Business-friendly Climate Action Plans
Formal Climate Action Plans (CAPs) are now a common document on council websites. A good CAP includes a clear net zero target, SMART goals and a focus on both the council’s own estate and the wider local area, but it should also be easily accessible to businesses wanting to understand their council’s commitments.
Potential investors, innovators and suppliers of low carbon goods and services should be able to read a council’s CAP and be reassured that they are in the right location to maximise their impact.
However, our research found that most councils don’t yet have a good understanding of the scope and scale of their low carbon business base, which is likely to result in missed opportunities to capture the full benefits of the net zero transition.
A great example of a local authority bucking that trend is Hackney Council. Hackney’s CAP sets a target to double the size of its low carbon business base and highlights the economic opportunities for low carbon businesses in each of the plan’s core focus areas.
Embedding climate in every department
Integrating climate commitments into wider council strategies is also important. For instance, procurement strategies can be used to leverage a council’s purchasing power to increase demand for local low carbon goods and services.
Manchester City Council is an early leader in this field. To drive greater use of low carbon suppliers, the council has started to apply a minimum 30 per cent social and environmental value weighting on all tender evaluations.
Integrating climate into planning and economic development strategies is another area of best practice. For example, South Cambridgeshire District Council’s ‘Green to the Core’ strategy brings planning policy into the mix by committing to promote net zero developments and more sustainable travel. Greater Manchester’s inward investment agency, MIDAS, has updated its key performance indicators (KPIs) to prioritise projects that attract foreign-owned low carbon businesses, thereby ensuring regional investment is aligned with the city region’s carbon neutral ambitions.
Leading by example
Councils have an crucial role to play in demonstrating climate leadership in their local area, for example by investing in flagship decarbonisation projects or championing climate action among local businesses more generally.
Many councils participate in innovative demonstrator projects, often on their own public estate, as well as access national funding to decarbonise public sector and residential buildings in their area. However, this only translates into opportunities for local businesses if councils engage directly with their local supply chain.
To quickly mobilise projects in tight timeframes, councils often draw from existing supplier frameworks which typically lead to the appointment of large national contractors. These contractors are not usually required to engage with local businesses and this is something Green Economy is working hard to tackle.
For example, when Greater Manchester Combined Authority recently appointed E.ON for domestic retrofit projects across the city region, we worked closely with E.ON and the local supply chain to ensure Greater Manchester based installers had an opportunity to get on the supplier framework.
