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1 greening actually greening actually environmental action through the local perspective david boyle

Greening Actually

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Page 1: Greening Actually

1greening actually

greening actually

environmental actionthrough the local perspective

david boyle

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acknowledgementsSome Liberal Democrat councillors and councils have led the way on theenvironment - when it wasn’t just fashion or a government target. I’d like tothank the London Boroughs of Sutton and Kingston-upon-Thames, EastleighDistrict Council and Kirklees Borough Council - their political leadership hasbeen a model for many. This book hopefully provides more.

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

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contentsForewood

introduction

one

two

three

four

five

six

seven

Amey plc

Simon Hughes MP

David Boyle

recycling

food

building

energy

transport

money

conclusion

appendix

457

1121293947556572

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Amey is one of today’s leading public services providers, managing the vitalinfrastructure and business services that practically everyone, everywhererelies on.

About AmeyIf you’ve driven on a motorway, travelled on the Tube, been into a localschool or used council services, there is a good chance you’ve benefitedfrom the work that Amey does. As one of the leading integrated publicservice providers in the country, the extensive scope of our work means thatday in, day out, we touch the lives of millions.

Our purpose is to support organisations, both public and private, that servethe public and meet the needs of the 21st Century citizen. Our approach isbased on true partnership, supporting the delivery of the highest publicpolicy objectives, in education and transport, social cohesion and communitydevelopment.

11,000 people work for Amey, who are at the heart of everything we do. Wealso bring the strength and additional capabilities of Ferrovial, one ofEurope’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 onclimate change. We see that although going green can seem hard, it issomething that must be done in order to preserve the planet for futuregenerations.

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

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

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

With best wishes,

Simon HughesLiberal Democrat Shadow Secretary of Statefor Energy and Climate Change

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introduction

“No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible untila great change takes place in the fundamental constitution oftheir modes of thought.”John Stuart Mill,Autobiography, 1873

“We are capable of shutting off the sun and stars because theypay 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 likeCornish pasties,” wrote Simon Hoggart about the Liberal Party in 1981 in theGuardian. “They have briefcases stuffed with documents, chiefly aboutcommunity politics, nuclear power and ecology. They drink real ale.”

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

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

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

Stretching even further back, the great Liberal philosopher John Stuart Millimagined a ‘stationary state’ economy which could provide for human needswithout going beyond environmental limits. For Mill and those that followedhim, green issues – though he never used the phrase himself – were issuesof liberty. Clean air, unpolluted water, were part of the basic pre-requisitesof life. Those who suffer from asthma, because of the traffic outside theirdoor, are suffering under a yoke of tyranny as potent as any prison with realbars.

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

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

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

Among the real pioneers were Lib Dem Sutton, where Liberals brought amotion 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 bythe voters the following year, and Graham Tope and his Liberal team wereset the task of putting it in practice. They were eventually awardedcertificate number 0001 in the European Union’s eco-management auditingsystem. The next seven certificates went to Lib Dem local authorities too.

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

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

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

Or Curitiba in Brazil, with its innovative currency paid out for collecting litterwhich can be used on the buses (it also has a flock of municipal sheep forkeeping 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-sufficientin energy and where the bus fleet runs entirely on biogas generated from thecity’s sewage. Even Istanbul manages to have public litter bins across thecity 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 LocalGovernment Association. “That should be our role and that is ourchallenge.”

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What makes Lib Dem local government different, asks Richard Kemp. Hisanswer is:

i) Devolution, involvement and participation. ii) Tackling long term environmental issues.

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

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

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

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

That is the political reason, but there is a more urgent reason too. Theargument known as Peak Oil – that oil will quickly become ruinouslyexpensive the moment that global oil production peaks – is not yet receivedwisdom, but it needs to be addressed. Any city or rural area that does notface up to the possibility that – climate change or no climate change – life isgoing to be organised very differently in the near future, is risking a seriouscrisis they have not prepared for.

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

David BoyleSeptember 2009

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one :: recycling

“I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see peoplethrowing 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 reallypossible, and we all do, then cast your mind back to the early 1980s, whenrecycling was a peculiar maverick idea. Rubbish was collected every weekand flung into the nearest hole in the ground and very occasionally burned.Old newspapers were occasionally collected by voluntary groups. Therewas the occasional bottle bank, a symbol of radical municipal greenery.

The idea that local authorities might one day send separate lorries out tocollect people’s bottles and – heaven knows, food scraps and plastic – wasa bizarre dream, ridiculed by the staid old Labour and Conservativeadministrations that used to run things in those days. Some of them wouldclaim 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 atax on landfill enforced by the European Union and most of the landfill sitesaround London are owned by American hedge funds, who know about a bitabout cornering scarce resources. It isn’t where we need to be, by anymeans, and change has been achingly slow over the last three decades, butit is change at least.

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

One of the councillors most involved in this has been Roger Symonds, whowent from being a teacher back in 1991 when he was first elected, to beenvironment portfolio holder, and mayor and various other positions, bothinside and outside the administration. Throughout that time, he was usingwhat influence he had to make Bath and the surrounding area the jewel inthe crown of British recycling.

In fact, the story began some years before his first election, with a smallrecycling collection service run by Avon Friends of the Earth. It was onlypiles of old newspapers in those days, sold on to the handful of emergingrecycled paper dealers. Similar packs of newspapers were appearing at thattime outside homes in many trendy corners of university towns, a soptowards the recycling dream.

But Bath was also becoming a hotbed of Liberal Democrat activity by theend of the 1980s, and recycling was high on their agenda. Bath hademployed a recycling officer in 1991. As a result of this, they were soonusing their influence to launch a council recycling service. Initially it wasvoluntary and patchy, and run by enthusiasts, but it made sense to contractthe experts to run it. It made sense to take on Avon Friends of the Earth,

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

They carried on using the Avon Friends of the Earth name, and the newenterprise also occasionally used a horse and cart – partly as a symbol ofsustainability – 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 awell-run ‘not for profit’ company. The neighbourhoods of Bath weregradually 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 controlof the council, Bath met its recycling target of 25 per cent, which they weresupposed to reach by the year 2000. Lib Dems on the council voted througha pilot programme recycling plastic in 1994, a good decade ahead of most ofthe 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 andNorth East Somerset unitary authority. Wansdyke had been dominated fordecades by the most Conservative and Labour council regimes – “the landthat time forgot,” according to one Lib Dem councillor. Not only did thisleave the new council with no overall control, but it meant that Bath wasmerging with an area that only managed to recycle two per cent of itsrubbish. So it was in some ways back to square one.

Except that the progress carried on. Avon Friends of the Earth extendedtheir coverage and the figures began to rise again. Liberal Democratinfluence meant that the resources to extend recycling were put into thebudget every year and, by the time the party was back in minority control in2003, the rate had been pushed up to 33 per cent. But there was a constantdrag on progress. The reluctance of the Labour and Conservative groups onthe new council meant that it took seven years to get to this level. Pressurefrom the Lib Dems, and from people in the old Wansdyke area demandingthe same recycling service as Bath, was what moved things along.

Recycling was by then among Roger’s responsibilities, and he had beenfollowing the story from the beginning. In 2001, he had proposed thecontroversial idea that Bath and North East Somerset should be a ‘ZeroWaste council’. As well as being a visionary shift – B&NES became the firstcouncil in the UK to adopt a Zero Waste strategy – it was a political movedesigned to head off the idea of burning rubbish instead of recycling, whichwas not at that time ruled out by either Labour or Tory groups. The Zerowaste proposal was passed by the council. Two years later and again in2008, when incineration was back on the agenda, Roger was able to arguethat Zero Waste was incompatible with burning the stuff.

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Zero Waste isn’t just strategic, of course. It is a long-term aspiration todesign out waste and to buy products which last and which can be recycled.The council has been using the slogan ‘Rethink Rubbish’ since 2003, andthe idea of minimising waste was at the heart of their philosophy.

By then, Roger was executive member in charge of the environment andused the year of Lib Dem control to force through ambitious plans to extendrecycling. There were plans to roll out plastics recycling, for cardboardrecycling, and fortnightly collection garden waste for composting locally. Butit 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 wasincredibly 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 Toddand then Gerry Curran took charge of the environment portfolio, andmanaged to implement schemes to recycle spectacles, batteries and mobilephones. The launch of a plan to recycle kitchen waste was also scheduledfor 2008. Unfortunately, with the change to a Conservative/Independentadministration after the 2007 elections, the kitchen waste plan has now beenput 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 onlydoing the cheapest option, that we would only recycle when it was moreexpensive to do otherwise, then none of this progress would havehappened. It was only in 2004 that recycling became less expensive thanlandfill. Food waste collection is very important to meeting our climatechange targets, and it would help in the city with the seagull problem too, byremoving food waste from the black bags.”

The result is that B&NES has dropped from being the top unitary authorityrecycler in the country in 2004, when Lib Dems were running the council, tobeing the fourth. Local authority marketing departments have littleinstitutional memory, and put out an excited press release hailing their fourthposition 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 andshould now have passed the magic 50 per cent mark. It still means half ofthe area’s rubbish is going into the ground, but it is an achievementnonetheless.

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

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

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

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

By 2008, ECT Recycling was organising the recycling for 16 local authoritiesacross the UK, and was then sold to a company called May Gurney, whileECT concentrates on transport. But the same principles and methodscontinue 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 explainsone of the pioneering aspects of the story, and explains why it remains sodifferent from the recycling now going on in most of the UK. When recyclingbegan to take off in Britain in the mid-1990s, and the plans for big incineratorplants were largely cancelled, the efforts of those who believe in bigsolutions shifted to selling councils the idea of big automated separatorplants – and of course the even more profitable business of providing theloans 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, therubbish is separated on the lorries as they collect it and plastic bottles, tinand 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 withplastic and cans.

The system is hugely more efficient, in the sense that it does not lose theusual 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 ithas glass in it. Bath’s recycled paper doesn’t. It makes its way into therecycled paper we use here.

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“Right from the beginning, we wanted to go for high-quality kerbsiderecycling,” says Roger. “Other local authorities like Eastleigh had gone forfortnightly alternating wheeled bin collections, and we went to see it in actionin the 1990s, but decided to stick with our kerbside separation scheme. TheLabour group, now down from 23 to five on the council, wanted to bring theoperation back in-house and to incinerate, but we managed to keep thesystem 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 Wastein the first place. This is what Roger had been working towards since hewas first elected in 1991. “I joined the environment committee from the startand this was always the area I wanted to be involved in,” he says. “Weachieved a lot when we were the biggest group and had control of thebudget. It was hard work persuading the other groups to support us, but webelieved in trying to avert climate change by implementing a Local Agenda21 Strategy. The more recycling and reduction of waste we achieve, themore we can help the survival of the planet, by reducing the waste of scarceresources.”

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

Lib Dem Liverpool’s environment portfolio holder Berni Turner has been anenvironmental champion for the city since becoming the executive memberin 2005. With inspiration drawn from projects like Bette Midler’s vegetableplots in community gardens all over New York, she was determined to createsomething like that in Liverpool too. To do that she needed some kind oflocal social enterprise partner, and she knew immediately where she shouldgo: Rotters Community Composting.

Like Bath, Lib Dems in Liverpool have pioneered contracting local socialenterprises 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’talways match. Rotters is a community organisation in Garston, Liverpool.As a social enterprise they had already started work collecting green wastefrom schools, homes and private businesses in their immediate area, withconsiderable success. Rotters had already taken one small step, but Bernirecognised 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 theEnvironment in 2009, and it was Berni’s job to push forward thissustainability agenda. Her work with Rotters has seen this social businessdevelop from a small scale community team into a business providingsupport to the long term unemployed by by creating a small scale growingproject ‘Fork to Fork’.

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

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

Eighteen months on, the project is an enormous success. The council isbuying an anaerobic digester to tackle the sheer scale of the wasted food,and the compost is ploughed back into food growing in the surroundingcommunity. That is the source of Liverpool’s local food in chapter 3. Itderives directly from resources gleaned from food thrown away from theairport and other parts of the south of Liverpool. It is an inspiring example ofusing 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 itinto 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 Rottersproject follows the enormous success of Berni’s big push to get Liverpoolrecycling. From the laggard of the big British cities, Liverpool became one ofthe most successful recyclers, leaping from just seven per cent to over 30per cent in a year.

The secret, she says, was to do it gently. The council provided blue boxeswhere everything could go in, ready to be sorted later. It was intended to besimple. “Bins are sensitive in Liverpool, ever since Derek Hatton’s Militantfailed to empty them,” says Berni. “You don’t mess with Scousers’ bins. Sowe 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 councilcolleagues constantly emphasised the link between wasted rubbish andwasted money. That was the message in leaflets, roadshows, exhibitions insupermarkets, and special days in schools. People understood the reasonsfor recycling were also practical and economic. Nobody wants their council

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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 youdo 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 witheverything we believe as Liberal Democrats, including – with the Rottersscheme – helping young mums learn how to cook fresh fruit andvegetables.”

What the Rotters project has achieved is, in some ways, the holy grail ofgreen economics. They are using their waste as a raw material forsomething else. They are completing the circle which economics ought tofacilitate, but so rarely does. We are only in the earliest stages of this, and ithas profound implications for the way things are made and for the futureshape of cities. After all, the kind of businesses that will transform what wethrow away into raw materials and products will need space; a recycling andre-use economy doesn’t really fit into New Labour high-densityneighbourhoods.

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

These are all politically risky. So is their bi-weekly bin collection. Theyachieve this not without complaint, but without political backlash, byresolutely communicating what the objective is and why. That is the bottomline: we are not recycling as an end in itself, after all. We are doing so, asone way – and not the most fundamental way either – of cutting down theamount we throw away and conserving resources. Not just because it helpsthe 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 obviouslyusing the council’s procurement budget. Buying products that are madefrom local recycled waste is the obvious way forward; there just isn’t much ofit around. It requires innovation, like using insulation made from recycledpaper (Cardiff) or running municipal vehicles on biomethane made from foodwaste (Camden). The future lies in squaring the economic circle, so that as

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

Push forward the boundaries: Small innovations don’t make muchdifference, but the lessons of Bath and Liverpool is that lots of smallinnovations can. Lib Dem councils are pushing forward the boundaries, bygetting their street sweepers to separate litter (Liverpool), or phasing outbottled water in council offices (Oldham). Liverpool now has glass andpaper bins in all their shopping areas too. The next boundary is clearlygoing to be collecting kitchen waste. This is expensive, but can have a hugepotential impact – and not just on the rats and seagulls – which is why LibDem Cardiff is pushing ahead with a £6 million processing plant for organicwaste. Fortnightly bin collections in Liverpool are off the Lib Dem politicalagenda.

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

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

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two :: food

“And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make two earsof corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of groundwhere only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind,and do more essential service to his country, than the while raceof politicians put together.”Jonathan Swift,Gulliver’s Travels

“While we have land to labour, then let us never wish to seeour citizens occupied at a workbench or twirling a distaff.”Thomas Jefferson,Notes on Virginia

the parableof the fruit tree

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The great American social critic Jane Jacobs used to execrate the planningand architectural professions in her own country for their obsession withurban motorways, out of town malls and their horror of human clutter andlife. But British planners were not perfect either, she said, because of theirobsession with large tracts of grass “so that Christopher Robin can gohoppity-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 tothe UK, when she was confronted with the peculiar reality of one of thoseubiquitous high rise estates, denying that those who live there could possiblybe poor because of the acres of municipal grass lying fallow. Other visitorsfrom Latin America have said the same: how can these people be needy ifthey don’t even use the land around them to grow food?

Mother Teresa and the others were, perhaps, unfamiliar with the tyrannicalhealth and safety regimes run by some local authorities, the purpose ofwhich seems to be to prevent any spontaneous popular activity whatever.But imagine for a moment if you were able to grow fruit and vegetablesaround those tower blocks, or on the rock hard spaces between, or even thewasted land full of litter known by the technical term ‘SLOAP’, or Space LeftOver After Planning. Not only would that provide some alternative tomonopolistic supermarkets and food deserts, but they would bring life backto 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 dayswhen 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. Themain difficulty has been that the south London borough of Lambeth is not, atthe moment, controlled by Liberal Democrats. Worse, he is a relatively newbackbench opposition councillor, elected only in March 2008, in the first by-election the party has won in Lambeth for twelve years, winning over half thevote in a previously safe Labour ward. Worse still, his fellow wardcouncillors are political opponents, one of whom he describes as ‘frosty’ andthe other he has hardly even met. How in these circumstances could hepossibly put into effect such a simple but potentially revolutionary idea?

The answer was by using what resources are available, and it happened tobe the first year that ward ‘purses’ were being promised for local projectsnominated by ward councillors. If the councillors could agree, there wouldbe 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 themaround 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 becausethe growing area they identified was being used for football, after the playingfields had been sold off by previous administrations. Steve moved on.

Luckily, there was clear interest in two other estates. He had alreadyintervened in one of them to defend one local resident who took it uponhimself to dig up an ugly litter-strewn corner of the estate to grow thingsthere. The council had noticed, told him to dig it up and Steve had beenable to persuade them to let him, at least wait until he could harvest thecrop.

Within a few weeks, the tenants associations of two estates in Camberwell –Calais Gate and Caldwell Gardens – were very keen to get started. Soonthe sections of underused scrub in Calais Gate were being transformed intoraised beds, designed in symmetrical shapes with fruit trees in between.Most of the work was done by people who lived there, but the budgetstretched to some extra work by the Brutish Trust for ConservationVolunteers. Soon there were also plum trees, apple trees, herbs spices,potatoes and a selection of other vegetables waiting for the spring. As Iwrite, Caldwell Gardens is preparing to turn their bare land into somethingsimilar. They have other plans for vines up the walls later.

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

As a Liberal Democrat, he also sees the idea of growing food locally as away that local people can make things happen for themselves. “It is anexample 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 insouth London where you meet kids who find the whole idea of growingstrawberries very weird.”

Steve was very influenced by the lorry drivers blockade in 2000, when itbecame clear that – without petrol – the nation was in danger of running outof fuel within a few days, which would have undermined the Just-In-Timedelivery systems that supply most of us with food. Growing food locally isthe potential antidote to that kind of unsustainable dependence. It inspiredhim to get involved in regeneration and to embark on his current mastersdegree, and his dissertation on sustainable regeneration. The main obstaclehe faced was dealing with council officials worrying about health and safetyand whether the raised beds would need planning permission.

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

Steve persuaded the officers that there really was no change of use, butthen they wanted detailed agreements with the tenants association andmaps of where the beds would be. “I’m a little bit cavalier about the rulessometimes,” he says now. “But I did agree that the people involved neededinsurance, which they have arranged themselves.”

The real issues – what to grow and how the produce should be divided – isgoing to be up to those doing the work. Calais Gate also plans a summerbarbecue and other communal events. Caldwell Gardens is opposite aprimary school which has its own growing areas, and it looks as though thetwo will link up. Steve now aims to get people growing vegetables in alleight estates in his ward, and he is eyeing a local car park which nobodyuses because they fear it is too dangerous. He is also looking ahead towhen Liberal Democrats take control of Lambeth again.

“I hope we can change the planning rules so that we can insist that newbuild housing units all have growing spaces,” he says. “If people choose notto use it, that’s fine, but it means there is space if they want to. It means achange in how we look at land. If people can look after these small patchesof land, then it will save the council money.”

It was during the sweltering summer of 2005 that Alexis Rowell, then a BBCjournalist, 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 Polewas 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 hewas a different person. He persuaded his partner to give up their car. Heabandoned holidays that involved flying anywhere, and he began to goforaging on Hampstead Heath for wild food at weekends.

In fact, it was the future of food, and the way that the giant multinationalswho dominate the world’s food supplies are exacerbating the greenhouseeffect, which most enraged him – from deforestation to make way for cattleranches to the trucking of vegetables across Europe and the grubbing up ofBritish 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 hisnew commitment to planet-friendly food brought him in contact with thepioneering founder of Somerset Food Links, former council leader andLiberal Democrat peer Sue Miller (see Power Actually). That led him to readLib Dem policy in detail. He was convinced, joined the party, and

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

Unlike many local politicians, who find themselves committed to greenpolitics because of the problems they encounter in their local wards, Alexisdid 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 theLiberal Democrats became the biggest party at the elections in 2006 andfound themselves, in alliance with the Conservatives, running a boroughwhich had been Labour for a generation. He was soon Camden’s eco-champion, chairing the borough’s all-party eco-task force, which soonbecame an energetic source of green ideas and challenges.

Alexis’ period as a councillor happened to coincide with the rise of theTransition Towns, the grassroots movement committed to re-organising thelocal economy to make it possible to survive the energy and climate crunch.Beginning in Kinsale in Ireland, there are now over 170 Transition Townsaround the world, many of them Liberal Democrat, including Lewes, Bristol,Dorchester, Cambridge and York. Transition Town thinking has fed into thepracticalities promoted by Alexis’ eco-task force.

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

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

Urban salad starter kits are being distributed and Alexis has been aroundsome of his local council estates – again like Steve Bradley in Lambeth –banging on doors, glancing at what he calls the ‘green concrete’, thecombination of impenetrable abandoned soil and signs warning about theconsequences of playing ball games. Some fruit trees are now in, andTransition Belsize are now increasing the scale of the local allotments.People are increasingly involved, and now the local Budgens says it will selllocal produce.

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Alexis has no garden himself, like so many people in Camden, but he hasthree balconies and this – plus his regular visits to Hampstead Heath –produces between five and ten per cent of the vegetables he needs. Noteveryone can forage in Hampstead Heath, and it would be disastrous if theydid, but what this approach emphasises is that there are assets around –undervalued patches of land, even fire escapes – where food can be grownor provided. There is also a powerful symbolic element to growing food incities, a kind of political antidote to Tesco culture.

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

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

But the Cuban experience demonstrates some unexpected knock-on effectsof this. The proportion of physically active adults more than doubled andobesity halved. Between 1997 and 2002, deaths from diabetes fell by half,coronary heart disease by 35 per cent, strokes and all other causes byaround 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 aboutproviding healthy local food to children, or old people in care, and aboutbuilding an equally healthy small business sector, employing local people,building local skills and trading with each other – the basis of local economicindependence.

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

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

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vegetable seeds than flower seeds. The waiting lists for allotments arehuge: 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. Gardeningand food growing is on almost every television channel.

There is also new evidence that gardening is enormously beneficial topeople’s well-being. Even green surroundings has a proven effect onpeople’s health and especially their mental health, according new researchin the Netherlands. It also has an impact on antisocial behaviour. “It is nocoincidence that gardening has such an impact on mental health,” saysAlexis Rowell. “In the end, this is about making people happier.”

That is certainly the way other Lib Dem councillors see it. Another of thoseinspired by the achievements in Cuba, producing food from every urbannook and cranny, is Liverpool’s Berni Turner. It reminded her of theRestoration Project in New York City, the scheme founded by the comedianBette Midler to turn small derelict sites across the city into gardensproducing food and vegetables.

Berni’s involvement with the Rotters composting scheme has led to a newproject, launched in 2009, called Fork to Fork – her own idea – which usesthe compost from the food waste to grow food. It is part of a wider push inLib Dem Liverpool to find small plots of land where food can be grown. Oneof the reasons local authorities find it so hard to use some of their collectedrecycled materials is that councils tend to operate in silos. But when theyare involved in food growing, for example, it is suddenly obvious whatwasted food can be used for.

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

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

Once again, this is about putting forgotten assets to use. “Local authoritiesare big landowners,” says Berni. “They have a lot of bits of land they can’tdo anything with. They might not have the capacity to grow things therethemselves, but if you give people some of that land, you can say ‘there youare – 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 thetime 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 DemLiverpool is doing. The systems that make our food arrangements sounsustainable are too entrenched for that. But there are things that can bedone immediately, with the help of local people, even if it is just greening themost concrete blighted neighbourhoods. But food is part of the new zeitgeistand the idea of growing it, and bypassing the supermarkets, seems – just atthe moment – to thrill people in every class and condition.

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

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

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

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

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three :: building

“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, domore 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 ofthings 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 amatter of sheer willpower in the face of administrative inertia, achieved bythe intelligent wielding of brute fact. Perhaps more accurately, it is a mixtureof determination, interpersonal skills and luck.

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

What Christian did have in his favour was supportive senior officials, and abrand new Liberal Democrat administration in York, elected in 2003. Healso had a strong sense of how it might be possible. He is a film and TVcomposer 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 justcreate the shift he wanted.

When he was first elected, that same year – he agreed to stand on conditionhe would never have to wear a suit and tie – he began to look around for asustainable project where he might have some impact, and he quicklyrealised 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 whatto do, and how to make new building sustainable, but not very good atactually putting it into practice themselves,” he says. “They print millions ofpieces of paper castigating people for not being green, when they are notactually doing it. I decided that my first project would be to make sure thenext council building to go out would be an exemplar of sustainableconstruction. Then when councillors and planning officers are being told bybusinesses that they can’t build more sustainably because it is tooexpensive, 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 newmaintenance depot in the Foss Islands Road area, which would houseeverything from the council’s stonemasons to its road repair teams. He alsofound that nothing was quite as straightforward as it seems: the plans hadalready been signed off. Describing himself as a ‘hapless innocent’, he wentto see the chief planning officer and told her what he wanted. “I was given awithering look and told that it would probably be best if I chose a project thatwas six years away from being built.”

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

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

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

But funding is never quite straightforward. There turned out to be asustainability officer at the regional development agency, but it soon becameclear 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 thesustainability officer’s secretary. After three months, he warned thesecretary 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 todiscover that – despite the difficulty getting through, or perhaps because of it– theirs was only the second programme in the region to apply for fundingthat year. Within an hour, they had raised a promise of £650,000, if theycould prove that this was a practical project and not some vanity project thatwould never represent value for money. The funding allowed Christian to goahead and find someone to design a sustainable building.

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

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

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

Residents have consistently commented that they didn’t realise whatchanges needed to be made to their own homes to save energy. Theevidence is that the decision of councillors has significantly reduced theenergy 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 aresult of the insulation - over 70,000 carbon monoxide detectors have beenfitted, 10,000 people given debt and benefits advice and 14,000 fire safetychecks have been carried out.

Warm Zone now employs 80 people and the overall economic benefit to thearea is about £50 million.

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The Kirklees scheme has been going for nearly three years, and the impactis clearly huge. By the end of January 2009, Warm Zone had knocked on111,000 doors in the Huddersfield and Dewsbury areas, and carried out over77,000 assessments and - thanks to the time lag involved - had insulatednearly 30,000 homes.

As a result, the average saving on heat for every household was £200 ayear, 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 ourpublic sector partners and some of the larger private sector employers in theborough too.“

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

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

Councillors (often responsible for the collection service) often have notvisited the centre they commission to handle their waste and yet are stunnedwhen they see the associated piles - this being one week in one localauthority.

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

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

The idea to start with was to take food waste from Liverpool Airport andother parts of south of Liverpool to compost it elsewhere. Eighteen monthson the project is an enormous success. The council is buying an anaerobicdigester to tackle the sheer scale of the wasted food and the and thecompost 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 fewcouncillors have actually been out with the trucks undertaking the collections- understanding what was involved was a key part of achieving the stepchange in Liverpool’s record.

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

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Former Mayor of Richmond upon Thames Cllr Bill Treble with the oldDaimler formerly owned by the Queen Mother, traded in for a moreenvironmentally friendly Prius. Richmond have consistently led the way oninitiatives that protect the local environment.

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 CllrStephen Knight (Deputy Leader)

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

Local food growing has been a major component of the drive in Belsize andTransition Belsize has been a key driver in getting things to happen. Thecampaign has been actively supported by the ward councillors and thepotential for food growing on estates is still vast.

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

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

You can contact Simon and his team on [email protected]

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Christian hesitated for an hour or so, nervous about whether he ought reallyto do so, but then tracked down the guru, called him up and asked himdirectly what kind of building would be possible – and eventually asked himto act as a consultant on the project. At this point the straw plan was savedagain 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 andanother three months would take him right up to the wire. But it wasenough, and the ecoDepot opened just before Christmas 2006, just sixmonths 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 anypoint 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 solarpanels or wind turbines with me in order to boil hot water for my coffeewhenever I need it, instead of taking a thermos flask, doesn’t make me anenvironmental green guru – it makes me an idiot. The straw walls of theecoDepot, 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 theirtrucks. On the coldest days of the year, the building only needs its heatingon 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 insistedthat it should be called an ecoDepot from the beginning, which had a ring toit. It is, he says, part of the practical politics of going green. He describesvisiting a sustainable housing development recently with the scrutinycommittee he was on. “The council issued a press release under theheading 'Scrutiny Board visits sustainable housing development' and feltaggrieved when, after a week, no local media had taken up the story,” hesays. “I changed the title to 'Electricity bills - £1 per week' and the localpress gave the story a two-page spread the next day. I’m convinced that, ifyou don’t communicate what you’re doing, you might as well not do anythingat all.”

Milton Keynes is one of those places which really welcomes plans for newhousing developments. The last new town to be designated, back in 1967,Milton Keynes has been both a recurring joke (the concrete cows), anarchitectural theme park (the first energy saving homes exhibition was heldthere) and a huge economic success story. Its rate of business growth ishigher than the highest UK region, and it is set to double in size again – tomake 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

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

Douglas happened also to be married to the council leader, which meantthat a word in the ear of the leadership was usually possible, but he was alsothe cabinet member responsible for the environment for seven years. Whenthey took control of the new town, largely on a green platform, tackling thesustainability of new homes was near the top of their agenda. “We wanted apolicy requirement of zero carbon construction,” says Douglas. “We wantedthem to be low energy and to use less water. We were determined to forcethrough carbon neutrality.”

The idea that no new home would add to the total carbon emissions ofMilton Keynes was enormously ambitious. It was also hardly surprising thatsome of the biggest volume housebuilders regarded the idea with horror.Milton Keynes is one of the jewels in their crowns, and this looked like aslippery slope.

Even so, carbon neutrality was inserted in the new local plan, which wasnegotiated during 2004 and 2005 with little or no opposition from the otherparties. Douglas and his team of officers were then responsible for takingthe local plan through the public inquiry that these things demand. Rightuntil the end, the housebuilders were expected to appear to challenge theplan. Then they were rumoured to be preparing to take it to court underjudicial 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 Councilin London, which has similar sustainable building policies, known as the‘Merton Rule’. Largely because it is in London, Merton has managed togather the lion’s share of publicity – Douglas’ carbon-neutrality regulationsare not known as the ‘Milton Keynes Rule’, though they go further thanMerton’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 acouncil area, but it was clear right from the start that there would have to beexceptions. What if the site was unsuitable for generating renewable energy– no wind or sun – what if it was not financially viable or some other reasonwhy carbon neutrality would be impossible? What then? Here Douglas wasbeginning to outline something along the lines of another of the innovationsdeveloped 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’sCommunity Land Act in 1975, developers have to haggle with councillorsabout what kind of community facilities they are going to offer, or how manyaffordable homes, as set out in what is known as Section 106 of the Townand Country Planning Act. It is an exhausting process and dispiritingsometimes, for both sides, more like legalised bribery than planning.

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

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

“I think this helped give us a closer working relationship with the localdevelopers,” says Douglas. “They bought into what were doing.” It meantthey also responded to policy D5, which sets out what the council expectsfrom sustainable energy development, which helps builders plan aheadwithout all the uncertainty of a political scrap about wind turbines at the lastmoment.

The rules about carbon neutrality, and the local carbon offset fund togetherhave been enormously successful. Council officers reckon that it will saveup to 12,000 tonnes of carbon emissions every year. Some of the newdevelopments in Milton Keynes to be covered by the new guidelines include:

i) Nampak: a site for 280 eco-friendly homes many built withsolar panels.

ii) Octel: 45 industrial units with wind turbines on their roof. iii) Knowlhill: warehouse and offices with ground source

heating.

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

The main problem came from the government, which began by encouraginglocal authorities to follow the lead of Milton Keynes, but then seemed tochange their mind. In 2007, the housebuilders persuaded Whitehall thatdifferent construction rules in different parts of the country were inhibitingtheir ability to build. Suddenly, one of the best building policies in thecountry looked in doubt.

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

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

Douglas McCall had been interested in green issues for years before he waselected to represent Newport Pagnell South 13 years ago. When he joinedthe cabinet in 2002, he had recently started a job as an IT project managerin Milton Keynes. Working locally left him with time to get to grips with theenvironment of Milton Keynes in a serious way. Even before that, he hadbeen involved in Local Agenda 21 in the days after the ground-breakingEarth Summit in 1992, and campaigned for the council to buy fair tradeproducts, which he eventually introduced when he became a cabinetmember.

His main effort at the start went into increasing recycling, and he managed totreble the rate locally in six years. This year (2009), they will be collectingkitchen waste for the first time. There has been no meaningful opposition tothis, or the stringent policy of carbon-neutrality, but Douglas emphasises theimportance of thinking politically about the message. That is why they havelinked 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 ishappening,” he says. “We have to show that doing a bit to save the planetalso makes economic sense. That’s why we are doing a carbon audit of allour buildings, changing the boilers, making sure computers are switched offwhen people go home at night. We have reduced the energy consumptionof the council – and now we are doing the same in the schools. It is aboutinvesting 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 furtherunder Carbon Manager Martin Davies. Watch this space.

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

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of technology and conservation knowhow. They are not about usingregulation to make everything dull and the same – these are not lowestcommon denominator targets – but about setting out visions and systemsthat encourage people to innovate, whether they are council officers,architects or builders.

The Milton Keynes Rule and the ecoDepot are visible symbols of LiberalDemocrat green policy in action. You only have to look at them to knowthings are changing. As such, they are major generators of changethemselves.

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

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

If it is too inclusive, it risks building communities that look inwards againstthe outside world. If it is too exclusive, it leads to fractured neighbourhoodsthat are more dependent on the world outside. That is one reason whyLiberal Democrats are increasingly involved in community land trusts(CLTs), a proven American system of tenure controlled by those who livethere, managing their own land and assets themselves. CLTs are one wayof providing affordable housing, by separating the ownership of the buildingsfrom the community ownership of the land underneath them. OxfordshireCommunity Land Trusts is chaired by former Lib Dem councillor Jock Coats.Lib Dem Cornwall has been persuaded to create a revolving loan fund tokick start CLT projects, though this has involved Conservative councillors asmuch as Liberal Democrat ones – one area where the search for innovationamong Conservatives has occasionally stolen a march on LiberalDemocrats.

The lessons of these ideas is that – when you take a step in the dark and itdoesn’t work, you can learn from it. When you take a step in the dark and itworks after all, then others will follow your lead. Other lessons and greenpossibilities for building include the following:

Make sure you communicate: Christian Vassie’s experience with theecoDepot and other projects is that the right phrase, and the right level of

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

Be innovative about ownership: People want to own their own homes, andit underpins their sense of freedom and responsibility when they do so. Butin a climate where the government regards endlessly rising house prices astheir touchstone of economic success, then other ideas are needed to makeit possible, whether it is using the council’s financial resources to help withlending, or separating the ownership of the buildings from the landunderneath – and experimenting with new kinds of community trusts, as theyhave so successfully in the USA.

Don’t be afraid to set standards: The Milton Keynes rule for zero-carbonhomes is a perfect example of smart regulation that is able to kick-start realinnovation by the house-builders. It also has a knock on effect on thereputation of the town. It means that Milton Keynes will now host some ofthe best examples of sustainable housing in the UK. The world’s expertsand green planners will beat a path there, and so will those who want to livein green homes, which – in an era of galloping energy prices – is going to bemany more of us. The same applies to the experience of Uttlesford in Essexunder Lib Dem rule about building extensions. Planning permissiondepends on a plan to make sure the carbon emissions of the whole housedo not rise, which is a way to encourage energy-saving innovation in the restof the house. It also applies to Lib Dem Cardiff’s target of a 60 per centcarbon reduction in emissions from council buildings and municipal waste by2018. And to Camden’s insistence that all new developments have a plan tore-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 agreat degree, many of them almost entirely conquerable byhuman 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 LiberalDemocrat councillor John Smithson six years ago when he happened to seethe statistics for deaths from hypothermia among the old. Nor is it just aYorkshire problem: there are about 30,000 deaths from cold across the UKevery year, the vast majority of them older people in their own homes, andthe Yorkshire figures were bad in 2003. “The problem is that older peopleespecially are frightened to put their central heating on for more than a fewminutes 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 theLib Dems took control of Kirklees Council around the same time, John beganto look around for some way in which they could tackle fuel poverty.

The green agenda has made energy conservation mainstream, especiallyafter the successful private members bill steered through Parliament by thethen Lib Dem MP for Christchurch, Diana Maddock. But it has only beensince her Home Energy Conservation Act 1995 gave extra responsibilities tolocal authorities that they have found much of a role in heating. That kind ofambition had disappeared with the days of Joseph Chamberlain, certainlythe days of Margaret Thatcher.

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

These days, of course, there are a whole range of government approvedand funded schemes to retrofit roof or cavity wall insulation into homes, butthey are often frustrating systems constrained by too many governmenttargets. The insulation is often sold door to door, but it often turns out youdon’t qualify because you are just outside the right boundary or aren’treceiving benefits, or don’t have the right kind of house, or already have aninch of minimal insulation already. Maybe the people who really need it livein private housing, as most older people do, and are not eligible for thecouncil scheme. To avoid all those pitfalls, and to go for something withmuch more chance of making real change happen, the team tracked downan 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 councilleader Kath Pinnock, a former history teacher who has represented the wardaround the junction 26 of the M62 now for 22 years. “He came backenthused and he enthused the rest of us.”

That was how Kirklees committed itself, with some modifications, to a projectthat would systematically go through the borough and insulate all thehouses, big, small, public, private, rich and poor. There would be no fiddlingabout with application forms and eligibility criteria, no irritating estimates of

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

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

It also meant that nobody would be turned away because they couldn’tafford £70. Then the council encouraged the Fire Service to get involved.They were keen to do so following the tragic death in Huddersfield of ayoung boy from carbon monoxide poisoning. That in turn meant that theycould 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 theywere eligible for.

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

The scheme has now been going for nearly three years, and the impact isclearly huge. By the end of January 2009, Warm Zone had knocked on111,000 doors in the Huddersfield and Dewsbury areas, and carried out over77,000 assessments and – thanks to the time lag involved – had insulatednearly 30,000 homes. As a result, the average saving on heat for everyhousehold was £200 a year, potentially enormous for anyone on the statepension.

The economic benefits are wider than that. Warm Zone now employs 80people and the overall economic benefit to the area is about £50 million.Other knock on benefits have been massive too. Over 70,000 carbonmonoxide detectors have been fitted. Over 10,000 people have been givenbenefits or debt advice during the visit. As many as 14,000 fire safetychecks have been carried out. By the end of this year, Kirklees will be agood deal warmer in the cold weather, and about 50,000 tonnes of carbonwill 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 itis also distinctively Liberal Democrat.

Nobody could accuse of John Smithson of only being interested in runningthe council better. As one of the pioneers of community politics, and aformer editor of the pioneering Radical Bulletin in the 1960s and 70s, he wasfascinated 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 offbecause we were interested in fuel poverty, but of course it not only savesmoney but it also means a great reduction carbon impact. It was one of thereally good things we did, and when the Tories took over they left it as itwas.”

The Tories no longer run the council and Kath Pinnock’s Lib Dems have fora 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 alsocutting carbon. This is a Liberal future for councils, taking practical action tohelp people, no matter what kind of housing tenure they have. I think it isprobably the best thing we have ever done.”

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

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

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

So here was Terry’s conundrum – and it was one which has been shared bygreen-minded people for some time. Would it be possible to re-inventcommunal heating schemes that were much more efficient? There was atleast the potential for supplying housing estates together, and by generatingenergy off the grid so that you could use the waste heat as well as theelectricity.

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Luckily, there is a technology which has been developed for decades whichmakes this possible, and which massively increases its efficiency not just bygenerating electricity but using the by-product heat as well. It is known asCombined Heat and Power or CHP. Building a huge new power station inthe middle of the city is not really practical, but CHP comes in all sizes. Thiswas a case for mini-CHP.

“The old communal heating schemes gave poor value for money and nopersonal control,” said Terry. “But we wanted to look at how to turncommunal heating into something more sustainable and efficient.”

An early move was to get a £3m grant from the Mayor of London to test outthe idea, but there was an immediate problem. The Conservative legislation30 years ago which forced councils to sell council houses to their tenantshad produced a peculiar anomaly in some of our biggest estates. InIslington, 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 blockthem if they refused to pay a contribution towards it? Would it be illegal ifthey were given it for free?

With 13,000 leaseholders out of 36,000 flats, this last issue was a massivepotential stumbling block. What Terry and his team did was to get the bestlegal advice on this subject which clearly showed that the council could goahead without incurring charges for leaseholders. As a result, CHP plantslinked 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 isalso at the heart of the regeneration of the Packington Estate, and it will alsogenerate electricity to power the shops, community facilities, youth centreand workshop, and use the waste heat to heat the homes.

Looking at energy in this way continues to build on the pioneering work byWoking Borough Council in Surrey, which began with a motion by a Lib Demcouncillor for an environmental audit. The council was then run by a minorityadministration led by the Conservatives, but the parties worked together,thanks partly to the innovative leadership of one council officer who becamethe standard-bearer for local authority involvement in energy, Allan Jones.Lib Dem and Tory councillors gave him the space to make Woking a worldleader in electricity generation without using the national grid (see Power,Actually).

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

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

As a former housing and regeneration professional, Terry Stacy is excitedabout the possibilities in Islington of generating your own green energy. Hevisited Woking in 2002 to see what was being done there, and has beenlooking at how to roll out ambitious projects in Islington ever since. Islingtonis 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 isincreasingly important to the administration. There are wind turbines oncouncil buildings to power the electric fleet, communal lighting and lifts.There are solar panels on churches and schools. They are one of theleading councils which are installing energy generation into social housing.

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

Fresh from a referendum which voted against the expansion of nuclearenergy two decades ago, it was Sweden where cities found themselvessuddenly in the energy front line. The energy had to come from somewhereand, in the end, they were best placed to deliver it. As a result, cities likeVaxjo 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 aheadthan their colleagues in the UK.

But it has often been Lib Dem councils which have been in the lead. LibDem Aberdeen set up a not-for-profit company to develop CHP schemes,Southampton linked up with a French energy utility to run district heatingsystems to 40 buildings, Eastleigh and Kirklees are leading the way onphotovoltaic cells on schools, homes and civic buildings. Lib Dem Bristoldeveloped a wind farm at Avonmouth Docks. Lib Dem Cambridge and NorthNorfolk have led the way on saving energy in their housing stock. Othershave pioneered low energy homes (like Newcastle or Sutton’s Bedzed), orthey have pioneered new technology that gives them instant real-timeinformation about where the energy is going in their buildings, as Lib DemLiverpool has. Knowledge is power, after all.

Other lessons include:

Don’t forget the little things: Even replacing old bulbs with modern energysaving ones will make a difference: new bulbs in Lib Dem Camden’sBloomsbury Square Car Park alone will save £24,000 and 100 tonnes of

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

Make way for quag-generation: It makes environmental and economicsense 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 by-product of hydrogen fuel cells is water. In the future, local authorities willfind themselves – not just in the energy business – but in the cooling andwater business too. They will do so because these are potential assetswhich need to be used for the benefit of the people they represent, andwhen Lib Dem Sutton is pioneering the use of grey water in their parks – andwhen Eastleigh’s leisure centre is also providing hot water for the CivicCentre next door – you know something is going on.

Start a fund: Energy service companies (or ESCOs) were invented inEastern Europe as a way that power companies could invest in energy-saving, in such a way that the savings could be shared out. That was whatWoking pioneered in the UK, and the idea has now spread to London. Butall you really need is a revolving loan fund, like the £250,000 launched byLib Dem Camden, which is used to test out green ideas and cut the amountof energy the council uses in its buildings, and pays the savings back to thefund. Islington’s £3m climate change fund has meant that they can alsoaccess £1.1m in match funding from central government programmes.

Build local capacity: Devon has been trying to build the energy sector inthe county under the Lib Dems, aware that this will have enormous knock-oneffects on the local environment. There are now more than 60 small andmedium-sized businesses in the energy sector in Devon. Their DevonRenewable Energy Skills and Training Project has helped achieve this, andthey reckon there are 154 new renewable energy generators in placebecause of the project – mainly solar, but with wind, hydro, wood fuel andphotovoltaic cells coming up behind. They also replaced the boiler atCounty Hall in 2009 with one which uses sustainable woodchip fuel suppliedfrom just ten miles away, and which cuts carbon emissions by 60 per centand 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 turbinesand solar panels in 300 homes, both as a way of tackling emissions andcutting fuel poverty, in one ‘eco neighbourhood’, where people can generatetheir own power and sell any surplus onto the national grid. The project hasbeen paid for by the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund. In Liverpool, this hasmeant buying all the electricity for street lights from renewable sources andputting in solar panels, wind turbines and rain water capture for toilets in the

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

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five :: transport

“The equal right of all men to the use of land is as clear as theirequal right to breathe the air – it is a right proclaimed by the factof their existence. For we cannot suppose that some men havea 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 thebeginning.”The Travel Plan of Fair Oak Infant School,Eastleigh

the equal right to breathe

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

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

Richmond is one of those few places in the country to have enjoyed LiberalDemocrat administration for getting on for a generation. But the party lostpower to the Conservatives in 2002 and spent the next four years re-thinkingeverything. So when they were swept back to power in May 2006, the newteam of controlling councillors had four key objectives: prioritising thesecondary schools, helping young people, sorting out the council’s financesand – top of the list – putting the environment at the centre. The idea ofcharging against pollution was bold and exciting, and it might make a realdifference.

“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 plasticbottles and to employ an energy manager – though, in the event, thatbecame a whole sustainability team.”

These ideas were the headline green objectives when Serge and hisenvironment portfolio holder Martin Ellengorn met a team of officers met inSerge’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 aboutchanges 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. Thisbook is full of bright sparks that drag on for years before they are fullyimplemented. But in this case, the whole business of putting the new greenidea into practice took just five months.

It is hard enough with any new policy to go through all the necessaryconsultation, even for projects which have been tried elsewhere. But in thiscase, there were a range of added difficulties. There were doubts aboutwhether it was legal, and a whole range of other administrative questions

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

Even without these complications, nothing could have prepared Serge andhis team for the media storm that would overwhelm them when theyannounced the idea. Serge was on the Today programme and, from thatmoment, he and two colleagues were doing continuous media interviews forthe rest of the day, to news outlets all over the world. He had calls early inthe 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 newresidential parking charges had been broadcast around New Zealand andCanada. It was reported in no less than 130 different newspapers in theUSA.

Anyone involved in climate change campaigning will tell you that, once astory like this circulates in the American media, there is an avalanche ofoutraged emails as soon as Eastern Standard Time reaches dawn, and theclimate change deniers reach for their keyboards. There was also a greatdeal of opposition in the UK, especially from organisations like the AA andother car-owner organisations. A few local people were also extremelyangry, and vented this during a meeting of the overview and scrutinycommittee later in the process.

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

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

Serge Lourie is an accountant by profession, and was originally a member ofthe Labour Party. In fact, on the second day of his accountancy exams in1971, he was elected as Labour councillor in Westminster. By the time hehad joined the Liberal Democrats, many years later, his interest in housingand insulation – which developed during his years on the Greater LondonCouncil – had blossomed into an enthusiasm for renewable energy.

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

Richmond’s energy team are now putting this enthusiasm into concrete form.There are already photovoltaic cells generating electricity on the roof of the

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Civic Centre, and the next project is to investigate a combined heat andpower plant, burning wood pellets from the council’s woodlands, to coverhalf of the council’s electricity needs. Meanwhile the weekly recycling rate isnow 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 whatwas possible, which crystallised the great frustration people have about thevast four-wheel drive vehicles, like armoured cars, that move aroundLondon’s narrow streets.

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

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

The most obvious success of the policy has been that, almost from themoment it was in place, it stopped being controversial. Even so, the surveysabout whether it was really changing behaviour remain ambiguous. Peopleare 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 theubiquitous 4x4s, it isn’t clear why and how much Richmond’s parkingcharges are having an effect. What the surveys do reveal is that people nowknow what pollution bracket their car comes in, and that is the beginning ofawareness.

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 behumoured, the motions must be gone through, but we all know it won’tactually 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 orany of our other modern addictions. The business of persuading parents notto drive their children to school falls into that category too. It all seems veryworthy, and the money is available so it has to be done, but let’s not pretendit isn’t a little bit hopeless. That’s what they say, but in Liberal DemocratEastleigh, at least, it hasn’t been hopeless at all. Far from it.

What makes Eastleigh’s determined five-year campaign to persuade parentsto give up their Land Cruisers for the school run so extraordinary is not so

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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 ofstate school pupils now shun the car when it comes to travelling to school,which is well above the UK average and above surrounding Hampshire aswell.

Former teacher David Airey, the cabinet member for transport andstreetscene, has led the project right from the beginning. So all-embracinghas the whole project been that he can’t remember when he first determinedto do something about the fumes and congestion that are the inevitableresult of a motorised school run. He was certainly involved in the idea whenhe was teaching in a junior school in Gosport. But the impact of traffic in hisown 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 owntravel pan, complete with graphs, cartoons, facts and practicalities. Theplans are colourful and include pictures by the children as well as maps.Some of the facts are revealing too: the Toynbee School Travel Plan revealsthat, when they began, 70 per cent of all those travelling to school by carhad 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 oranother in every school. It involves recruiting enthusiastic teachers andgovernors onto a steering group for each school. It means assemblies andsurveys run by pupils, parents, teachers and other staff. It involves gettingthe 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 highwaysauthority. But long before that, it is usually apparent that the children at leastare responding with imagination. The reports start coming back from theteachers. The surveys come back to be added up, the ideas start comingout.

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

What makes Eastleigh’s approach so successful, says David, is that it isflexible. Car-sharing might suit some schools, but for others it is a matter oforganising walking buses. David tells the story about the Netley AbbeyJunior School, in his own ward, with the local mayor giving out prizes in theirhall, 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

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

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

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

Then you need some quick wins. There are banners in the car parks and ‘IPark and Stride’ badges. But there has to be something obviously changingthat people can see before they will respond. “We’ve found that directservices are very co-operative about it,” says David. “If we say it’s a walkingroute 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 hasto happen fast. If the school entrance is hidden by trees and branches, thenpeople drive faster past it because they don’t realise it’s a school – thenagain, you need to do something quickly. In Hamble, children designed newbollards to show where the school was. “We insisted that this was donequickly, and because we wanted it to be seen by the parents that the schooltravel plan was delivering something quickly,” says David. “That type ofapproach has made the project successful.”

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

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

There is no doubt that transport can be the graveyard of green ambitions. IfRichmond had misjudged their policy on gas guzzlers, the whole story mighthave been very different. There are certainly enough corporate

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communicators with an agenda to undermine any such initiative. Theirsuccess with a ground-breaking charging policy, and Eastleigh’s successwith 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 energyand verve, and rode the wave of publicity that hit them rather than drowningunder it. They explained the purpose: not just climate change but whypeople need clean air, not just for themselves but for their asthmaticchildren. At the other end of the scale, David Airey and his team in Eastleighcommunicate to narrow audiences of the pupils, staff and parents ofindividual schools, but they convince them that the objective is right and –most important – that something will happen, and that people can make adifference.

Some of the other lessons derive from this:

Make a difference fast: If there is public cynicism about the politicalprocess, that nothing ever changes, then that is even stronger when itcomes to transport projects. Traffic expands to fill the roads space available,as we now know. Decades of road ‘improvements’ have only served toincrease the amount of traffic. What the team at Eastleigh knew was thatenthusiasm for school travel plans would only continue if people could see adifference very quickly.

Back the pedestrians: Whatever the tabloids might tell you, there are morejourneys by foot than there are using any other form of transport. Walkingmatters, and it particularly matters for the local economy. If people findwalking dirty and dangerous, then they will stop using the local shops. Thatis why Lib Dem Islington is creating new pedestrian areas by removing anunsightly roundabout at Highbury Corner and working towards a newpedestrian area at the Angel. It is why Lib Dem Cardiff is doing the same intheir city centre. It is why Lib Dem Portsmouth has introduced a 20 mph limiton their residential roads, which has succeeding in reducing speeds byabout 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 andprovided cycles all over the city centre, though London has shown signs ofplanning to. Certainly no UK city has come anywhere near the kind of familycycle use that you find in the Dutch or Scandinavian cities. But Lib Demcouncils are beginning to see their role as encouraging cycling. Islingtonhas been restoring two-way cycle access in all those places where complextraffic management schemes have undermined it. They have identifiedabout 50 places across the borough where there are barriers to cycling thatcould be removed.

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Back the car sharers: The great benefit of car sharing is that it meanspeople don’t have to own their own cars. It cuts traffic, and thereforepollution and carbon emissions, but it also provides a way that poorerhouseholds can get access to a car if they need to. Lib Dem Islington’s CarClub now has 100 shared vehicles on the road and they are now aiming for500. It also means they have some means of encouraging council staff togive 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 DemSouth Somerset led the way by converting their vehicles, and thepossibilities are now endless. Electricity, LPG, oxygen, methane, hydrogenhave all been tried by one local authority or other. Probably the only realoption now is to end the experiments and review the whole vehicle fleet, asLib Dem Oldham is now doing. But it still means giving a lead by testing outthe latest technology, like the stop-start mechanism in the much-publicisedPrius, 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 travelplan for staff (Sutton).

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six :: money

“Progress is the law of the world; and Liberalism is theexpression of this law in politics.”Joseph Chamberlain,Why I am a Liberal, 1885

“Do anything, however small. Save one out of a hundredshops.  Save one croft out of a hundred crofts.  Keep one dooropen 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

history doesteach economics

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

The mayor and future Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, son of the greatLiberal pioneer of city government Joseph Chamberlain, had chosen thatsummer to steer a local act of parliament through Westminster and to launchwhat became the Birmingham Municipal Bank.

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

The Birmingham Municipal Bank opened at the end of September, afterfurious 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 thecity and had become a trusted and influential player in the life ofBirmingham. Then it was swallowed up by the Trustee Savings Bank, whichin turn was swallowed by Lloyds Bank, which in turn lives on in the belly ofthe vast and government-owned Lloyd’s Group. Its branches have longgone and, apart from lingering on in the memories of a few of Birmingham’solder inhabitants, it has been forgotten.

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

The tale of the Birmingham Municipal Bank had excited him since beingshown a battered old savings book, still lovingly kept by one of his localvoters. He had formed the ambition to revive it as part of his campaign forproper banking services some years ago. Birmingham is still a bankinginnovator, after all. The Aston Reinvestment Trust is, even now, bucking thetrend 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 LiberalDemocrat conference, the collapse of the investment bank LehmannBrothers in the New York ushered in a few terrifying weeks when it becameclear than many of the biggest banks in the world were broke.

Financial crises tend to happen in October, for no obvious reason, and thisone was no exception. This one, perhaps even more than any other, wasalso demonstrably self-inflicted. Huge bonuses and a culture of speculationhad removed the banking elite even further from the real world, and the factthat so few of them understood the implications of the obscure financialderivatives they were buying and selling made the situation even moreprecarious.

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

One year on, it was clear that the business of starting a new bank was nosimple matter. The council set up a scrutiny panel, the council’s chiefofficers advised against the idea, and huge sums were quoted to them bybanking experts of £200 million for a banking licence.

There is a less expensive way. Conservative-controlled Essex CountyCouncil 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 byBanco Santander. In the same way, Post Office financial products areactually managed by the Bank of Ireland.

But simply white labelling a new bank wasn’t what Michael wanted. “I wantsomething that doesn’t have the sharp practice behind it of the bankingindustry,” he says. “The Birmingham Municipal Bank encouraged thrift.These days when there are so many predatory systems encouraged by thebanking industry, I wanted to do something separate from the establishedbanks. The problem is that banks have abandoned their principles and Ibelieve there would be substantial support in the general population for anew Birmingham bank.”

Michael was discovering just how much the established banking industry isbuttressed by the high costs of entry. This is one of the main reasons localbusiness in the UK is in such a weaker position than their American orGerman competitors, and potential competitors. There are only 170branches per million people in the UK, compared to 520 in Germany and960 in France.

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The question is what local government can do to help. The argumentcontinues in Birmingham, as it does in other places. But Michael isincreasingly aware of the problem, now that a small oligopoly of large andfrightened banks – now mainly in government ownership – have beenwithdrawing from the local economy. Of 12 new projects in his ward, 11 ofthem have had their finance removed by their lenders. Meanwhile, his wifewas 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 tothe collapse of local banking continues in Birmingham and elsewhere. Butthe argument is far from clear-cut. Many Lib Dem councils have invested incredit unions, but these remain small and under-capitalised. There are onlya handful of community development financial institutions like the AstonReinvestment Trust in the UK. These are difficult questions. What Lib Demcouncils 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 savingsand somewhere to put their money which isn’t a dodgy Icelandic bank. Onlya quarter of a century ago, many local authorities were still putting theirmoney into local mortgages instead. Liberal Democrat Portsmouth is oneplace which is looking more closely at re-launching the idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A van drew up outside the town hall in Liberal Democrat Stockport in May2009, bearing the slogan ‘Greyland: Cleaning Chemical Manufacturers’ onthe side. Greyland’s managing director Richard Dyson leapt from the caband carried in the first box of sustainable cleaning materials through thedoor. It was the first delivery from a new contract that ticked all the boxes forthe council’s sustainable procurement policy. Greyland’s cleaners are notjust environment-friendly, they are also local. Greyland is based in Stockportand employs Stockport people.

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

Stockport’s procurement policy is to buy green where possible, using thecouncil’s resources to improve the environment. But it is also to buy localwhere possible, because that keeps the money flowing around the localeconomy, and supports local jobs and local businesses. It makes the moneygo 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 inLib Dem Cornwall in 2001 which led to a new way of looking at these moneyflows in a sustainable way. Researchers developed a survey which allowedthem to track where money was spent locally, and compared what happenedto the money spent in a supermarket with the money spent on a localvegetable box scheme. To their surprise, the money spent on the veggiebox stayed circulating in the local economy twice as much: by the time it hadbeen 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 bottomline for the veggie box scheme was no different. But there was, potentiallyat least, a huge difference just by making sure that money spent locallystayed locally for just a little longer, before it leaked out to utilities,supermarkets and multinationals. That is a huge challenge for localauthorities, 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 andhis colleagues were trying to do at an IDeA environment leadershipacademy – to buy local and sustainable where possible – he was told it wasillegal. Of course, if they were excluding outside companies from bidding,then it would have been, but that is not what Stockport has been doing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The secret was to find ways of helping small companies and socialenterprises gear up to bid for contracts, and making sure the contracts weresmall enough to broaden the number of local bidders. It isn’t easy, and it ismade more difficult by perverse government requirements about centralisingprocurement. But it is an important innovation, and part of an emerging LibDem critique of local economics, which sees beyond the headline indicatorsto 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 ina meaningful way.” The question is how much Lib Dem councils can act toclaw back some influence over the health of their local economies. Some ofthe lessons are as follows:

Use the procurement budget: Lib Dem Islington has pioneered a newprocurement 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 signedup to the Carbon Disclosure project to begin de-carbonising their supplychain. It is now perfectly legal also to ask suppliers to disclose their owncarbon emissions. There is also no reason why councils always have to buyservices from the private sector: local social enterprises can put more valueback into the community, if you can find them – or encourage and grow themuntil they are in a position to bid.

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

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Help local business: Lib Dem Islington has cut the time they take to paylocal invoices from 20 to ten days. Bury Council is doing the same, thanksto a motion put forward by opposition Liberal Democrats. Lib Dem Oldhamhas gone further by setting up a credit crunch war cabinet which meets oncea fortnight to look at how the local economy is working, and takes action asquickly as possible. They also have a £400,000 rapid intervention fund tosupport 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 localcredit unions. In both cases, they can help divert council reserves intolending. Lib Dem Leeds has seen the city credit union link up with thegovernment-funded Sharing the Success to help local enterprises refusedbank loans. Lib Dem Birmingham and Stockport have also been takingaction against illegal loan sharks.

Organise meet the buyer events: The first step to buying local, andkeeping local money circulating better, is to link up potential local bidderswith council procurement staff. Stockport did just that, as we have seen. LibDem 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 couldonly describe a multinational, but getting to know them is an important start.

Tackle local monopolies: One of the main factors that sucks money out oflocal economies is a profusion of supermarkets. New rules that allow localauthorities to take local competition into account when they decide planningapplications are almost certainly on the way. But measuring potential moneyflows is also evidence, even now, one way or the other over potential newdevelopments – whether they are superstores or local markets. Both havean 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 istherefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, tore-dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination meansthat everything can be re-dreamed.”Ben Okri,2003

only connect

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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, whensomebody shouted at him. “Let’s do it for Devon!” they bawled, and gavehim a big smile.

When you have led a large local authority for more than a decade, there arethe occasional encounters in the street which seem to involve raised voices.But when people reflect your own slogans back at you, you know things areprobably going along the right lines. ‘Let’s do it for Devon’ was designed toexplain the challenge of climate change.

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

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

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

The other challenge was, of course, winning over the people of Devon. Andhere Brian brought in some marketing support to get to the heart of themessage and what it meant. Part of the result was an appeal to Devon’ssturdy pioneering spirit. Hence the slogan: ‘Let’s do it for Devon’. But thekey was to link green ideals to money. Continuing with the less than greenstatus quo meant an absurd waste of energy and rubbish, and thereforemoney. The final campaign was called ‘Don’t let Devon go to waste’ and itwas 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 CountyHall was to replace the ancient boiler so that they could use sustainablewoodchip from ten miles away, rather than oil from the Persian Gulf.

But the main issue was broader, and this is an issue for any administrationthat tries to go greener: how should it all link together? Brian’s answer inDevon was, again, to link green progress with economic progress. Thatmeant looking at where the wind blew most, to give a steer to renewablesprofessionals where wind farms might be given priority. It meant runningsubsidised training to grow the business of installing renewable energy, to

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increase the number of jobs – and increase the wages of people working inthe 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 ithas had an effect. Devon has supported 345 business over three years,building the renewables sector from 11 to over 60 companies, saving localsmall business and communities up to £4m in their electricity bills.

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

Brian’s Lib Dems are, of course, out of power again after an aggressiveConservative push into the West Country, so it looks like Devon will getanother hiccup in Lib Dem political control. But the pioneering green policieslook 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 centralproblem of green policy-making at local level, which is to embed it at thecore of policy and begin to stitch it together. This is far from simple whendepartmental boundaries straddle all the most important innovations, and itmakes it doubly difficult to conjure up the kind of leadership that makes thiswork.

In their different ways, the greener Lib Dem councils are all wrestling withstitching a raft of green policies into something more coherent. Like Lib DemSomerset’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 theeconomic 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 newCarbonFREE fund, looking at how a local carbon offset investment schememight work.

The future looks likely to mean even more blurring of departmentalboundaries. New houses that are producers of energy. Recycling thatprovides the raw materials for new local enterprises. New green spaces toreduce crime and tackle mental ill-health. Schools that produce their ownfood. Retail space for farmers and food markets. Or insulation that alsoboosts local employment, and the experience of Kirklees has fed into a 2009Friends of the Earth report which suggests that insulation could create70,000 jobs across England and Wales alone.

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There are examples of all these around the UK, many of them in Lib Demareas, but they are only at the very beginning. Taking it further requiresfinancial innovation as well as political will. It requires leaps of imaginationto turn every home and lamp-post into a power station. It requires particularcourage to cut the traffic, as the latest research suggests, by reducing roadspace.

All these burst out of conventional Whitehall targets. They require boldinnovation when, whatever the rhetoric, conventional auditing prefers tinyinnovation. But the stories in this book show that they are possible, andthree lessons particularly leap out.

Lesson #1: re-imagine your assetsConventional thinking suggests that the balance sheet of local authoritiesare simply financial. It is just a numerical bottom line. What Lib Demsbrought 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 onthe tired old model. In fact, their exclusion is often the reason why so littleactually works.

The same applies to the environment. The energy which just seeps outthrough the roof is a wasted asset. The heat which gets wasted whenelectricity is produced is one too. So is the wasted concrete space wherecrops could be grown, or the food from people’s plates which just goes intolandfill.

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

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

Lesson #2: collect local people with ideas, know-how and energyMany of the stories here suggest that making green innovation happen is notso much a matter of heroic political individualism. It is about finding theexpertise locally that might be used, or the enthusiasm in and around thecouncil. When Christian Vassie (York) wanted to build his ecoDepot, he

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collected around him a team of internal enthusiasts who could make ithappen. When Roger Symonds and his colleagues (Bath and North EastSomerset) wanted to make recycling a reality, they tapped into the expertisebuilt up by Avon Friends of the Earth. Neither assumed that all the wisdomand knowhow lay inside the council or inside their own political group. Theyreached 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 whatcouncillors do when they can’t command and control any more.

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

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

Lesson #3: communicateThe huge importance of getting the message right is a theme which runsthrough so many of the stories, whether it is Brian Greenslade’s slogans inDevon or Christian Vassie’s blogs in York. Getting the titles right can makeall the difference between public excitement and apathy. Making theobjective broad and clear enough can be the same.

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

One of the key messages in the stories in this book, in Liverpool and Devonin 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 awaste of money too. The key message is not just to explain the purposebehind the policy, but to explain the implications for the future for ourpockets.

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

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

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

Often the solution is to help people see things clearly for themselves, andthis is what he did to put his latest idea into action: lending out smart metersfrom the local libraries. Smart meters can be clipped onto wires going intoyour house, and tell you how much energy you are using – and what it iscosting. They allow you to experiment at home by switching things on andoff to find out where you are wasting energy. Christian told his three childrenthat, if they helped him save energy, he would share the savings betweenthem 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 computerswere 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 lendsmart meters alongside library books was impossible and probably illegal.The main opponents were in his own group, so it was necessary to take theidea to the full council – in his role as executive member for libraries – to getthe go-head.

But it has been a great success. The smart meters cost only £1,000 andwithin 24 hours, there were 200 people on the waiting list. Hundreds ofhouseholds have now borrowed them. The next idea is to do the same withinfra-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 tomake decisions about their own lives,” he says. “The key here isinformation. Once people have learned about their own homes, they don’tneed the smart meters all the time.”

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

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

Those places are going to include borrowing community land trusts fromurban USA, community supported agriculture – whereby people subscribe tolocal food – from rural Japan. It is going to mean borrowing the technologyfrom the PassivHaus, a wooden house so well-insulated that it doesn’t needa boiler (it gets heated by human bodies) which has just been given planningpermission 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/susforceCombined Heat and Power Association www.chpa.co.ukCommunity Land Trusts www.communitylandtrust.org.ukCommunity Recycling Network www.crn.org.ukDecentralised Energy www.dekb.co.ukEaling Community Transport www.ectgroup.org.ukEastleigh school travel plans www.eastleigh.gov.uk/ebc-1548Energy Saving Trust www.energysavingtrust.org.ukForum for the Future www.forumforthefuture.orgGreen Liberal Democrats www.greenlibdems.org.ukLGA Environmental Advisory Service www.eas.local,gov.ukLM3 (local money flows) www.lm3online.orgLondon Community Recycling Network www.lcrn.org.ukMilton Keynes Partnership www.miltonkeynespartnership.infoMay Gurney www.maygurney.co.ukNew Economics Foundation www.neweconomics.orgNew Rules (US) www.newrules.orgPlugging the Leaks (local money flows) www.pluggingtheleaks.orgRenewable energy www.reuk.co.ukSustain (local food) www.sustainweb.orgSustainable Communities Act www.localworks.orgTransition Towns www.transitiontowns.orgWarm Zone www.warmzones.co.ukWrap (recycling resources) www.wrap.org.ukYork ecoDepot blog

http://www.bbc.co.uk/northyorkshire/we_love_ny/blogs