Leicester City Council are currently consulting on their new Climate Emergency Action Plan, which will cover the next five years until 2028. The consultation is open until Sunday 28th January 2024 and you can read the consultation documents here. We are writing a detailed response from Leicester Friends of the Earth but it will have more impact if as many people and organisations as possible respond to the consultation. You can complete a survey at the link above or simply send an email to sustainability@leicester.gov.uk with your thoughts.
Here are our suggestions for the key points to include:
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Although there are many good actions included in the new
plan, there are also too many points without any defined targets, so that there
is no way of measuring whether the Council is making progress towards reaching
net zero by 2030. There are also too many ‘actions’ listed which are in fact
only plans to make plans. These are not actions and should not be listed as
such.
The Council
The Council recognises that the most impactful actions they
could take to reduce the carbon emissions of their own buildings are to retrofit
insulation, install heat pumps and connect more buildings to the district
heating networks. However, insulation and connections to district heating are
not mentioned in the actions listed in this section. There is only a plan to
make a plan! Why not start trying to fund those projects immediately, while
creating the roadmap? When we are facing a climate emergency, we haven’t got
two years to waste in only writing the plan.
Housing
The ongoing programme of insulating council homes is good
but nowhere near ambitious enough. There needs to be a target to retrofit all
council owned and managed homes, as well as a target to get all homes in the
private rented sector up to standard. We would also like to understand what
more will be done to encourage privately owned homes to retrofit, as they make
up a significant proportion of the city’s housing stock.
Business, public services and community
The tree planting and Tiny Forests projects happening on
school grounds are excellent but they could be more ambitious; aiming to plant five
more Tiny Forests by 2028 is only one per year! Could the Council aim to plant
a Tiny Forest at every school that has sufficient green space within the next 5
years? That would be a significant number of trees and ensure that most
children in Leicester had access to a Tiny Forest.
Transport
To make active travel more attractive we need to find ways
of reducing traffic levels, so that it is safer to walk and cycle. One of the
key factors driving increases in road traffic is light goods vehicles, driven
by online shopping. This is recognised
in government statistics but not addressed in this plan (apart from with a plan
to make a plan!). More urgent action is needed. For example, the Council could
work with online retailers to install more parcel lockers around the city so
that deliveries could be dropped at one point for people to collect.
Land and infrastructure
The glyphosate reduction trials in city parks are welcome
but we would like to see this expanded. It is possible to manage parks and
green spaces without using any chemical pesticides (herbicides, insecticides
etc). Other local authorities are also managing their streets without using
chemical pesticides and we would like to see the Council follow this best
practice and phase out the use of all pesticides in the next five years.
Consumption and waste
The Council state that food waste is being separated from
other household waste. How is this done? And is it as effective as a separate
food waste collection would be? We are concerned that this is not the most
effective way to manage household waste.
It is good to see that the Council intends to increase the
choice of meals in schools, to address the climate impact of food. This should
apply to all institutional settings, including hospitals, care homes and
prisons, not only schools. Vegan options of similar nutritional value to other
meal options should be made available for every meal.
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