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Leader’s Report to Council

Waste Resources and Street Cleansing Strategy

Earlier this month the Cabinet considered a new Waste Resources and Street Cleansing Strategy. We all know how good our residents are at recycling, the best in the country, but this still requires us to burn up carbon collecting this material to be recycled. This new strategy, Rethinking Waste, is aimed at reducing the amount of “stuff” we consume, and which we need eventually to collect and recycle or dispose of. To highlight this strategy, I visited the excellent Repair Café run by Sustainable Didcot which aims to extend the life of worn out items (if only they could do the same for worn out politicians!) and so reduce waste and save money. You can see a report of my visit on our social media.

We do however need to carry on collecting waste and recycling and so Cabinet has also agreed for the council to go out to tender for a waste contractor ready for when the current contract with Biffa comes to an end.

Climate targets

Waste and recycling is the largest contributor to our carbon outputs and cabinet has also been looking at the targets which we previously set for carbon reduction for our own operations and for the district as a whole.

The reason for setting challenging targets was to change the way we think about our work and to make us consider how we can do things differently. This has been remarkably successful in that we have almost halved our emissions as a council. Some of this has been due to external changes like the decarbonisation of the National Grid, but we have also made significant changes ourselves:

  • Embracing flexible working, reducing travel by staff and councillors and allowing us to move out of Milton Park into smaller premises,
  • Decarbonising our buildings by installing solar panels and heat pumps and,
  • Using electric vehicles where practicable

However, there have been barriers to achieving our goals, not least the fact that there is still no practical alternative to diesel waste vehicles. I know that some councillors would like us to waste money on electric vehicles that don’t work purely for the sake of a news headline, but this is not something which we as a responsible authority would do.

So, regrettably we have had to put back our target for achieving Net Zero as a council by 5 years.

Looking at the district as a whole, we have also not seen the progress we would have liked. There are two main contributors to carbon emissions within the district which have been problematic: transport and housing.

We applaud the efforts of Oxfordshire County Council to reduce carbon emissions through their transport policies, often in the face of criticism and disinformation, but since we set this target there has been a significant change in the fashion for car purchasing. Whereas the trend for many years was for cars to become smaller and more energy efficient, the move lately, fuelled by intensive advertising and debatable finance options, has been for cars to get bigger and more gas guzzling.

In housing there have been challenges in decarbonising both existing housing and new builds.

Attempts to retrofit the existing housing stock had been hampered by continual changes in Central Government policy and funding, offering subsidies for insulation and solar power only to remove them again.

But the most common question I am asked is about new housing, “why do we allow developers to build new houses with substandard insulation and without solar panels?” We had hoped that a change in government would have led to a change in the National Planning Policy Framework to allow us to insist on this but, despite the pre-election rhetoric, the new government looks a lot like the old one.

Nature Recovery Plan

Yesterday I attended the Annual Summit of the Oxfordshire Local Nature Partnership. Each session started with the singing of folk songs, something I’m hoping to introduce to council meetings in future, but the main discussion was about the Local Nature Recovery Strategy which is currently out for consultation. Please look this up online and make your contribution to this important piece of work.

Future Oxfordshire Partnership and Devolution

You will see on the agenda that we are now including a regular report on the work of the Future Oxfordshire Partnership (FOP). This was initially the Growth Board but, as the Growth Board funding is coming to an end, we are examining what the role of the FOP is going forward.

This will obviously be influenced by the government’s plans for devolution. I think that it is fair to say that these are at best “unclear”, especially with regard to rural areas. We know that the government likes Mayors, but we are not Manchester or London and so it is not clear what is intended for this area.

Budget Scene Setting

We have started the process of preparing for next year’s budget, and I would urge all members to read the paper which went to Cabinet last week and attend the briefings which are being planned on this. At this stage there are clearly many uncertainties which will become clearer as we get nearer the time to agree the final budget next year. The largest uncertainty is the approach which the new government will take to local authority funding. Like all council leaders, I received a letter on this recently from the Minister which used a lot of words but didn’t actually say anything and so we will wait and see.