Climate impacts are intensifying, emissions continue rising, and local authorities are on the frontline of both the crisis and the response. At the Centre for Sustainable Energy, we witness daily how councils are uniquely positioned to drive climate action from retrofitting social housing to supporting community energy projects.

As climate risks deepen and permeate every aspect of local life, can councils truly deliver effective public services without weaving climate considerations into the fabric of their decision-making? We don’t believe they can.

After holding a workshop to speak with local authorities and understand their views on this issue, we responded to the consultation from the Local Government Association on whether local authorities should have a climate duty, and what it should require of them.

The councils that we’ve engaged stress how vulnerable climate staff and programmes are to being cut:

“There are councils where climate work is like a ‘ping pong’ between parties, with almost no certainty.”

In order to avoid this issue, we, and most of the council officers we engaged, believe that local authorities should have a statutory duty to act on climate mitigation and adaptation.

What could a statutory climate duty involve?

Things get difficult when you get into the details of how a duty should be worded and what it should require. A duty that is too general will not result in any change, but a duty that is too narrow and prescriptive could stifle innovation and creativity from the councils, potentially resulting in them limiting action to the minimum requirements.

At CSE, we would support:

• An overarching duty requiring local authorities to address climate change mitigation and adaptation in accordance with central government commitments across all council activities and responsibilities.

• A requirement to annually report on progress, with a standardised dataset of national indicators to report back on, co-created with local government. This reporting should be made public.

We also believe in some additional duties to work alongside this. One of these would be a specific duty requiring local planning authorities to align their local plans and planning decisions with our carbon reduction commitments and the mitigation of the risks identified in the latest climate change risk assessment. We believe that it makes sense to use the planning system to its fullest extent as a tool to reduce emissions to ensure that development is adapted to the climate to come. 

We would also support a duty requiring councils to enforce minimum energy efficiency standards for privately rented homes, with funding and support from central government to do so. The current regulations give councils the power to enforce minimum standards, but only a minority of councils are proactively doing so. A recent consultation proposes tightening the standards further, but this is irrelevant if the standards are not enforced. A full implementation of these standards would lift vulnerable people out of fuel poverty, improve health outcomes and cut emissions. 

There are also a variety of activities which we’d encourage councils to consider, but we’re not sure should be legal duties. These include:

• Creating local area energy plans and Regional Energy Spatial Plans, to plan the quickest, most cost-effective way of de-carbonising the local energy system. More than a duty, we think councils need funding and support. 

• Safeguarding people in social care, for example people in nursing homes. These vulnerable people are more susceptible to climate impacts and the impact of living in a cold home. Given councils’ responsibilities, it’s vital that prior consideration is given to these foreseeable climate impacts to limit avoidable deaths.   

• Reducing transport emissions. Councils are in the best position to support local transport decarbonisation through their management of local transport networks and public space and their close relationship with the public.  

• There are huge opportunities for local authorities to achieve emission reductions through their supply chains and approach to procurement which are not fully exploited. 

There’s a balance to be struck between setting minimum requirements which all councils should meet, whilst allowing the flexibility and creativity for local authorities to plan actions which are locally relevant and impactful with their constituents.

We think any duty should create a floor on ambition, rather than a ceiling, and be accompanied by funding and support to help councils deliver on it. It’s also important not to penalise any councils already leading on this issue by gatekeeping funding, nor should any councils who are already behind be penalised.

It’s also important that whilst annual reporting should be required, action should always be a priority to avoid councils spending time arguing over whose emissions are whose. These considerations will help to ensure that a new climate duty would encourage local council action on the climate crisis, rather than discouraging them and preventing climate work.

“It’s important to realise that just because it’s a statutory duty, it doesn’t mean the work will get done.”  – Local council officer

Local government reform and devolution

As ever, local government is in flux. Local government reform and further devolution is on the cards, with proposals to replace two-tier local authorities (where you have a district and county council) with unitary authorities alongside proposals to empower mayors and create a new regional arm of government (strategic authorities) with a role in many aspects of decarbonisation including: retrofit funding, the delivery of the Great British Energy, Local Power Plans, heat network zoning and leading Local Nature Recovery Strategies.  

There’s a risk that all this upheaval will slow things down and result in a loss of valuable institutional knowledge, but we think both proposals have the potential to offer rural authorities the economies of scale they lack and enable greater ambition and coordination.

Regional climate adaptation

There’s also potential for strategic authorities to allow climate adaptation to be addressed regionally. For instance, lowland flooding can often best be managed by changing upland land management practices, but it’s rare for a single local authority to include a whole river catchment to enable joined-up programmes to be created.  

Likewise, whilst the planning system has tools to manage flood risk in existing settlements, it currently lacks the capacity to relocate these settlements.  Whilst dystopian, in the future it’s likely to be necessary to abandon some towns and rebuild them inland.  In Fairbourne, a coastal village in South Wales, National Resources Wales has indicated that maintaining flood defences may become unsustainable by 2054. The community is permanently blighted, with people’s homes unsellable. With sea level rise accelerating it may be the first to face this issue but it won’t be the last. 

The planned relocation of communities like this, and other communities on the east coast, would likely require a regional approach with cooperation from multiple local authorities. There is potential for strategic authorities to offer a framework for this work and for the potential creation of new planning delivery tools such as Resilience Development Corporations. We are grateful to the Town and Country Planning Association for this idea. 

We hope others take the opportunity to respond to LGA’s consultation (deadline 30^th May).  

Also, let us know if you think we’ve got it right, or if there’s anything we’ve missed. Email us at dan.stone@cse.org.uk