The days are getting shorter and so is the time left until the COP26 summit in Glasgow. That summit is widely regarded as being make-or-break for international efforts to keep the rise in global temperatures below 1.5%. At MCA there is only a limited amount we can do to influence world leaders but we do have targets a little closer to home.
SMDC now has less than two months to deliver a ‘fully costed, measurable and achievable’ plan to get the district to Net Zero. That promise was made over two years ago and previous deadlines have come and gone in a puff of excuses, evasion and doubled-down claims of ‘leadership’. This deadline is so public that this time, surely this time, there can be no more evasion.
There are a few encouraging signs – a professional consultancy has finally been brought in, in the form of Anthesis, and political embarrassment at the lack of action in comparison to sister council High Peak has spurred a few minor potential advances in areas such as electric vehicle charging points.
A mid-ranking officer now explicitly has climate in his portfolio and a dedicated climate change officer is still promised. SMDC’s biodiversity partner, the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust, is deftly and admirably riding the political winds to win funding for local projects.
Staffordshire Climate Matters is holding a series of meetings around the county on specific sectors of the climate agenda, the findings of which will be presented to councillors, including those from SMDC, at a conference in October.
But these signs of hope are rarer than a public bus on a Moorlands road. Almost everywhere else, the few plans made public bear the scars of months and years of essential preparatory work undone, or started too late – of policy making as a permanent state of essay crisis.
A widely publicised ‘public consultation’ on SMDC’s plans has now been downgraded to a telephone survey of public attitudes to climate change. These are the sort of things that should be done – are done by other councils – at the start of a process, not weeks before the all-important plan is due to be delivered.
It is impossible to escape the conclusion that caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of two rudderless years and a new deadline as an act of political theatre, SMDC cut and ran on the public consultation. That does not bode well for any hope of a ‘fully costed, measurable and achievable’ plan by the end of October.
There is so much that needs to be done, and so little idea from within SMDC leadership about how to do it. Where are the plans for proper co-operation with the County, where so much of the heavy lifting will need to be done in coming years?
The portfolio holder will now sit on the Joint Waste Management Board, we are told. Great, but what about Energy? What are they going to do, retrofit houses with landfill?
The Centre for Alternative Technology is hosting a series of Innovation Labs for the county’s local authorities. That’s good – as far as it goes. And how far that goes is impossible to find out. There seem to be no citizens involved in the process and if SMDC has any clue what they expect at the end of it they are not letting on.
The Green Infrastructure Project Management Board is another template for future co-operation we are told. Well, MCA is all for those kinds of bodies – we’ve been pushing for similar for years. But where is the presence of anyone with climate in the job title?
Tourism, Farming, Wildlife Management: they are all there, and should be. But where does any action on climate get a look in? Yes, we hear you say, the portfolio holder has climate in his job description. But it’s common knowledge that the grittier, messier, harder bits that go with climate action don’t get much of a look-in these days. And those in-trays tend to be more ‘In’ than ‘Out’.
The last two years have been marked by a relentless focus on the softer, nicer more photogenic aspects of the portfolio – i.e. Nature. At MCA we all love a tree, and we’re quite fond of bees too. But even their most urgent advocates wouldn’t claim that Nature-based solutions can make more than a bit of a difference. The relentless focus on Biodiversity at the expense of Climate has left the plan dangerously unbalanced and threadbare. If God gave humans two legs to walk and they make a choice to use only one, they will end up going round in circles, arriving back almost where they started.
Whatever emerges in a matter of weeks, SMDC won’t be quite back where they started. It will not be that bad. But it looks set to be far, far short of where, with leadership, they could have and should have been.