Agenda item

To receive a verbal update on the draft Sustainability Strategy feedback.

A presentation was provided by the Climate Change and Sustainability Project Manager, Policy & Strategy Team Leader and the Policy & Strategy Officer on the feedback received on the Draft Sustainability Strategy.

 

Audio recording – 54 minutes 16 seconds

 

The Policy & Community Manager presented Appendix B to the Information Note entitled ‘Sustainability Strategy Draft Actions’ and advised that:

 

·                A public consultation on the Sustainability Strategy took place in March.

·                The Climate Change Strategy had been expanded into the Sustainability Strategy as sustainability was now a key council priority in the Council Plan. 

·                It covered many areas such as reducing emissions, climate change adaptation, biodiversity and cross cutting sustainability matters.

·                These four areas would be covered in the following presentations from relevant officers.

 

The Climate Change and Sustainability Project Manager provided a presentation on reducing emissions and advised that:

 

·                In the draft, there was a goal for the Council to achieve Net Zero by 2030 on its own operations which was also referenced in the Council Plan.

·                Within that target, they would be focusing on their own buildings, vehicle fleet and key contracted services including waste collection, leisure centres and grounds maintenance which accounted for 90.4% of all council emissions.

·                The biggest emissions contributor was gas usage from leisure centres and lidos which equated to 45% of all council emissions. Other key contributors were electricity use in leisure centres and gas use in council buildings.

·                9.6% of council emissions were from activities that the Council had less influence over such as staff working remotely and commuting. They had a target for these wider emissions to be Net Zero by 2040.

·                There were still gaps in their knowledge about understanding emissions that arose from IT and smaller contracts, as well as emissions related to Council Estate.

·                Key actions to reduce council emissions included delivering decarbonisation of leisure centres in North Herts by March 2026, implementing the use of sustainable low carbon fuels in heavy duty refuse collection vehicles, and wider measures to reduce fuel consumption in the waste collection service.

·                Other actions included decarbonisation of key council buildings, particularly the District Council Offices, Hitchin Town Hall and North Herts Museum.

·                Work would also take place with the Contracts Procurement Group to assess their supply chain of goods and materials and how they could utilise procurement to reduce emissions in this area. 

·                There was a longstanding target to achieve a North Herts Net Zero district by 2040. 

·                Key sources of district wide emissions from the biggest to smallest emissions contributors were transport, domestic, industry, waste, agriculture, commercial and public sector. Land use such as forestry had a slightly negative emissions contribution to the district.

·                They had limited influence to drive national action, but they had an important role to play in the district by place shaping new residential and commercial developments as the Planning Authority.

·                They could also engage in showcasing to influence district wide emissions by providing case studies of sustainability, for example developments that had met gold, silver or bronze targets in the SSPD.  

·                In addition, they could participate in partnerships to bring groups and stakeholders together to influence district wide emissions.

·                It was important for the Council to engage with residents through face-to-face conversations, social media and newsletters to translate national policy into local relevance and raise awareness of sustainability issues to involve them.

·                Actions to reduce the district wide emissions arising from transport had been developed. These were to work with the County Council to improve public transport, expand EV charging provision across the district by installing more charging points in Council owned car parks, and to secure funding towards improvements to cycle and walking infrastructure.

·                In terms of heating homes, they would encourage residents to retrofit their homes by continuing to promote and deliver government funded grants in addition to independent advice and services or schemes.

·                Government funding was being made available towards community energy projects and the Council would investigate how to obtain this in the future.

·                They would look to support community energy groups such as Green Heat Coop in Royston as they could play an important role in reducing domestic emissions in the district by driving local sustainability projects.

 

The following members of the public asked questions:

 

·                Dr John Webb

·                Roger Lovegrove

·                Deolinda Eltringham

·                Julia Sonander

·                Chris Jones

 

In response to questions, the Climate Change and Sustainability Project Manager advised that:

 

·                Replacing gas boilers with air source heat pumps, solar PV roof installation, and implementation of wall and ceiling insulation were just some of the measures that would be deployed to greatly decarbonise the leisure centres. They would not be able to fully decarbonise them as they could not carry out certain things such as replace the boilers that heated the learner pool at North Herts Leisure Centre, however, they would still be making significant progress towards full decarbonisation in this phase.

·                Geothermal or ground source heat pumps were considered as a measure to decarbonise council buildings, but ultimately, they were more expensive and air source heat pumps were more cost effective.

·                In September 2023, investigation into fitting solar PV on multi-storey car parks in North Herts had taken place but this was deemed to be financially unfeasible. It had been achieved in places like Tewkesbury where they had used funding from the PSDS to deliver this and solar panels in private car parks would become more common, but the capital costs associated with this were too great for the Council to carry this out on their car parks currently. 

·                The Planning Authority had different considerations to make when making decisions on developments and would not consider emission reducing technologies if they interfered with heritage conservation for instance. 

·                Energy demands from the leisure centres would be addressed by both energy generation through the heat pumps and solar PV, in addition to energy efficiency measures such as insulation.

·                Heat pumps were more widely used in Nordic and Scandinavian countries due to their colder, harsher winters.

 

In response to questions, Councillor Mick Debenham advised that this phase of the Leisure Centre Decarbonisation scheme should reduce emissions from the leisure centres in North Herts by two thirds. 

 

In response to questions, Councillor Daniel Allen advised that:

 

·                Financially, it was not viable to install solar PV on multi-storey car parks as they had already investigated the possibility at Hitchin Swimming Centre car park. However, they would consider leasing space on their multi-storey car parks to private companies if they were approached. 

·                They would focus on decarbonising their current buildings instead of acquiring new ones that had already been decarbonised.

·                Community energy would be used in the Harlow and Gilston development in East Herts with energy production taking place onsite.

·                Bespoke heat pumps would be custom designed for the leisure centres to ensure that they were fit for purpose. 

 

In response to questions, Chris Jones advised that air source heat pumps lost efficiency in cold temperatures, particularly if they were designed tightly. Because of this, the energy production of the leisure centres could be impacted if outlier views that the Grand Solar Minimum 2020-2053 would bring longer, colder winters and shorter, hotter summers came true.

 

N.B. Councillor Joe Graziano left the Zoom call at 21:02 and did not return.

 

The Policy & Strategy Officer and Policy & Strategy Team Leader provided more information on climate adaptation, biodiversity and cross cutting matters of Appendix B to the Information Note and advised that:

 

·                There were broad themes within the appendix on the Council ensuring that its operations and services were resilient to the impacts of climate change and that the district was also resilient to the unavoidable impacts of the changing climate. 

·                They had assessed climate change risks through the HCCSP.

·                Adaptation was defined as changing lives, work and communities to help face climate change. 

·                There were several actions listed in Appendix B regarding climate adaptation. One of which was to signpost residents and businesses to resources that would provide information to them on climate change mitigation and adaptation.

·                Another action was to engage with water companies on reducing water usage within Hertfordshire as the county had a low water supply but high usage.

·                They would signpost communities to cool and warm spaces within the district. The County Council currently provided a map of locations available which the Council would help to keep updated with the possibility of using Council buildings as cool and warm spaces.

·                Learnings from the Resilient Together project would be established and applied to sites within North Herts.

·                After recent weather events, they would endeavour to record extreme weather events in the district and how the incidents resulting from these effected both council services and the district as a whole by setting up a monitoring system to record the incidents.

·                They would establish learnings from emergency volunteer work when aiding a response to emergency weather events that would become more frequent with the changing climate.

·                In addition to broadening the Sustainability Strategy as part of a key priority on the Council Plan, the Council had also declared an Ecological Emergency to recognise that the climate crisis and ecological crisis were supportive of each other.

·                Since the Climate Change Strategy had been developed, the Council now had an enhanced biodiversity duty to not only preserve biodiversity, but enhance it as well.  

·                Actions within the actions table could be separated into three categories. Actions to improve biodiversity on Council owned land, actions to work with partners to improve biodiversity on other land in the district and actions to improve biodiversity through the planning system such as Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) requirements for developments.

·                They would look at the success of the wilding audit recommendations over the last few years and whether there would be further opportunities to implement further recommendations.

·                Opportunities to deliver the aspirational Greenspace Action Plans and additional aspirations as each plan came up for renewal would be considered and reviewed, however, they were constrained by resources so they would look at grant funding to help deliver these aspects.

·                The Greenspace Team already worked with the Wildlife Trust to improve rivers and chalk streams but they would also look to support their aspiration to reintroduce Water Voles in Purwell.

·                There were opportunities to expand reduced mowing regimes across the district but it was acknowledged that they received a lot of complaints on this. To address this, they would improve communication by working with volunteers and resident groups to expand into the areas where they had struggled to in the past. 

·                They would look at the final version of the Local Nature Recovery Strategy to see where the Council could contribute to the actions listed in this.

·                In terms of planning actions, there would be a full review of the Local Plan and they would consider biodiversity within this by encouraging developers to implement more than the Statutory 10% BNG on developments where possible.

·                Council owned land, both big and small scale would be assessed to see where more wildflower areas and wilding could be implemented.   

·                They would support habitat banks in accordance with the Local Nature Recovery Strategy.

·                Opportunities for the Museum to host climate or nature exhibitions in their space would be investigated. 

·                There were crosscutting actions in the actions table that encompassed multiple areas of sustainability and climate change.

·                One of these was detailed as increasing communication both internally to reduce other sources of council emissions and externally to support residents to act more sustainably.  

·                Introduction of water saving measures at the allotments would be looked into, however, water saving actions within the district relied on the Environmental Agency or water companies to act.

·                Areas within the district that would benefit from cooling would be identified, and they would undertake feasibility assessments in these areas to see whether trees could be planted to provide shade to cyclists and pedestrians in addition to improving biodiversity.

·                Assessment of council sites to ascertain the value of green infrastructure and nature-based solutions to understand the best use of council owned sites would be considered.

·                The feedback from the public consultation in March was being reviewed and would be implemented into the Sustainability Strategy.

 

Councillor Daniel Allen highlighted the brilliant work that had taken place on sustainability and that the fairer, greener statements in the Council Plan had been addressed through this work.