Issue - meetings

The following Motion was proposed by Councillor England and seconded by Councillor Barrett:

Climate Emergency and COP26

1.  Dacorum Borough Council notes that the important Climate Summit COP26 is being held in Glasgow this November, with only eight years remaining of the ten that were available when the Climate Emergency was recognised and declared by this council.

2.  Council also notes that the local response to the Climate Emergency, while capable of undertaking many urgent and useful actions within its powers and capacity and able to energise local people and businesses, faces critical limitations in key areas for scaling-up change, such as:

• Sufficient and adequate workforce, trained and scaled for deployment to install Ground-Source and Air Source Heat Pumps and other innovative renewables and insulating technologies to reduce CO2 production in housing and other buildings
• Funding for the front-loaded costs of insulation schemes and conversion to renewables of present carbon-intensive systems used in Dacorum, both by the Council and by residents and businesses.

3.  These work-streams and others require urgent action by Government, to improve capacity for local authorities to draw on, particularly those authorities like Dacorum with large housing stock, who are required to insulate buildings, adopt non-fossil-fuel sources of heat and power, and to reduce or recycle waste products safely and efficiently.

4.  To ensure this council and others can undertake this critical work, local authorities need reassurance from Government that they can confidently prepare budgets knowing that that capacity will be available.

5.  Council agrees to ask the Portfolio-holder for Environment to write to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and Alok Sharma, President of COP26 to urge a commitment on spending and timing for an urgent and effective scheme of investment in workforce training, technological innovation and industry standards to allow local government to make urgent progress in meeting its challenges meaningfully in the financial year 22/23.       

A vote was held:

It was unanimously agreed,

and therefore the Motion was carried.

Proposed by Councillor Adrian England

Climate Emergency and COP26

1.  Dacorum Borough Council notes that the important Climate Summit COP26 is being held in Glasgow this November, with only eight years remaining of the ten that were available when the Climate Emergency was recognised and declared by this council.

2.  Council also notes that the local response to the Climate Emergency, while capable of undertaking many urgent and useful actions within its powers and capacity and able to energise local people and businesses, faces critical limitations in key areas for scaling-up change, such as:

• Sufficient and adequate workforce, trained and scaled for deployment to install Ground-Source and Air Source Heat Pumps and other innovative renewables and insulating technologies to reduce CO2 production in housing and other buildings
• Funding for the front-loaded costs of insulation schemes and conversion to renewables of present carbon-intensive systems used in Dacorum, both by the Council and by residents and businesses.

3.  These work-streams and others require urgent action by Government, to improve capacity for local authorities to draw on, particularly those authorities like Dacorum with large housing stock, who are required to insulate buildings, adopt non-fossil-fuel sources of heat and power, and to reduce or recycle waste products safely and efficiently.

4.  To ensure this council and others can undertake this critical work, local authorities need reassurance from Government that they can confidently prepare budgets knowing that that capacity will be available.

5.  Council agrees to ask the Portfolio-holder for Environment to write to the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and Alok Sharma, President of COP26 to urge a commitment on spending and timing for an urgent and effective scheme of investment in workforce training, technological innovation and industry standards to allow local government to make urgent progress in meeting its challenges meaningfully in the financial year 22/23.       

Councillor Barrett seconded the Motion and thanked Councillor England for bringing the Motion to Council. He confirmed he was fully supportive of the content and was happy to write a letter as proposed. Further as a measure of the importance of the subject he would be asking the Leader of the Council to join him in signing the letter.

The Mayor invited the proposer, Councillor England, to speak on the Motion.

Councillor England: “The August 2021 report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) makes clear that we already face global temperatures in excess of anything our species has experienced.

“Since 1995, government representatives from around the world have gathered annually for the UN Climate Change Conference (often referred to as the Conference of the Parties, “the COP”)

At COP21, hosted in Paris, world leaders committed to a historic agreement to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 ? above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the rise to 1.5 ?. They also agreed to step up efforts to adapt to the impacts of climate change and to make finance flows consistent with a pathway  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5