Campaigners rate council zero out of 100 on climate efforts
HALTON Council has been rated zero out of 100 by a campaign group because it does not have a formal action plan to tackle climate change.
But the authority claims it is taking ‘significant action’ to reduce its carbon emissions.
Not-for-profit organisation Climate Emergency UK (CE UK) scored 409 local authorities in the UK on the quality of their climate action plans - strategic frameworks for measuring, planning, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions and related climatic impacts.
Of the 409 councils, 84 - including Halton - were deemed not to have a climate action plan in place, while the 325 which did were scored according to 28 questions based on what the organisation called ‘an expert-approved checklist’.
The average score for councils in Scotland and England was 46 per cent, but a fifth of UK local councils still have not published an action plan at all - earning them a zero rating.
Halton’s plan is currently being developed, despite the council declaring a climate emergency in 2019 and recently stating its aim to become carbon neutral by 2040.
Annie Pickering, Campaigns and Policy Officer at CE UK, said:
“While we understand that councils need much more support and funding from the national Government, and have been stretched by responding to the pandemic, the fact that some councils have developed well thought out, costed and ambitious plans, shows that it is possible.”
A Halton Council spokeswoman said it was producing an action plan but the timeframe had been impacted by the need to divert resources to deal with the pandemic. She said the intention was to publish it in ‘the coming months’.
She added: “The methodology behind the scorecard is focused solely on the assessment of action plans - indeed the report acknowledges that ‘councils may be doing good things which aren’t reflected in their action plan’.
“In Halton, the council has already taken significant action to reduce our carbon emissions. Since we started to measure our carbon footprint in 2006/07, overall emissions have reduced from 26,338 tonnes of CO2 to 9,770 tonnes.”
She also pointed to renewable energy schemes, the switching of street lights to LEDs, building retrofits, heat decarbonisation schemes and the roll out of EV charging points at council premises.