Martin Tod

Back in February, Keith House set the ambitious goal of making Lib Dem-led Eastleigh Borough Council a zero carbon council by 2012. This builds on Eastleigh’s climate change action plan launched in 2005.

Given the recent coverage of Winchester’s environmental footprint, you’d hope that our City Council would be thinking in similarly ambitious terms.

Last Wednesday, the Conservatives in Winchester agreed their plans for Winchester City Council (’Live for the Future: Tackling Climate Change‘).

And their target for CO₂ reductions by Winchester City Council?

They haven’t set one. There is no target for CO₂ reductions by Winchester City Council in the climate change strategy they agreed last Wednesday!

The document is an embarrassment.

It sets one overall target - to reduce CO₂ emissions for the overall district by 30% by 2012 (even though much of what needs to be done to achieve this is outside their control and this target is barely more than the Government required minimum).

There are some specific targets on housing - although these are mostly inherited from the Lib Dem administration or mandated by government.

And then… nothing.

The officers have come up with a long list of useful ideas, but there is a complete absence of any serious overall framework and of any political commitment or leadership.

Almost all the feedback they have received has been fobbed off with waffle.

Overall, there is:

• No target for any City Council activities.
• No target for Renewable Energy.
• No target for Transport.
• No target for Adaptation Planning.
• No target for community involvement.

The one encouraging decision from the Council was to provide some grant funding to Winchester Action on Climate Change. I’ve been involved with WinACC since the initial meeting back in July and working as part of the Communications team to get the WinACC website ready for launch. (One of my contributions was the abbreviation ‘WinACC’, after it turned out that the WACC web addresses were taken by the World Association for Christian Communication and the Wichita Chamber of Commerce). It’s good to see all the work by WinACC volunteers (from all parties and none), especially the Convenor Robert Hutchison, recognised with some funding.

But, funding WinACC is not a substitute for serious leadership on climate change from the city council. And sadly, that is now proven to be seriously lacking.

It’s been a bit of a hectic week for media with interviews on Sky, ITV and the BBC.

The BBC and Sky wanted to talk about the WWF report on Winchester’s Environmental Footprint.

The Sky interview (below) was live and straight into a camera with a small earpiece in my ear where I could listen to Eamonn Holmes.

The BBC interview was prerecorded at home. The final shot with Tom Hepworth is shot in our living room. That’s my TV that gets switched off at the end (and, yes, it does get switched off at the wall when not in use).

WWF’s analysis showed that Winchester uses the equivalent of 3.6 planets worth of resources - above the UK average of 3 planets - and way over the level we would need to be at to be sustainable.

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I’ve just watched the ‘Location, Location, Location’ programme about the ten best places to live in Britain - and Winchester has dropped to number two behind Edinburgh.

However, we’re still the best place to live in England so I guess we shouldn’t feel too down!

I watched the show and we lost points for our carbon emissions and our road safety - two areas we’ve been campaigning on for quite some time.

Aside from our national commitments to a zero carbon Britain, I’ve already offered my time to Winchester Action on Climate Change and will be continuing with our campaign for proper 20 mph speed limits outside schools and in residential areas that want them.

Excellent meeting of Winchester Action on Climate Change on Saturday. There were all kinds of great people there from all kinds of different backgrounds – and real energy to get stuck in and do some real work to build awareness of climate change and what people can do about it. My background is in high technology and communication, so I’ve offered to help build a website with useful local information. Watch this space…

It’s been an inspirational couple of days meeting the Christian Aid “Cut the Carbon” marchers as they moved through the Winchester constituency from Chandlers’ Ford to Alresford on the last lap of their walk to London.

The march started in Bangor in Northern Ireland in July and has been through Edinburgh, Newcastle, Leeds, Birmingham, Cardiff and Bournemouth. By the time they reached Chandler’s Ford, some of the walkers had already walked more than 900 miles to build awareness of climate change.

I was invited by Haulwen Broadhurst to a dinner to welcome them at Chandler’s Ford Methodist church - which was a brilliant evening. We ate well (but simply) - Martin John Nicholls (see right) provided inspiring entertainment - two marchers spoke about their personal experience - including one of the marchers who gave personal testimony about the effect of climate change in Burkina Faso. (The marchers are balanced between people from the developed world and the developing world).

I was so inspired that I asked a colleague - Jackie Porter - to come and join me in welcoming them when they arrived at St Gregory’s in Alresford. After their arrival, we got talking to two of the marchers - Geoff and Kate Davies who were marchers from the South African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute - about the work they are doing to bring together faith communities to work on the environment and social justice in South Africa - and ended up being invited to come to dinner again to continue the conversation. Once again, it was an inspirational evening. This time we heard from a speaker from Brazil about the impact of climate change in her country – and were reminded by a marcher from Britain about our responsibilities for these global problems in the west and the actions we need to be taking.

It was good to be reminded that the biggest cause of problems for the developing world is often our carbon emissions in the industrialised world, not those in developing countries - and that, although climate change is mostly hurting the world’s poor, the rich world is mostly to blame.

One of the purposes of the march is to get politicians and MPs to sign up to 80% carbon reductions by 2050 - vs the current target of 60% - and to require companies to account for their carbon emissions.

Since we’d passed policy in Brighton a few days supporting (indeed, in the case of carbon - where we want 100% reductions, exceeding) these goals - I was absolutely happy to sign up. I also promised to get people to back their campaign - so please go to their website and sign up to support their campaign if you can.

Just back from Robert Hutchison’s productive and enjoyable “Coffeehouse Challenge” for the first meeting of Winchester Action on Climate Change. It was fun session with a lot of positive energy and constructive, concrete ideas.

Most people in Winchester now agree that climate change is a problem – Robert has rightly identified that the challenge is to get local organisations and individuals to agree on action.

One opportunity is to learn from our neighbours. Eastleigh Borough Council has just installed their first Combined Heat and Power plant at Fleming Park and they’ve also put into place practical measures such as refunding the planning application fee to people who install renewable energy technology in their homes.

On a personal note, I’ve found the World Wildlife Fund footprint calculator an easy and useful tool to help me find ways to reduce my ‘carbon footprint’. It’s available online at http://footprint.wwf.org.uk

A depressing decision by the Conservatives at the council meeting on Wednesday… in essence, they’ve voted through parking proposals which could have been designed to increase congestion, increase CO2 emissions and decrease air quality in the city centre. Their plans combine a big hike in parking charges at the Park & Ride - dramatically reducing the saving that this represents vs. town centre parking - with the reintroduction of ‘first half hour free’ for on street town centre parking. This has the effect of:

• Encouraging more people to drive to the centre - rather than using the Park & Ride
• Encouraging an increased number of short trips into the centre - rather than fewer longer trips
• Encouraging people to drive around looking for parking meters - rather than parking quickly

all of which will have a negative effect on congestion, emissions and air quality.

Their argument for this change is that it will help a subset of small businesses such as “locksmiths, dry cleaners and sandwich shops”. Quite aside from the complete lack of any thought about the impact of this change on the environment, it’s a pretty feeble argument economically too. Most businesses - whether small, medium or large - benefit from people spending longer in town and, if anything, the majority of Winchester’s businesses are likely to suffer as a result of these changes, rather than see any benefit.

If the late autumn and Friday’s torrential rain weren’t enough to persuade me, a surprising encounter with a ladybird while canvassing proved enough to show that climate change is a real phenomenon, even in Winchester.

I was discussing a number of environmental issues while visiting a member in Otterbourne when a ladybird crawled across the window. Aside from the surprise of seeing a ladybird in November, it rapidly proved that this was no ordinary ladybird. It had more spots than usual and was quite large so the person I was visiting suspected it might be a harlequin ladybird.

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What a depressing Queen’s speech: full of more rhetorical Home Office legislation, sounding ‘tough’ for the tabloids, chipping away at freedom and fairness, but having little or no impact on terrorism, crime or anti-social behaviour. If legislation was all that was needed to make Britain safer, you’d expect that the 59 Home Office bills passed since 1997 would have made us the safest place in the world.

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After the Service for Remembrance Sunday at the Cathedral, I took the chance to visit the excellent Winchester Farmers’ Market.

For some reason, I always end up buying too many jars of pickle at Farmers’ Markets, but on this occasion I managed to resist buying anything until I gave in to a cup of homemade chocolate. Once my guard was down a Christmas pudding and some rare breed sausages followed in quick succession (to take home, not to eat immediately!).

It struck me before the last election just how many policy areas are affected by food. I remember having an excellent discussion on the topic with the owner of Laverstoke Park Farm during a visit before the last election with our parliamentary spokesperson on food. There are obvious and strong links between food and health. There are also links between food and behaviour in school and, according to a report by former inspector of prisons Lord Ramsbotham, in prison too. Quite apart from the local impact of farming policy on the environment, food air miles have a impact on climate change.

I think we could do more to campaign on food in the Liberal Democrats. We had a policy for more local, healthier school food in place before Jamie Oliver’s excellent campaign had even started, and did nothing with it. I’d like food quality to feature more heavily in our campaigning on behaviour, health and education.