38: Co-benefits of local climate action

Climate action can deliver a huge variety of other benefits: improving health from active travel, reducing fuel poverty through insulation, decreasing pollution through clean heating and transport, creating good jobs and building resilient communities. Matt and Becky are joined by Dom Boyle from PwC to discuss these co-benefits of climate action, and shows that keeping it local can accelerate net zero, reduce dependence on fossil fuels and bring huge social benefits across the UK.

Find us at www.localzeropod.com

Episode Transcript:

[Music flourish]

The main message is that local authorities need the support of local government, whether it’s funding support, regulation or devolution support, in order to be the changemakers that they need to be in their local areas.

[Music flourish]

Matt:  Hello and welcome to Local Zero with Matt and Becky. Today, we’re going to be talking about the co-benefits of climate action. If you’re an avid listener of the show, you may have noticed that most of the conversations we have with our guests focus on way more than just energy or carbon emission reductions.

Rebecca:  Whether it’s community cohesion that results from Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, health outcomes from working in community gardens or just getting out of your car and onto a bike or some of the sustainable jobs and careers that could be created through new insulation and electrification programmes, there are just so many benefits that climate action can bring about but unfortunately, today, most of these are not captured when policies are set or investments are planned.

Matt:  So today, we’ll be chatting with Dom Boyle from the Cities and Sustainability Team at PwC. Dom is one of the main authors of a brand new report, Accelerating Net-Zero Delivery which captures data about all the potential benefits of climate action and shows that doing things locally can make a huge difference. The report shows that outcomes are significantly better when places tailor their net-zero delivery to the needs and opportunities of their local communities.

Rebecca:  I know, Matt, you especially like this report because of the sheer number of graphs that it contains [laughter], backing up these very bold statements that it puts forward; fundamentally, that the UK needs new delivery frameworks, new governance models, new finance and funding instruments and new skills and capacity development approaches all focused around joining up local action with national policy. So it’s very, very exciting and, of course, we’ll do our very best to bring the discussion back to a practical level as well in terms of what we can all do to get involved.

[Music flourish]

Matt:  As always, you can reach out to us at our dedicated Twitter handle. If you haven’t already, go find and follow us @LocalZeroPod to get involved with discussions over there. Also, email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com if you want to share some longer thoughts.

[Music flourish]

Rebecca:  But before we get into this very exciting discussion today, I think we’d better reflect back on what’s been happening over the past few weeks with the good, the bad and the weird.

Matt:  Certainly.

Rebecca:  So, Matt [laughter], what have you got for us?

Matt:  Well, let’s begin with the good news. We had a ban on bad news, I think, in the last episode.

Rebecca:  We did [laughter].

Matt:  So let’s keep that flavour and let’s start with the good news. I think last time, I talked a bit about a company called Ripple Energy which is taking a whole new way of distributing ownership of local wind farms to try and reduce your energy bills. Many of the listeners will have heard of Octopus Energy, one of the fastest-growing energy suppliers. Becky, we’ve talked about Octopus in the past.

Rebecca:  Yeah, I’m with Octopus and taking advantage of some of their innovative tariffs which is really exciting stuff that they’re doing.

Matt:  Absolutely and there’s another innovation from them – they’re coming thick and fast at the moment – called their Octopus Fan Club. Now the benefits of this are that you can essentially sign up to be supplied power by a local wind farm. I suspect they may broaden this out to other technologies in due course.

Rebecca:  Hang on! Hang on! I’m just getting that fan club, right? [Laughter] I’m imagining groupies but you mean fan as in a windmill.

Matt:  Big fans, yeah. Exactly. The kind of things when your kids point and say, ‘Ah, big fan!’ [Laughter] This is really cutting-edge marketing stuff. So it’s 100% renewable electricity supplied from your local fan (your wind turbine) and 20% off your unit rate. So for the price you pay per unit of electricity, there’s 20% off. In the context of electricity bills having gone up...

Rebecca:  That’s huge.

Matt:  Yeah, so 20% off your turbine when it’s spinning and you’re using your electricity and 50% off your unit rate – halving your unit rate – when the wind picks up and the green electrons are really flowing, i.e. there’s a surplus. 

Rebecca:  Wow!

Matt:  Now, before you all get too excited and, Becky, before you get excited...

Rebecca:  Too late.

Matt:  ...there are only two of these available at the moment. One is in East Yorkshire and one in South Wales but they’re expecting to roll this out. You need to be living nearby and you also need a smart meter but they are encouraging people to sign up their interest. I’ll just finish on this point. Octopus are looking to create some kind of community benefit directly from this. They’re a little vague about what that might be at the moment. They include things like educating local schoolchildren and investing in local community funds but I think the intention is there.

Rebecca:  I mean, ultimately, this is good news in getting people maximising their use of renewables, minimising their use of gas and just reducing bills all around. So it’s a very, very exciting model. I mean I wish I lived there. I feel like I need to write to Octopus and [laughter] and get a wind farm. Come on! [Laughter]

Matt:  It’s just another reason for me to move to East Yorkshire [laughter].

Rebecca:  Exactly. I’ve actually got some good news as well and I think it relates in that it’s a different take on how we can, again, do things to try and reduce our dependence on gas and reduce our bills but instead of switching to renewables, it’s more focused on what we can do to shift our demand. There was a great news article in The Guardian and at the end of it, it pulled together a whole load of recommendations about what people can actually do in their homes. Some of it is challenging. Some of it is not accessible to everyone, like insulating your home and replacing gas boilers with heat pumps and so on. Of course, we’ve talked about that before. It’s not always easy.

Matt:  It’s costly but also you might not have the autonomy or the agency to do it. You might not own the home, for instance.

Rebecca:  Exactly but for those people that can, and right now this is the emerging news in terms of Rishi Sunak’s statement which is coming out as we are talking... I realise that will probably be [laughter] old news.

Matt:  We have a live newsfeed open at Local Zero HQ at the moment.

Rebecca:  It’s really good news in that people who are installing energy efficiency measures, like solar panels, heat pumps or insulation will pay no VAT and so it’s a good time to get in and do that. There are easier things that we can all do and, in fact, you pointed this out to me, Matt, is turn the thermostat down on your boiler; not for your household heating but for your boiler. Now I had no idea how to do that and you linked me to a really great article that walks you through that and so perhaps we can put that in our show notes for people like me that want to do it and just don’t really understand how to. Obviously, there are other measures as well. So absolutely keep your thermostat below 190 and keep your shower timed to four minutes. That’s always a good tip. Play a song that you know is four minutes and make sure you’re out by the end of the song. That’s what I do. Turn the lights off. I think they’re things that we know but it’s just building in those habits around all of that but it can make a big difference.

Matt:  It certainly can and we’re having to throw absolutely everything at this at the moment. So there are some really good examples there and, as you say, some interesting policies that are coming out as we speak. Probably, at that point, it’s time to turn to the bad news. Each week comes not just one but several stories about how the energy crisis is affecting people. I was taken with this and Becky, you and I are both parents and we’ve both got young kids. Thankfully, I think it’s fair to say that neither of us would categorise ourselves as fuel-poor but the thought of living in a home where I am actively having to make a decision about whether my kids are going to heat or eat or whether I’m going to have to heat or eat is terrifying. I read in the news this week that the End Fuel Poverty Coalition estimated that 2.5 million households with children will be in fuel poverty once the new energy price cap comes into effect on 1st April. That’s 2.5 million households. Now, that’s roughly two in five households with children. That rises to more than half of households with children if we look at just single-parent homes. It’s frightening, really frightening.

Rebecca:  It’s really frightening, particularly when you look at the knock-on consequences. You talk about heating or eating but I have spent time in a home that I couldn’t heat and it was down to the poor building stock and I actually developed asthma-like symptoms from just living in this home for a few years. So for children that are growing up in those early developmental stages, the links to some of these chronic diseases and chronic respiratory diseases at the same that we’re battling through this terrible pandemic is just really, really worrying stuff.

Matt:  Frankly, some of the policies that were announced by Chancellor Rishi Sunak just moments ago and, again, we’ve just had wind of this and so we haven’t had time to fully digest them but on the face of it, they won’t fundamentally change those numbers. We’ve seen an uplift in national insurance to, roughly, £12,500 which will mean that some of these parents and even households without children won’t be paying national insurance which will help to some extent. We’ve also seen funding for councils double to tackle the most vulnerable homes which I’m sure will make a crucial difference to some homes. The other policies, Becky... the one that will be cheered by many folk with cars, nationwide, is cutting fuel duty by five pence which will save, roughly, the RAC think about £3 a tank. It’s actually a highly regressive policy because it helps those who drive the most and who run around in the most fuel-consuming vehicles. Yes, more to do I would say.

Rebecca:  A lot more to do and perhaps some better targeting would have been nice to see on that.

Matt:  Well, we shall see how that develops. I do have a weird one if you fancy it.

Rebecca:  Oh, I always love a weird one, Matt. Come on.

Matt:  Okay, well, there’s a back story to this one. I was in the Trossachs. For those of you who don’t the Trossachs, it’s part of the Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park just north of Glasgow. My mum and dad were there on holiday. In fact, my kids joined them for a couple of days. We were off a little loch there and my dad turns to me and says, ‘I’ve just seen a beaver’s lodge.’ I said, ‘Excuse me.’ I completely didn’t believe him. I mean he’s a very believable chap and very trustworthy but I didn’t believe a word of it [laughter]. I forced him to go and take me to see it. Anyway, we go down and there are trees littered everywhere. I don’t know, Becky, if you ever watched... I think it’s on one of the Disney channels which I have on repeat in my household. It’s Lady and the Tramp where the beaver cuts down this tree into twiglets and then it just falls. There are trees everywhere like this and it got me thinking in terms of reintroduction and rewilding. Apparently, there is a beaver family living on this loch and it’s one of a thousand beavers now living across Scotland and across 250 territories. From a climate perspective, that’s really important. Just off the top of your head, Becky, have you got any idea about why you think beavers might be a good thing for our climate mitigation or climate adaptation?

Rebecca:  No and, in fact, in my mind, I’m just thinking....

Matt:  You just think, ‘Matt’s going off on one about beavers.’ Yeah, okay.

Rebecca:  ...about trees falling down all around [laughter].

Matt:  ‘This isn’t very Local Zero. He’s finally lost it.’ [Laughter] Well, they do a number of things that are important. We all know beavers dam and that means that they slow down the rate of water. With climate change, we have much more frequent periods of intensive rainfall and more flash flooding. So the more damming you have, the slower that water flows and there’s a reduction in flooding. They can also help to clean the water in terms of filtering this water through these dams. Another carbon point is that wetlands are really good for sequestering carbon and locking that carbon up and keeping those emissions locked up in our landscape. It’s kind of a weird good news story because we tried to reintroduce them back in 2009 in a place called Knapdale on the Argyll Peninsula and it didn’t really work but then they just took to other areas. Yeah, a really nice story I think and a bit of a weird one too.

Rebecca:  Yeah, definitely a weird one but quite exciting. Get out there and see more wildlife. I love it, Matt [laughter].

Matt:  Didn’t think you’d hear that today [laughter]. On to possibly more pressing matters, we have our guest waiting in the wings to talk a little more about place-based climate action.

Rebecca:  Yeah, and let’s see if he mentions the beavers as one of the co-benefits [laughter].

Matt:  I sincerely doubt it.

Dom:  Hi, I’m Dom Boyle. I’m an economist at PwC’s Sustainability and Climate Change Team working in cities and local government and trying to help them and all of us understand the costs and benefits of getting to net zero.

[Music flourish]

Rebecca:  Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Dom. It’s really, really great to have you on Local Zero and also to talk a little bit about some of the phenomenal insights that came out of the report you released recently called Accelerating Net Zero Delivery. For myself and Matt, one of the things that really excites us about that report is that you focus not just on carbon emission reductions or cost reductions but you talk a lot about the co-benefits of climate action and why local is important in that. I guess before we really start to dig into things in too much depth, perhaps you could just tell us a little bit about what you mean by co-benefits. What are you talking about when you say co-benefits and how might different people experience these things differently?

Dom:  Sure and thanks for having me. Before I get into the co-benefit side of things, I’ll just explain the context of this report. I think we all know that net zero is a crucial challenge, both for local governments and for the country at large. We handily had the Net Zero Strategy that came out last year and we know that buildings and transport, which are two big urban sectors, are responsible for way more than 40% of the emissions, depending on which region you’re looking at. We’ve got a feeling that local is better and anyone who works in this space understands that we need to do things locally in order to get our emissions down because the way that things are implemented on the ground is always local in nature. We also understand that local is not happening fast enough. So UKRI (UK Research and Innovation) and Innovate UK wanted to understand what are the benefits of local delivery versus less local delivery and how can we use that information about those benefits to make the case to national government about how we link up local delivery and national enablement. So to your question, we worked with a team from the University of Leeds and Otley Energy to try and really understand the value of this concept of co-benefits. When we say co-benefits, we mean things that are happening alongside climate change abatement. Greenhouse gas emission reduction in itself is a big benefit for the environment but it also comes handily with lots of other benefits like clean air and for streets, fewer road accidents, more people on bikes with physical health benefits and in the building sector, warmer homes means less people suffering from winter colds and a more productive workforce which is good for us and good for the Treasury. When I say co-benefits, it’s a bucket of things around health, productivity and wellbeing-type issues that we used the Green Book Treasury methodologies to value.

Matt:  Perfect. So picking up on that, I just wanted to understand your assessment here because there were some real hard-hitting numbers, Dom, that came out. If I can paraphrase, a place-based approach cost, roughly, a quarter of a place-agnostic approach. For that money, you’d get twice the energy savings versus the place-agnostic approach and twice the social benefits. These are the kinds of numbers, in my mind, you can take to an energy minister, even a chancellor, and you would be in a position, I’d hope, to convince them that maybe local is better. I just wanted you maybe to explain a little bit about how you got to those numbers and what kinds of assumptions were behind them.

Dom:  Sure. Exactly, you’re right. The numbers are really striking and they were striking for us when they came out of the models. I would caution that it is a spectrum we’re dealing with here. On the one side, when we say place-based, we mean if you took the deployment pathways in the Net Zero Strategy – things like the 600,000 heat pumps a year target that we’re aiming for and 55% of all journeys in urban places to be made on a bike or walking –if you took those targets and you applied them across the country, we would still have a lot of social benefits. We then wanted to understand what if you were able to take the most cost-effective benefits first and deployed them first of all; so the benefits that cost you the least and abate the same amount of carbon. When we say cost, we mean both the financial cost... a measure that warms your home but may be cheaper than a very expensive retrofit and still abates carbon but also the measures that have the most social benefits, for example, the things we talked about before like air quality, warm homes, etcetera. We essentially ranked all the 500 different measures in six major cities in the UK and we used that ranking to understand if I was in charge of that local authority, how would I prioritise my spending and my interventions. I stress the fact that it’s a spectrum because that’s not exactly how net zero will be delivered. Net zero will be delivered based on local preferences, feasibility and various other things but understanding those places in detail and understanding the costs and benefits and ranking them allowed us to create this picture of what we called the ‘place-specific’ or ‘place-based deployment.’ Just to give you some examples of why it’s not realistic, the most cost-effective measures we had there were walking and turning down your thermostat. Now it would be great if everyone turned their thermostat down but we’re not really in a position to do that and we probably shouldn’t. There was a conversation on your show a couple of weeks ago about people who were wearing ski suits and that’s a very cost-effective measure but it’s maybe not the way that we want to get to net zero. In terms of walking, again, most of us could walk to work and lots of us can’t. There are some really cost-effective measures that are in that kind of far-out bucket where they’re not going to happen at scale and there are some other ones that we are able to do far more efficiently if we look at the places in which they’re delivered.

Matt:  So that’s the key point, Dom, I think is that we’ve got the same 500 measures, is that correct, but you’re essentially deploying these in a place-sensitive way versus a place-insensitive way?

Dom:  That’s correct.

Matt:  And you find that these are cheaper to implement if it’s place-sensitive but also they yield more benefit.

Dom:  That’s right, yeah. There are a couple of examples. In the housing space, the benefits are not as different as in the transport space. For example, if you look at one deployment of a heat pump, largely, that’s a technology that works the same in most houses and you’d be talking social benefits of about £5,000 across the population, whether that’s in Swansea or Glasgow. Those benefits are because the people in Swansea and Glasgow would have warmer homes, etcetera. That’s an example of a benefit that largely doesn’t change. If you look at cycling, for example, the way that the benefit of cycling is calculated is based on physical activity. It’s also based on removing cars from the road, clean air and various other things but one of the biggest drivers of why active travel is good for society is because it creates healthier people. Unfortunately, Glasgow has a life expectancy significantly lower than other cities in the UK and that includes post-industrial cities like Liverpool and Manchester. Because Glasgow is a less healthy place in general, the benefits of getting Glaswegians onto bikes means that cycling is a really sensible thing to do in Glasgow and it’s more cost-effective.

Rebecca:  This is really exciting and you talked about 500 measures. In my head, I’m really struggling to think of more than about 20-30 different measures. You’re not just looking at how much it costs to, say, buy a heat pump or... I guess walking has very little cost associated with it but you’re quantifying these in different ways for different cities. Presumably, there’s quite a lot of complexity and data that comes into understanding how those benefits come to be. How did you get to these numbers for such a diverse range of measures?

Dom:  On the social benefit side, that was a little bit newer but the methodology that we’re using has been around for a long time. The Treasury releases something called the Green Book which is a large technical guidance for doing project appraisal. It means that when you go to the Treasury to apply for funds, the Treasury will say, ‘Please tell me how that will benefit society.’ For example, if I want to apply for a loan from my bank for a heat pump, my bank will care whether they get their money back. If I want to apply to the Treasury for a heat pump, they’re interested in whether that’s going to increase my productivity, whether I spend the energy savings in the shops and increase the tax take and whether it’s going to create jobs. It’s a very different way of understanding costs and benefits when you’re the government versus when you’re a private sector provider. With the measures that we have valued in there, like congestion, clean air, physical activity and warm homes, there are methods in the Green Book that tell you how to value these different things and we’ve used Treasury methods on almost every occasion.

Matt:  So, Dom, in my mind, I’m splitting this in two ways. It’s the cost of doing things locally or not versus the benefit that you get for doing it locally or not. I completely understand and I think your example there of deploying cycling infrastructure in Glasgow could yield greater health benefits versus, say, somewhere where there’s a slightly healthier population. That makes sense. For each pound you spend in Glasgow, you’re going to yield wider social benefit but I wondered if you could just unpack and explain why the cost of doing things locally is lower versus a place-agnostic approach.

Dom:  That largely comes down to local autonomy. If we look at the Net Zero Strategy or various other pathways such as the one that the Committee for Climate Change use, most of them assume a level of modelling that is uniform across the country. For example, if a heat pump programme was to be rolled out and funded by BEIS locally and you have one list of suppliers, then that would be the way that heat pumps are rolled out across the country. So certain types of heat pumps and certain installers would be used uniformly but I think anyone who works in this space knows that that’s not how this space works. Whether it’s a heat pump, insulation or fabric, you want to use the right type of measure in the right place. The difference in housing stock between somewhere like Cambridge and Peterborough versus Swansea and Liverpool is very different. In Glasgow, 75% of people live in flats and that means that Glasgow is really susceptible to measures such as district heating which depends on density. It’s a series of things but the cost measures really depend on unique local circumstances. When you use local knowledge to make those deployment decisions, you end up with more cost-effective deployment.

Matt:  I would personally agree with your logic but I’ll play devil’s advocate for a moment. I can imagine a counterargument to that would be if you go bespoke and think local, you’re not getting the scale that’s required. You’re not benefiting from the economies of scale. You’re not linking into a wider national supply chain. That’s not my view but I have heard that argument. Is that something that you had to tackle in the modelling and that kind of trade-off between it being bespoke versus scale?

Dom:  Yeah, I think we did tackle that in the modelling and we didn’t. There are certain industries where you really do need to go scale or it’s not going to work. Hydrogen is the obvious one. Either we take a decision as a country to do hydrogen or we don’t do hydrogen. You can’t have hydrogen in Middlesbrough but not have it anywhere else because the supply chains required to produce that hydrogen and to get it to the places it needs to be are too great. Heat pumps are a different example as are bikes and buses. Most of these things can be done locally. There will be economies of scale in the production of bikes and buses but at the local level, we’re talking about implementation. In answer to your question, we didn’t consider whether hydrogen would be done at scale but it’s a relevant factor.

Matt:  Okay, so there’s an important differentiation here between the value of economies of scale in terms of purchasing and procuring things versus the actual implementation. By all means, put in a big national order for 10 million heat pumps but then the question is about how you implement those and that should be local.

Dom:  Correct.

Rebecca:  I have something that seems to crop up a lot when we’re talking about the sorts of investment decisions that are covered in your report and the outcomes. We’re talking a lot about these co-benefits. Now coming back to a couple of the examples we’ve talked about like getting out of your car and walking or getting a heat pump in your home, some of those co-benefits are going to be felt by the person that is engaging in that activity. At the moment, I’m walking 100 miles in March as part of a WWF-sponsored initiative (World Wide Fund for Nature) and it’s great. I feel better for it and I get out. I personally reap some of that reward. Similarly, living in a warmer home, there are reductions in asthma and health benefits and I’m going to feel that but those benefits can’t be quantified and traded off against the investment that I’m having to make. So how are you dealing with this challenge of who is paying and then who is able to leverage those benefits? The numbers you’re talking about are huge but, as an individual, I’m not going to be experiencing that. So is that part and parcel of why we need to be doing this locally? Is it to enable local investment and local capture of those benefits?

Dom:  Yes, that’s a really good point. The differences between the benefits of different measures are stark. If you were to get into an electric vehicle tomorrow and trade in your old car for an electric vehicle and then run that for the next 30 years, the social benefits of that are somewhere maybe between £100 and £500 which is not huge. You’re getting reduced carbon but you’re not getting the other benefits of moving to active travel or public travel. Now compare that to if you were to trade your car in for a bike, you’re talking around £10,000 of social benefits that you create over that lifetime. Heat pumps and insulation are somewhere between £3-5,000 per installation and social benefits. Now in answer to your question, as individuals, we don’t tend to take into account social benefits because they’re what economists call public goods. They affect everyone but they can’t be captured by anyone. My partner gets annoyed at me going on about this sort of stuff but we bought a chiminea for our back garden recently and we bought these logs to burn in it. We soon realised that it would annoy all of the neighbours [laughter]. I decided to calculate the social damage that I was doing if I did burn those logs; not to my neighbours but to society as a whole or to Southeast London. For an £8 bag of logs, I was creating £20 worth of damage. That damage is to the NHS and the productivity of Southeast Londoners. I do have the choice of every time I use the chiminea of donating £20 to the NHS but really, this is the role of government. Government exists to regulate us to not do things that have social damages and to do things that have social benefits.

Matt:  I mean I love the example of the chiminea but the point about the bike and the social benefits versus those of the EV and I think there’s a message here from your report that’s very important at this moment in time. We’re seeing net zero slip into culture wars. It’s definitely being picked up by certain political parties as the next focus for an emphasis on personal choice, removal and reduction of regulations and maximising freedoms. I won’t go into the detail but I’ve had incidents on the bike this week and seen the aggression towards cyclists. Actually, what you’ve just said there should be screamed from the rooftops that we’re actually saving the drivers around us money. I think once the debate falls into that category, it’s a very different discussion that we can be having.

Dom:  Absolutely right but once again, how are we going to get to net zero? Is it by bringing people along with us? Is it by changing behaviours and by doing behavioural economics and nudging or is it by regulation? You’re absolutely right in saying that getting from a car onto a bike is one of the most socially beneficial things that we can do but it’s also annoyingly one of the hardest things to persuade people to do. London is a city that’s made for bikes. There are some other cities in the UK that it’s easy to cycle in. There are many in which it’s not and so the obvious answer is that government should spend on the infrastructure required to make it easier to cycle.

Matt:  That’s a really important point and links, Becky, to our previous episode a couple of weeks back on low-carbon infrastructure and the definition of what that is. It’s infrastructure that facilitates low-carbon behaviour. Maybe if we go back to the example of fuel and burning fuel, some people won’t have a choice there. Maybe if we put chimineas to one side as that’s maybe more of a socially luxurious thing. In terms of solid fuel burning in the home, they’re having to do that but that comes at a high social cost. Why are they having to do it? Because the heat pump hasn’t been installed yet. The report here makes a number of key recommendations and looking at them here, most of them are facing squarely at what government should be doing. I wondered if you could maybe talk a little bit more about what actions need to be taken. What do people do with your report now?

Dom:  That’s a really good question. What we’ve suggested, other than the social benefits, is that this is not just about understanding that benefits are higher than costs. I think most people in government do understand that but, especially in local government where many of these decisions will be made, whether it’s local government, local community groups, local energy companies or individuals like ourselves making these decisions in our daily lives, none of us has the upfront capital. As a society, the upfront capital required to get to net zero within the next 30 years is not going to be possible without government intervention, both in a funding sense and in a regulation sense. Even if we were to convince ourselves that the social benefits were worth it, as I said, those social benefits don’t accrue into our bank accounts and so we’re not going to make those decisions independently. I think the answer here and what we’ve suggested in our report is that we need some form of delivery framework that acts as a glue between local government and national government. There are various versions of that delivery framework around. We’ve got the net-zero hubs. We’ve got the UK Infrastructure Bank offering technical assistance to local government or it will be in the next few years. We’ve set out three different options of examples for what that could look like but the main areas where we need to have better coordination are around system governance, portfolio management, capacity in skills and funding and financing. Those four categories won’t be strangers to anyone who works in this space but the main message is that local authorities, with the exceptions of very few, don’t have those four aspects in abundance and they need the support of local government, whether it’s funding support or in regulation or devolution support in order to be the changemakers that they need to be in their local areas.

Rebecca:  I really like that point. It really struck me, when we saw the Net Zero Strategy published at the tail-end of last year, that there’s a lot of emphasis on this concept of local delivery yet, at the same time, no devolution of responsibility and no additional funding into local authorities. I was just thinking before, when you were mentioning cycling, about the fact that that brings social benefits to people around us as well. Matt and I both live in the South Side of Glasgow and there is... I want to say a temporary cycleway. I mean it’s not temporary as it’s been there for some time but it’s basically a load of bollards that have just been put between a couple of lanes in the road to enable a cycle lane. I know, Matt, you use that and it’s really, really great to give you that space. I’m on a number of local Facebook groups and I can tell you there is so much anger towards it. People do not want it. It’s really interesting that there’s investment, albeit just through the form of bollards at this point, at least in our neighbourhood, and while potentially delivering benefits for people that are still in their cars, they do not see that benefit. To me, there’s something really interesting in here about the kind of process that we need to go through and it might be that there is this kind of pain point that we need to overcome before we are at a point where people actually see, realise and value these benefits that are being delivered. I can completely get on board with this need to look at decisions at that local authority level and to look at how things can be delivered by local activists with an appreciation of that local context.

Matt:  It’s almost like people aren’t aware there are co-benefits.

Rebecca:  Yeah, exactly.

Matt:  So how do we make people aware? To put a pound sign in front of that can help but, as you say, Dom, if you’re not feeling that in your own pocket...

Dom:  Just maybe to round this off, there are also local costs. We had to take into account that there is a hassle factor about getting out of your car and onto a bike. There’s also a big hassle factor about having a heat pump installed. Those things can also be valued and there’s a reason that people don’t do these things. It’s not just about cost savings or social benefits. It’s also because they’ve not been incentivised to do so and, again, that’s another role for government.

Rebecca:  Yeah, absolutely. So this is a really fascinating discussion and my brain is going off in so many different directions. One of the things we really, really like to do towards the end of the show is to bring it back to what people can do. What can I do? What can Matt do? What can people listening to the pod do to start to make a difference? If they believe in everything we’re saying, how can folk get involved? I loved your example about donating £20 to the NHS [laughter] every time you burn one of your logs but do you have any other suggestions for what people can do to get involved?

Dom:  The frank answer is no [laughter]. I don’t know whether it’s worth trying to give an answer here but the things that people can do at the local level are well-understood. They are trying to walk and cycle instead of getting in their cars. They are trying to convert their heating systems to a heat pump or installing insulation if they can afford it but we recognised, through this report and in other work that we’ve done, that not everyone can afford this. Particularly with low-income households, it’s a bit much to ask people who can’t afford to pay the fuel bill to also install a heat pump. So, ultimately, what people can do is vote for parties who are going to do greener things, write to their MP and become activists and campaign for this sort of thing.

Matt:  And, of course, to stop buying chimineas, Dom.

Dom:  Of course [laughter].

Matt:  Brilliant. Listen, thank you so much for that fascinating discussion and a fascinating report which we will be sure to namecheck on the website and on social media.

Dom:  Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Rebecca:  Absolutely and great discussion. As always, please do go and visit us on Twitter and get involved in the discussions there. We are @LocalZeroPod. Email us if you’ve got longer thoughts that you can’t constrain to a tweet. We are at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com but for now, just thanks again to Dom, thanks to everyone for listening and we’ll see you next time. Bye.

Matt:  See you soon. Bye bye.

[Music flourish]

Yeah, and Carys, just to keep us right, we’ve got about 25 minutes for the chat give or take. Start making Thunderbirds’ motions if we’re running over. Sorry, Dom, I make all these cultural references to Carys and she’s going, ‘I don’t know what Thunderbirds is.’

Dom:  I do, of course.

Matt:  [Laughter] Do you actually know, Carys? You’re not sure [laughter]. Yeah, there we go. Brilliant, okay. At least that one landed.

Dom:  Spaceships?

Matt:  The one about the Ferrero Rocher and ‘Ambassador, you’re spoiling us’ did not land.

Dom:  No.

Matt:  Okay, that’s fine. You’re missing out, Carys. That’s all I’ll say. The ‘90s was a simpler time. 

Dom:  It really was.

Transcribed by

PODTRANSCRIBE