Archived decisions

Environment and Transport Select Committee

10:10 Campaign - Briefing Paper

12 January 2010

The 10:10 campaign

· The 10:10 campaign was launched on September 1 2009. It aims to encourage individuals, businesses, education and other organisations (including local authorities) to reduce their carbon emissions by 10 percent in 2010.

· The campaign is run by a central team with support from organisations including the Guardian, ActionAid, Comic Relief, the Energy Saving Trust, and the Carbon Trust.

· To date, a total of 57 local councils have signed up to take part in the 10:10 campaign. This includes only two county councils - Warwickshire and West Sussex. (Details in Appendix 1). Three Hampshire Districts have signed up to the initiative: Eastleigh, Winchester and Havant.

How 10:10 works (local authorities)

· Organisations which sign up to 10:10 will be asked to report their progress in reducing carbon emissions from four key areas; electricity, on-site fuel (e.g. gas), road transport and air travel.

· Councils will be allowed to set a baseline year that ends any time up until 30 June 2010. It is suggested that councils could therefore submit data collected for NI 185 for 2009/2010, minus schools and outsourced contracts, as a baseline and then use the 2010/11 figures as a final submission.

· Whilst the campaign is aiming for cuts of 10%, it does recognise that such significant reductions may be impossible for some organisations. It is therefore planning to recognise those organisations which reduce emissions by 3% or greater in 2010.

· The 10:10 initiative is not a legally binding contact. However, it does require participants to share their carbon consumption data and organisations can only claim success at the end of the year if they achieve at least a 3% reduction.

· Further information on how council's are expected to contribute to 10:10 is available from the campaign website: http://downloads.1010uk.org/docs/1010%20Councils%20Methodology.pdf, (and is attached as Appendix 2).

Key issues for Hampshire County Council

· The County Council recognises that climate change represents the biggest threat to the achievement of its long term vision that "Within a decade Hampshire will prosper without risking our environment".

· At its meeting in November 2007, the County Council agreed to work towards reducing its overall carbon footprint to zero. The Council's approach to this has been to approach this with a series of significant and step changes over time.

· Recent Climate Change Centre of Excellence Panel and Cabinet Policy Briefing sessions have received presentations on the benefits of having an overall strategic approach.

· The current trend of County Council emissions is one of an ongoing rise; the aim to reduce emissions overall must tackle this rising trend as well.

· A number of specific initiatives are tackling this, notably the redevelopment of EII Court (a £40million investment), the Street Lighting PFI and the Workstyles agenda looking to address not just our current office footprint asset but also the way we work overall within that asset.

· It is appreciated that there are benefits to engaging with national and local climate change campaigns and initiatives. The 10:10 campaign could have positive reputational aspects - signing up demonstrates commitment to taking action on climate change, but not achieving the target (either 10% or 3%) could have negative reputational issues.

· It has also been recognised that individual initiatives often have little effect in isolation and take resources and focus away from longer term strategic interventions, therefore a co-ordinated, integrated approach to action on climate change is needed.

· In particular, 10:10 does not consider emissions from schools as a whole from a local authority perspective (rather it treats each school as an individual signatory if it wishes to sign up). Schools currently make up nearly 60% of the County Council's CO₂ emissions and are therefore key to our target setting for emissions reduction, particularly with respect to CRC. Working with schools is a strategic priority to emissions reduction.

· Similarly 10:10 does not consider emissions from outsourced services and it is unclear as to whether electricity from street lighting (which our PFI contract aims to reduce consumption by 15%, and is the second largest area of emissions for the County Council), is included.

· Whilst 10:10 gives a focus to, and raises the profile of emissions reduction which are both positive, a danger is that this could potentially divert resources away from these and other longer term strategic actions towards shorter term smaller gains and away from the drive to zero carbon.

· In terms of emissions and our Local Area Agreement, it is Hampshire's per capita reduction in CO2 (NI186), that is included and not specifically the County Councils own "in-house" emissions (NI185).

· On a Hampshire-wide basis the County Council is currently coordinating the development of a Hampshire-wide Climate Change Vision and Strategy with its partners, to be implemented from the end of the current round of Local Area Agreements (LAA), in 2011.

· This Vision and Strategy will take advantage of the combined power of partnership working to establish key long-term measures for responding to climate change in Hampshire.

· The Vision and Strategy for Hampshire will have a major influence on the climate change actions of the County Council, and others. This is an innovative project which will seek to deliver major emissions reductions across Hampshire, beyond those that will be achieved through the LAA process.

· It is therefore important that any decision to participate in 10:10 would need to understand the resources impacts on other key strategic areas of work already underway.

· The County Council currently has to report on it's NI185 & NI186 emissions on a financial year basis and will have to report it's Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) footprint on a similar basis. All of these use separate sets of figures to calculate the baseline and progress. Although 10:10 would use information from NI185, calculations for it will need to be disaggregated from the total figure for NI185, as not all of the areas we report on for this indicator are relevant to 10:10.

· The County Council is putting in place a strategic response to climate change, setting out its priorities and targets to both reduce carbon emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change. It has also been developing a framework to help guide decision making and the investment of limited resources in the long term i.e. including and beyond 2010.

· A key element of this is the setting of informed carbon emissions reduction targets by early 2010. These targets will need to reflect the strategic approach of the County Council in tackling the carbon agenda, take into consideration national targets set under the Climate Change Bill, and balance the need for stretching yet achievable goals.

Background to existing carbon consumption

· Hampshire County Council's Carbon Emissions (as measured for the year to Summer 2009):

Schools: 69,400 tonnes CO²

Street Lighting: 26.600 tonnes CO²

Corporate Estate: 15,600 tonnes CO²

Residential Property: 8,800 tonnes CO²

Business Travel: 6,600 tonnes CO²

Outsourced Contracts: 14,600 tonnes CO²

Measurements were taken with the best data available based upon utility meter readings.

Using Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) emissions as a baseline comparator, HCC's total consumption has gone up nearly 9% since 2000. The majority of the increase has been in schools where more power is being consumed through increased IT use etc. The challenge for the Council is to arrest the increase before delivering any major reductions.

County Council's approach to target setting

· The current approach to date (endorsed by CMT and Cabinet) is to set informed targets in early 2010 (probably by March of this year) based on evidence from both technical investigation and realistic and achievable expectations.

· The approach has been divided into a number of workstreams:

- Buildings/Performance Monitoring

- Street Lighting

- ICT

- Hearts and Minds

- Communication

- Schools

Given that schools consume the largest proportion of our carbon, there is currently a focus on schools engagement and a dedicated group has been established with Headteacher representatives. A number of initiatives have commenced to reduce carbon; these include:

- The fitting of principal and sub-meters to power and fuel supplies to measure consumption accurately.

- Sharing of best practice amongst schools.

- The future appointment of dedicated schools support officers to work alongside the Property Services Technical Team.

- A major communications strategy to launch the `Hearts and Minds' approach to behavioural change in schools.

· Other initiatives include:

- Producing a detailed Carbon Management Plan for agreement by the Council.

- Assessing the impact of known programmes of work to buildings including Workstyle, BSF and Landlord Repair and Maintenance Programmes.

- Extending the Display Energy Certificates (DEC) to buildings of 1000m² on all sites (a Government requirement).

- Monitoring the performance of existing renewable energy devises (Ground Source Heat, Solar Thermal, Photovoltaics).

- Undertaking feasibility studies on more efficient boiler controls, lighting replacement, biomass boilers and other innovative technical approaches to assess which would realise the greatest reductions based on financial investment. It is expected that a modest grant application will be made to assist here.

- A 15% reduction target has been built into the street lighting PFI contract.

- Pilot study on Mottisfont Court offices in relation to `Hearts and Minds' for HCC staff.

· In terms of benchmarking our carbon emissions, from the evidence we have to date and in comparison to statistical neighbour authorities, Hampshire's emissions would not appear to be exceptionally high or low.

· To put the 10% target in context, the refurbishment of EII Court and the net reduction of offices in Winchester as a result, will deliver 10.5% (approx 300 tonnes CO² reduction in the carbon footprint of Hampshire's offices in Winchester. Given the major capital investment that this involved, it demonstrates what the scale of investment required could be across the whole of the Hampshire estate to deliver an equivalent reduction.