Leeds on frontline of local climate response
Cities will put sustainability at the heart of everything they do, insists Leeds City Council’s joint leader Richard Brett – but he says they need the freedom and the resources to get on with the job.
Interview by Julian Birch.
Building sustainable cities is about creating places that improve the health, wealth and wellbeing of communities, as well as dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It’s not impossibly complicated, but it does require leadership, commitment and a willingness to rethink how places are planned, designed and managed.
Cities like Leeds are at the frontline of the need to change. The city council there is in the final stages of agreeing a climate change strategy document that will set its overall vision and priorities. There is a real determination to deliver the strategy with action on the ground, joint leader Richard Brett believes. ‘It can’t be a bolt-on for just one area – everybody’s got to do it. We’ve all got to wear green hats and we’ve all got to take green actions.’
Climate action still has to compete with other policies such as economic regeneration, but, says Brett, the difference now is that it’s embedded in strategies across the city. For example, the local development framework has specific draft policies on climate change and development patterns that reduce future carbon emissions and it also includes a development plan document on natural resources and waste including the strategic need for low carbon infrastructure.
Support is coming from a range of other authorities and other organisations, including CABE’s sustainable cities programme. And the council says that action is happening at every level, right down to the ward, with every councillor given a £30,000 budget for capital schemes that reduce energy costs.
‘We’re determined to see development happen in a low carbon and sustainable manner with real focus on community and liveability,’ insists Brett, a Liberal Democrat councillor. ‘The sustainable cities programme could help us tie up all the different skills and specialisms that are required to deliver this and help us think through delivery issues at different spatial scales.’
He says that awareness of climate change in Leeds has reached a ‘tipping point’, where people are willing to take action themselves. Unprompted, council IT staff are deliberately starting to buy computers and printers with the lowest energy consumption. And the recycling of waste has doubled since the Lib Dem/Conservative administration he jointly leads took charge in 2004 – it’s now approaching the 40 per cent level that staff previously told him was impossible.
So he believes that means sustainability initiatives will thrive despite the financial squeeze caused by the recession and the need to keep council tax bills as low as possible. But it does mean an even stronger emphasis on reducing energy costs: ‘Over the next couple of years we’ve got to prioritise actions that directly reduce our corporate carbon emissions and energy spend.’
One example of this is reducing the electricity supply in major council buildings from 240 to 230 volts, a 4 per cent reduction that means an 8 per cent cut in power use. Another is encouraging planning and asset management staff to use the time freed up by a reduced development workload to focus on regeneration and low carbon energy ‘so that we can move straight into building a sustainable city and a sustainable economy in ways that we weren’t doing before the recession’.
In the longer term the priorities are new, low-carbon communities and dramatic improvements in public transport, and the amount of walking and cycling in the city. ‘We know what we need to do and we are beginning to be quite clear about what our priorities are,’ says Brett. ‘The difficult thing is finding the resources to do all of this. We’re particularly interested in how we can develop large-scale sustainable neighbourhoods with the right infrastructure in place and this is very likely to require innovative financial arrangements to avoid trading off elements of sustainability against each other.’
One example of making things happen on this kind of scale are plans that are on the horizon for an eco-suburb with up to 7,000 homes in the Lower Aire Valley. ‘It’s only a couple of miles away from the centre of Leeds and only half a mile away from major development and regeneration opportunities within the Lower Aire Valley that we think will provide 25,000 new jobs over the next 20 years. That’s much easier to justify in sustainability terms than building a new isolated town.’
But Leeds cannot fund the development on its own. ‘Building 7,000 homes is a huge undertaking and it’s not just the homes themselves but the infrastructure – bridges over the River Aire, putting the roads and all the other things that then allow developers to build sustainable homes in the right place.’ Public transport will obviously be an essential other ingredient to this new suburb.
So progress means decisions on resources being taken in London and Whitehall’s record is not great when seen from most town halls. The supertram project that never was is a particular bugbear in Leeds. ‘We talked to the government for something like 15 years, we thought we’d got agreement that this was going to come, we spent more than £10 million in preparation for it and then at the end they said “no, it’s too expensive, we can’t do it”.’
Unsurprisingly, Brett believes that: ‘The most useful change we could have would be to provide us, the council, the city region, with more decision making and revenue raising authority. It’s a huge frustration how slowly and spasmodically the government makes decisions about infrastructure funding in our city. I keep on going down to talk to ministers, I leave them with ideas and it’s months and months or even years sometimes before we get an answer.
‘At the moment in all major cities outside London our fate is not in our own hands, we don’t have the financial wherewithal to do what the Victorians did. What I would very much like is the same sort of autonomy that London has with its mayor. If the city region had a mayor with the same powers, that would be a considerable leap forward because it would give you much more of a focus and much more chance to raise money. Please devolve power to us – trust us – is the message.’
So what would he do with that power? One simple idea would be to introduce a London-style Oyster card for buses, trains and taxis in the city region. ‘The buses would then move much quicker and they’d be more attractive because at every stop at the moment they’re fiddling with change. It’s no surprise that London has a far better public transport system than Leeds. If we had something that was half as good it would be an improvement on what we’ve got now.’
Another – more personal – ambition is to encourage more walking and cycling. That will mean convincing not the government but his colleagues in the council chamber.
‘Some of our most deprived areas are within walking distance of the city centre,’ he explains. ‘Between every main road I want there to be a properly paved, properly lit, properly signed cycling and walking route going out from the city centre up to a couple of miles. I’m struggling with some other councillors who don’t believe that those actions would have a regenerative effect on the deprived areas but I firmly believe they would.’
