages instead. Liberal Democrat Portsmouth is one place which is looking more closely at re-launching the idea.

“We have huge amounts of money in the money markets,” says council leader Gerald Vernon-Jackson. “We might get a better return going back into the mortgage market. That’s why we are looking at whether we can establish some kind of Portsmouth mortgage.”

It isn’t as if there is no expertise in the council. Portsmouth owns £1.6 billion in property, and do so for the long-term. It is one of the main ways in which they fund their work. They even own the port, one of the biggest in the country, founded by Richard the Lionheart. They recently bought the largest banana importers in the UK in order to save one of the port’s major customers from bankruptcy. It inspired the inevitable headlines in the local press – ‘Council goes bananas’ – but it reveals an ambitious willingness to support the local economy.

Gerald is a veteran Liberal Democrat campaigner, having worked alongside Chris Rennard at Cowley Street before he became more closely involved in local government. He is one of a new generation of council leaders, many of them Liberal Democrats, who are not prepared to sit out the economic crisis waiting passively to see what will happen. He is also very aware that his council’s huge reserves are now earning next to nothing in interest.

“The Tories say that government should withdraw from the economy,” he says. “The issue is that the city council is actually part of the economic mix of the city. We can’t just withdraw.” greening actually

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In the short term, Gerald is discussing whether the council can take over the homes of people who are being threatened with repossession because of mortgage arrears, because it is considerably cheaper to maintain families in rented accommodation where they already live than it is to find temporary accommodation – let alone take their children into care.

He is also talking about whether the council might extend mortgages to first time buyers, though a mortgage lender, who would use the council’s reserves to fund local lending. “Portsmouth is a poor city,” he says. “It is sensible to look at ways we can help people get on the first rung of the property ladder. We need to make sure that people in Portsmouth can buy homes.”

Lib Dem Newcastle has been pursuing the same issue, but decided that the FSA regulations would make re-launching council mortgages pretty impractical – though there are still five mortgages being paid off from the days when the council did lend money. Instead they have been talking to local building societies to see if they could lend money for them.

“Right now, the lack of available credit from providers such as Newcastle Council isn't the particular problem,” says Newcastle’s regeneration portfolio holder Bill Shepherd. “The money is there but the risk profile has gone up, which means higher deposits are required from buyers. Our attention is focused therefore on putting together packages that address the need for a high deposit. We also have some hard-to-sell properties, particularly flats, that mortgage companies don't like at the moment, and we are looking to underwrite these too.”

That is the issue. If local people lose their homes, or can’t get the lending they need to buy them in the first place, the council picks up the pieces – and at great expense. Liberal Democrats are moving the debate about public services to see how they might be more preventative, rather than passively rescuing anyone who happens to need help, and to see what assets they have in order to do so.

There is one bit of bright news about the Birmingham Municipal Bank. The bank’s old headquarters in Broad Street was sold by Lloyd’s in 2006, and bought back by the council. There has even been a version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni performed there by the Birmingham Opera Company. That is a boost for local culture and a historic irony as well, but is this – or any of the rest of the struggle for local banking – in any way green?

The short answer is that, if you believe that the speculative banking system is part of the problem for the planet – demanding returns that no natural system can ever provide – then of course it is. But there is a longer answer too: looking at the way money flows around local economies can make more 70

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sustainable economies possible too, and it all about using existing budgets more sustainably.

A van drew up outside the town hall in Liberal Democrat Stockport in May 2009, bearing the slogan ‘Greyland: Cleaning Chemical Manufacturers’ on the side. Greyland’s managing director Richard Dyson leapt from the cab and carried in the first box of sustainable cleaning materials through the door. It was the first delivery from a new contract that ticked all the boxes for the council’s sustainable procurement policy. Greyland’s cleaners are not just environment-friendly, they are also local. Greyland is based in Stockport and employs Stockport people.

“They contacted me and told me they were local and produced more environment friendly products,” says Stockport’s environment portfolio holder Stuart Bodsworth. “I went to see them and invited them to a Meet the Buyer event earlier this year.”

Stockport’s procurement policy is to buy green where possible, using the council’s resources to improve the environment. But it is also to buy local where possible, because that keeps the money flowing around the local economy, and supports local jobs and local businesses. It makes the money go further, but it also means that products – cleaning products, in this case – don’t have to be trucked across the country to get there.

Buying green has been an objective of sustainability campaigners for years.

Buying local is a newer idea, and it goes back to a ground-breaking study in Lib Dem Cornwall in 2001 which led to a new way of looking at these money flows in a sustainable way. Researchers developed a survey which allowed them to track where money was spent locally, and compared what happened to the money spent in a supermarket with the money spent on a local vegetable box scheme. To their surprise, the money spent on the veggie box stayed circulating in the local economy twice as much: by the time it had been re-spent three times, it had been worth over £2.20 to local business.

No more money had come into the local economy than before. The bottom line for the veggie box scheme was no different. But there was, potentially at least, a huge difference just by making sure that money spent locally stayed locally for just a little longer, before it leaked out to utilities, supermarkets and multinationals. That is a huge challenge for local authorities, and it is one which has been taken up in a big way by Stockport.

It is also very controversial. When Stuart Bodsworth explained what he and his colleagues were trying to do at an IDeA environment leadership academy – to buy local and sustainable where possible – he was told it was illegal. Of course, if they were excluding outside companies from bidding, then it would have been, but that is not what Stockport has been doing. greening actually

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“What we are doing is setting out clear criteria which any business can address,” says Stuart. “The competition is still free and open. It isn’t closed to people outside the borough. When you are looking for value for money, it isn’t just the bottom line. It is what the bid offers the community that matters.”

The procurement policy itself dates back to 2006, and it has just gone through a full review. There was political opposition from the beginning – questions from Conservative councillors about why the council wasn’t just accepting the cheapest bid, and accusations of wasting money. But these have dwindled recently.

The key engine which drives it has been a series of Meet the Buyer events which Stockport holds, which bring together potential local bidders with the people who are in charge of procurement for the council. The first one was in 2007, and they have been so successful that there are more planned each year. Stockport has now extended their Meet the Buyer events to include our public sector partners and some of the larger private sector employers in the borough too.

“This all comes from our desire to have a procurement policy that works for Stockport, that it is environmentally sustainable and socially sustainable and it keeps the money circulating in the borough,” he says. “It is important that local authorities exercise a leadership role here. It is part of what we exist to do. We have to champion the things that we believe in and, as Liberal Democrats, we believe in the environment and social justice, and we also believe this is good for the borough.”

This is about re-imagining local economies so that they make better use of the resources near at hand. If you can grow tomatoes in the heart of the city, on allotments or on abandoned land, then that means that much fewer are going to be trucked in from Spain or airlifted from the Canary Isles. It also means that local skills are going to be used better. It means that the money that goes into the local economy stays circulating there – and every time it circulates, it creates more wealth. You might not have any more money, but by making sure that local businesses are buying locally, then you can keep it circulating there.

“The idea is that we would rather the money we spend circulates within Stockport, that it doesn’t leak out, that it will be used to pay Stockport people, who will spend it in Stockport shops, which will give jobs to Stockport people,” says Stuart.

The business of tracking where council spending goes was pioneered in two Liberal Democrat councils, even if those behind it were semi-detached. The first study was in Cornwall, but the first application of the money flows measuring tool LM3 was in the Lib Dem former Alnwick Council, now 72

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subsumed into the new unitary Northumberland Council. They used it to measure where the money spent in the award-winning Alnwick Gardens went to afterwards, and were able to calculate its economic impact in the town.

Northumberland Council also discovered how better procurement can boost the regeneration budget. They worked out that just shifting five per cent of spending to local suppliers would bring another £125 million to the north east. They also found that local procurement could multiply the spending on regeneration four times over.

The secret was to find ways of helping small companies and social enterprises gear up to bid for contracts, and making sure the contracts were small enough to broaden the number of local bidders. It isn’t easy, and it is made more difficult by perverse government requirements about centralising procurement. But it is an important innovation, and part of an emerging Lib Dem critique of local economics, which sees beyond the headline indicators to what is actually happening on the ground.

“Often this is completely spurious growth attributed to the financial services,” says Michael Wilkes in Birmingham. “Actually our economy is not growing in a meaningful way.” The question is how much Lib Dem councils can act to claw back some influence over the health of their local economies. Some of the lessons are as follows: Use the procurement budget: Lib Dem Islington has pioneered a new procurement code that supports local suppliers where they are available.

There are also many things that councils can do to buy sustainable products, just by specifying eco-goods where possible. Lib Dem Camden has signed up to the Carbon Disclosure project to begin de-carbonising their supply chain. It is now perfectly legal also to ask suppliers to disclose their own carbon emissions. There is also no reason why councils always have to buy services from the private sector: local social enterprises can put more value back into the community, if you can find them – or encourage and grow them until they are in a position to bid.

Procure for broad long-term objectives: The whole idea of Best Value was supposed to end the old Conservative insistence on choosing the lowest bidder, no matter how useless. But under the Gershon review, Best Value seems in practice to be going the old way. In fact, Treasury procurement rules suggest that councils look at the added value of contracts, not just on the local environment and local economy but on social cohesion. Lib Dem Camden has been pioneering a new form of procurement that also builds in long-term mutual support, in this case in mental health, which also builds community.

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Help local business: Lib Dem Islington has cut the time they take to pay local invoices from 20 to ten days. Bury Council is doing the same, thanks to a motion put forward by opposition Liberal Democrats. Lib Dem Oldham has gone further by setting up a credit crunch war cabinet which meets once a fortnight to look at how the local economy is working, and takes action as quickly as possible. They also have a ÂŁ400,000 rapid intervention fund to support people and businesses through the worst effects.

Link up with local lenders: The local lending infrastructure, such as it is, can be given a boost by local government, whether it is local banks or local credit unions. In both cases, they can help divert council reserves into lending. Lib Dem Leeds has seen the city credit union link up with the government-funded Sharing the Success to help local enterprises refused bank loans. Lib Dem Birmingham and Stockport have also been taking action against illegal loan sharks.

Organise meet the buyer events: The first step to buying local, and keeping local money circulating better, is to link up potential local bidders with council procurement staff. Stockport did just that, as we have seen. Lib Dem York has done the same. Bidders will need more help down the line, especially if the contracts are too big, or if there are specifications that could only describe a multinational, but getting to know them is an important start.

Tackle local monopolies: One of the main factors that sucks money out of local economies is a profusion of supermarkets. New rules that allow local authorities to take local competition into account when they decide planning applications are almost certainly on the way. But measuring potential money flows is also evidence, even now, one way or the other over potential new developments – whether they are superstores or local markets. Both have an impact, and the council needs to know what it is likely to be.

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seven :: where next?

“It’s not easy being green.”

Kermit the Frog, 1970 “The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re-dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re-dreamed.”

Ben Okri, 2003

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The Liberal Democrat leader of Devon County Council, Brian Greenslade, was wandering along the high street of his home town of Barnstaple, when somebody shouted at him. “Let’s do it for Devon!” they bawled, and gave him a big smile.

When you have led a large local authority for more than a decade, there are the occasional encounters in the street which seem to involve raised voices.

But when people reflect your own slogans back at you, you know things are probably going along the right lines. ‘Let’s do it for Devon’ was designed to explain the challenge of climate change.

Conventional wisdom suggests that it is hard to capture the imagination – at least of the silent majority – with an imaginative green campaign. Tabloid coverage of bin rebels or frustrated motorists is often enough to frighten off all but the most committed politicians. But Brian’s encounter suggested that the truth is more complicated.

Devon had been Liberal Democrat in one form or another – but with some gaps – since 1993. Brian is a former accountant and lifelong Lib Dem activist: he represented the Liberals in his mock school election in 1964 and, as he said, “I never really looked back”. But when his colleagues took control again in 2005, they were determined to make green the overarching policy and message of their administration.

“The officials took to it very strongly,” says Brian. “The challenge was to get it really embedded into the organisation”.

The other challenge was, of course, winning over the people of Devon. And here Brian brought in some marketing support to get to the heart of the message and what it meant. Part of the result was an appeal to Devon’s sturdy pioneering spirit. Hence the slogan: ‘Let’s do it for Devon’. But the key was to link green ideals to money. Continuing with the less than green status quo meant an absurd waste of energy and rubbish, and therefore money. The final campaign was called ‘Don’t let Devon go to waste’ and it was made into a short TV advert, and shown on the local TV stations.

It seemed to work. Brian’s team met all their targets for the next four years, reaching a recycling rate of over 53 per cent. The key decision for County Hall was to replace the ancient boiler so that they could use sustainable woodchip from ten miles away, rather than oil from the Persian Gulf.

But the main issue was broader, and this is an issue for any administration that tries to go greener: how should it all link together? Brian’s answer in Devon was, again, to link green progress with economic progress. That meant looking at where the wind blew most, to give a steer to renewables professionals where wind farms might be given priority. It meant running subsidised training to grow the business of installing renewable energy, to greening actually

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increase the number of jobs – and increase the wages of people working in the green sector.

It meant teaming up with a diverse range of experts like Exeter University, Global Action Plan and the Westcountry Energy Action Trust, and again it has had an effect. Devon has supported 345 business over three years, building the renewables sector from 11 to over 60 companies, saving local small business and communities up to £4m in their electricity bills.

In their own buildings, they are cutting the carbon emissions by over two per cent a year, investing on energy saving and energy generation in schools and, of course, running the climate change awareness campaign Do it for Devon.

Brian’s Lib Dems are, of course, out of power again after an aggressive Conservative push into the West Country, so it looks like Devon will get another hiccup in Lib Dem political control. But the pioneering green policies look set to carry on – and that remains a clear Lib Dem achievement.

What Brian and his team managed to do was to begin to tackle the central problem of green policy-making at local level, which is to embed it at the core of policy and begin to stitch it together. This is far from simple when departmental boundaries straddle all the most important innovations, and it makes it doubly difficult to conjure up the kind of leadership that makes this work.

In their different ways, the greener Lib Dem councils are all wrestling with stitching a raft of green policies into something more coherent. Like Lib Dem Somerset’s unanimous decision to become the first Transition County, building a plan to reduce the county’s energy to a sustainable level.

Or Islington’s £10 million green investment plan, launched to tackle the economic downturn in 2009, including micro green spaces, new allotments, car sharing and new cycle access and safety programmes.

Or Eastleigh’s Beacon status for climate change, and their new CarbonFREE fund, looking at how a local carbon offset investment scheme might work.

The future looks likely to mean even more blurring of departmental boundaries. New houses that are producers of energy. Recycling that provides the raw materials for new local enterprises. New green spaces to reduce crime and tackle mental ill-health. Schools that produce their own food. Retail space for farmers and food markets. Or insulation that also boosts local employment, and the experience of Kirklees has fed into a 2009 Friends of the Earth report which suggests that insulation could create 70,000 jobs across England and Wales alone.

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There are examples of all these around the UK, many of them in Lib Dem areas, but they are only at the very beginning. Taking it further requires financial innovation as well as political will. It requires leaps of imagination to turn every home and lamp-post into a power station. It requires particular courage to cut the traffic, as the latest research suggests, by reducing road space.

All these burst out of conventional Whitehall targets. They require bold innovation when, whatever the rhetoric, conventional auditing prefers tiny innovation. But the stories in this book show that they are possible, and three lessons particularly leap out.

Lesson #1: re-imagine your assets Conventional thinking suggests that the balance sheet of local authorities are simply financial. It is just a numerical bottom line. What Lib Dems brought to the debate about community politics (See Communities Actually) was that local people are vital local assets too. They bring imagination, knowledge and abilities which are not available to councils which operate on the tired old model. In fact, their exclusion is often the reason why so little actually works.

The same applies to the environment. The energy which just seeps out through the roof is a wasted asset. The heat which gets wasted when electricity is produced is one too. So is the wasted concrete space where crops could be grown, or the food from people’s plates which just goes into landfill.

It even applies to money. Some neighbourhoods might have no more money flowing in than some of the poorest areas in the country, but – because they have local business, know how and enterprise – the money stays circulating locally, and every time it does, it creates wealth. Money flows are an asset, and green ones too, because they use local resources more effectively.

So setting out on a greener journey often means taking stock of what you have already got, whether it is the local green business (Stockport) or the local food waste from the airport (Liverpool) or the wasted space in housing estates (Camden). Wasted land, heat, energy, money flows are all resources that can be used, because green policy means looking at efficiency in a whole new way – not just about value for money, though that comes into it, but value for waste.

Lesson #2: collect local people with ideas, know-how and energy Many of the stories here suggest that making green innovation happen is not so much a matter of heroic political individualism. It is about finding the expertise locally that might be used, or the enthusiasm in and around the council. When Christian Vassie (York) wanted to build his ecoDepot, he greening actually

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collected around him a team of internal enthusiasts who could make it happen. When Roger Symonds and his colleagues (Bath and North East Somerset) wanted to make recycling a reality, they tapped into the expertise built up by Avon Friends of the Earth. Neither assumed that all the wisdom and knowhow lay inside the council or inside their own political group. They reached out to make things happen.

Liverpool’s Bulky Bob’s scheme (see Power Actually) is another example.

Making things happen often means finding the people who can best do it, and drawing them in. That is a very modern political skill – it is what councillors do when they can’t command and control any more.

That is a feature of any kind of innovative change, of course, but it is especially so of environmental change. The green agenda is part of the great narrative of our time. It affects everyone, and many people it affects profoundly. Those who go into politics and local government to make a difference there, and who are not asked for help in this, often give the whole business up to do something more worthwhile. So among the energy that is wasted is this huge human enthusiasm, without which change finds it harder to happen.

“Give people the space to be creative, and do their best work,” says Christian Vassie. “Local authorities are not usually very good at that.” But Lib Dems can be, and often are. It is one of the things that make the best ones distinctive.

Lesson #3: communicate The huge importance of getting the message right is a theme which runs through so many of the stories, whether it is Brian Greenslade’s slogans in Devon or Christian Vassie’s blogs in York. Getting the titles right can make all the difference between public excitement and apathy. Making the objective broad and clear enough can be the same.

Symbolism matters because it makes bigger change possible. But it is also important to use it to explain what is most important. Nearly 90 per cent of our housing will still be where it is in 2050. Insulating it properly is a far bigger priority than building new green houses, however perfect, important as that is. Get the message right and get it across and these big shifts suddenly become possible.

One of the key messages in the stories in this book, in Liverpool and Devon in particular, was linking the green message with the economic ones.

Landfill is not just a waste, it’s a waste of money. Inefficient energy is a waste of money too. The key message is not just to explain the purpose behind the policy, but to explain the implications for the future for our pockets.

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But of course there is an element of heroic political individualism about all this, and it is the ability to carry on despite the knock-backs and never give up.

“When I was first elected, I imagined I would do three or four great things a year, and had to work out painfully that I might do three or four great projects in my whole time on the council,” says Christian Vassie. “The problem is that bureaucrats are masters of the electoral cycle. They urge constantly to put things back four or five years ahead, safe in the knowledge that the electoral cycle will have been and gone and everyone will have lost the will to live.”

Christian’s worst fears were realised later when he proposed that the council should cut its energy use by five percent a year. The response was: “Could we say between nought and five percent?”

Often the solution is to help people see things clearly for themselves, and this is what he did to put his latest idea into action: lending out smart meters from the local libraries. Smart meters can be clipped onto wires going into your house, and tell you how much energy you are using – and what it is costing. They allow you to experiment at home by switching things on and off to find out where you are wasting energy. Christian told his three children that, if they helped him save energy, he would share the savings between them and the house. Even having switched off everything in his own home, he found he was still spending 2.3p an hour, just because the computers were still plugged in at the wall. It may not sound much, but 2.3p comes to £170 a year.

The immediate response from council colleagues was that the plan to lend smart meters alongside library books was impossible and probably illegal.

The main opponents were in his own group, so it was necessary to take the idea to the full council – in his role as executive member for libraries – to get the go-head.

But it has been a great success. The smart meters cost only £1,000 and within 24 hours, there were 200 people on the waiting list. Hundreds of households have now borrowed them. The next idea is to do the same with infra-red thermometers to check on heat leaking from the people’s homes.

“I wanted to make sure that in York at least, we can empower people to make decisions about their own lives,” he says. “The key here is information. Once people have learned about their own homes, they don’t need the smart meters all the time.”

Smart meters are not the whole story, of course. The truth is that all the tales told here in this book belong at the very beginning of a much bigger story, where we start using the resources we have – often inconvenient greening actually

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resources we never realised we had – to stitch together a new kind of local government, and new kinds of places.

Those places are going to include borrowing community land trusts from urban USA, community supported agriculture – whereby people subscribe to local food – from rural Japan. It is going to mean borrowing the technology from the PassivHaus, a wooden house so well-insulated that it doesn’t need a boiler (it gets heated by human bodies) which has just been given planning permission in Lib Dem Camden.

Lib Dems have been playing a leading role in making these ideas possible, but there is still a very long way to go.

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appendix

Camden Sustainability Task Force www.camden.gov.uk/susforce Combined Heat and Power Association www.chpa.co.uk Community Land Trusts www.communitylandtrust.org.uk Community Recycling Network www.crn.org.uk Decentralised Energy www.dekb.co.uk Ealing Community Transport www.ectgroup.org.uk Eastleigh school travel plans www.eastleigh.gov.uk/ebc-1548 Energy Saving Trust www.energysavingtrust.org.uk Forum for the Future www.forumforthefuture.org Green Liberal Democrats www.greenlibdems.org.uk LGA Environmental Advisory Service www.eas.local,gov.uk LM3 (local money flows) www.lm3online.org London Community Recycling Network www.lcrn.org.uk Milton Keynes Partnership www.miltonkeynespartnership.info May Gurney www.maygurney.co.uk New Economics Foundation www.neweconomics.org New Rules (US) www.newrules.org Plugging the Leaks (local money flows) www.pluggingtheleaks.org Renewable energy www.reuk.co.uk Sustain (local food) www.sustainweb.org Sustainable Communities Act www.localworks.org Transition Towns www.transitiontowns.org Warm Zone www.warmzones.co.uk Wrap (recycling resources) www.wrap.org.uk York ecoDepot blog http://www.bbc.co.uk/northyorkshire/we_love_ny/blogs

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